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Fr. Jordi Rivero The root cause of scandals is a crisis of faith The Camino to Santiago that I just completed was a time of grace: 1. I realized, at a deeper level, that we are living a great apostasy. -Everywhere we could see the roots of Christian Europe. Even the smallest towns have a church in their center. But today they are mostly closed, vestiges of another era. -Relatively few on the Camino had a Christian motivation. What used to be a pilgrimage seeking repentance and conversion has become simply an adventure, a sport. -Even the older persons in the towns, there seems to be only a remnant of the faithful left. -I had the practice of, Instead of saying goodbye, I saying “see you in heaven” -the response often was “if there is one” or just a puzzled look. -I had the sense that there is a radical loss of faith, profound indifference. -The result is a huge apostasy and the resulting darkness in the hearts that still is being masked by a culture absorbed in entertainment and consumerism. -To see this is grace because we need to know the battle at hand in order to respond. 2- The fruit of the Camino for me was a profound awareness of the grace we have received in Love Crucified through the Path, the constant teachings, and having each other to help us live it. -This brought me to repentance for my lack of resolve and focus on the mission that the Lord has given me. I saw occasions even in my recent past where I acted as a good priest but not as the Missionary of the Cross, as if my identity and mission is something that can be put on and off. -The physical demands of walking to the next goal each day became a sign of the spiritual discipline that the Lord is asking of me to allow Him to transform my heart. St Paul: “where sin increased, grace abounded all the more”   Rom 5:20 He did not minimize the devastation caused by sin, he suffered it daily, but he resolved the more to give His all, trusting and proclaiming that Christ’s grace working in Him is stronger than all evil and will bear great fruit. Actually, he saw the suffering as a blessing.  Our confidence is not in the world, that things are not too bad, or that we humans are going to somehow fix the problems. Our faith is in the love of Jesus crucified who lives in us as victims of love. Are you going through a hard time? Are you concerned about the future?  Don’t minimize the problem, but know and proclaim this: Rom 8:35 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Notice that these things DO separate most people from Christ… But Paul is proclaiming that Christ wants to give us the power to conquer and not be defeated.  But we must be willing to embrace the cross. St. Paul knew that remaining steadfast was only possible through the Cross. Paul goes on to say:  "For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. ST. CLAUDE DE LA COLOMBIÈRE who said:  Really humble people are never scandalized: they know their own weakness too well; they know that they themselves are so close to the edge of the precipice and they are so afraid of falling over that they are not at all astonished to see others do so. St. Claude, like Paul, knew his weakness and relied on the Lord. Regarding the scandals in the Church, the focus for the remedy seems to be on more and better regulations, better accountability, a process of handling...