Good Friday is the most realistic day in the Christian year. It does not flatter appearances. It does not pretend that the visible rulers of religion will always be faithful, that civil authority will defend innocence, or that the crowd will love truth when truth stands before it. It shows us the opposite. Priests conspire. A governor caves. The mob howls. Friends scatter. Christ is led out to die.
That is why Good Friday speaks so sharply to Catholics living through a battered and humiliated age. We look around and see bishops rewarding confusion, punishing fidelity, and treating tradition as the problem while the real vandals are welcomed as pastors. We see a Catholic media class forever promising that the next gesture, the next appointment, the next Roman signal will turn the tide, even as the tide keeps coming in. We see many who once spoke boldly rediscovering caution just when caution serves the wrong men.
Good Friday does not tell us that such things are normal in the sense of being good. It tells us they are possible in the history of the Church because they were present at the center of the Passion itself. The crisis of the Church did not begin when pagans attacked from outside. It reached its most terrible form when the men closest to the sacred used their position against the Lord.
Continue reading at Hiraeth in Exile