I am sure that most of us are aware that starting last February 21, the Holy Father called together the heads of all the Episcopal Conferences from around the world for a four-day conference to grapple with the sexual abuse scandal. I am not sure if the organizers selected that date to start the conference with this in mind, but it was a very fitting date for it was the feast of St. Peter Damian.

St. Peter Damian lived during the beginning of the 11^thcentury (1007-1073). He was an Italian hermit, monk, reformer, and later a bishop. The 11^th century was a particularly dark time in the Church, with a string of bad popes who seemed to be more interested in worldly pursuits than in building up the Kingdom of God. But the problems were not confined to the papacy; bishops were selling church offices, priests were taking advantage of their positions, engaging in common law marriages despite their promises of celibacy. In 1049, St. Peter Damian wrote a long letter to Pope Leo IX, a reformer pope, in which he complained of distinctively foul corruption within the clergy. This letter has come to be known as The Book of Gomorrah, and it pulled no punches; “The befouling cancer of sodomy is, in fact, spreading so through the clergy, or rather like a savage beast, is raging with such shameless abandon through the flock of Christ.”

At that time, the term “sodomy” referred to a range of homosexual behaviors, but what particularly angered St. Peter Damian were acts of sexual predation by older clergy on young boys, and the lax attitude of bishops and religious superiors who knew about these outrages and did nothing to stop them. Sound familiar? When I read The Book of Gomorrah last February it was eery how a book written nearly a 1000 years ago could have been written about the scandals currently rocking the Church.

In his book, Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks On the Sexual Abuse Crisis, Bishop Robert Barron has a chapter, “We Have Been Here Before,” which not only recounts the crisis during the time of St. Peter Damian in the 11^thcentury, but how scandal and sinful behavior has torn at the Church from the very beginning. St. Paul writes, “We hold this treasure in earthen vessels” (2 Corinthians 4:7), in which the treasure is the grace of Christ and the new life He has made available to us, while the earthen vessels are the flawed, fragile, and morally suspect people who have received that grace. In fact, St. Paul wrote his first letter to the Corinthians to confront sexual misconduct in the Church there, “It is widely reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of a kind not found even among pagans – a man living with his father’s wife” (1 Corinthians 5:1).

Books on Church history can be quite shocking as there are popes who had multiple mistresses, children, conducted orgies, and the worse of human behaviors. The reason for such reporting of bad behavior is not to excuse, not to sensationalize, not to scandalize, but in a sense to immunize. Hearing these sad, tragic stories and seeing that the Church continued can be a vaccination against despair – clearly, the Holy Spirit is maintaining and moving the Church forward, despite the very bad behavior of some of her members.

I end with a sad, but somewhat amusing, story. Napoleon is said to have confronted the secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, Cardinal Consalvi. Napoleon told Cardinal Consalvi that he was going to destroy the Church. Cardinal Consalvi reportedly replied, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?”

We have been here before, and we have survived.