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Show CARDINAL NEWMAN ON CHURCH SCANDAL The Church has' scandals, she has reproacK she has shame; no Catholic will deny it. She ha" ever had the reproach and shame of being tb?. mother of children unworthy of her. She ha" good children she has many more bad. Such i the providence of Cod, as declared from the beginning. begin-ning. He. might have formed a pure Church; bu He has expressly predicted that the cockle, sow by the enemy, shall remain with the wheat, eve to the harvest at the end of the world. He pronounced pro-nounced that His Church should be like the fisher' net, gathering- of every kind, and not examined till the evening. There is ever, then, an abundance of material in the lives and histories of Catholics, ready to tb'-use tb'-use of those opponents who, starting with the notion no-tion that the Holy Church is the work of the devi1, wish to have some corroboration of their leading, idea. Her very prerogatives give special opportunity oppor-tunity for it; I mean that she is the Church of all lands and of all times. If there was a Judas among the' Apostles, an a Xicholas among the deacons, why should we b surprised that in the course of eighteen hundre1 years there should be flagrant instances of cruelty, cruel-ty, of unfaithfulness, of hypocrisy, or of profligacy, profli-gacy, and that not only in the Catholic people, bn in high places, in royal palaces, in bishop's households, house-holds, nay, in the seat of St. Peter itself ? What triumph is it, though in a long line of between be-tween two and three hundred Popes, amid martyr confessors, doctors, sage rulers and loving Father" of their people, one, two, or three are found who fulfill the Lord's description of the wicked servant, ser-vant, who began "to strike the man-servants ah the maid-servants, and to eat and drink and b drunk?" What will come of it, though we gran that at this time or that, here or there, mistake in policy, or ill-advised measures, or timidity, o vacillation in action, or secular maxima, or narrowness nar-rowness of. mind have seemed to influence tlv Church's action, orher bearing toward her. chi- j dren I I can oury say that, taking man as he i-it i-it would be a miracle were such offenses altogether absent from her history. |