We are not losing faith in the church. We never had it.

The news is filled with scandal, pain, sin. What does it mean to see the church so lost, priests molesting children, superiors secreting them in their brokenness, passing along suffering in place of healing, corruption abounding? For many, the news about the Roman church is another chapter in the neverending story of human perversion, greed and dishonesty. But an important, perhaps the important story, is muted beneath the hubub about sexual orientation and clerical marriage. Like all things of this world, outrage and disgust conceal the deeper and more important truths, the fine meaning behind acts and events and words that change lives, that changes the world.

For while much will be spoken and written over sinful priests in the church, little will be said about the real captivity of Rome, the imprisonment to a simple but enduring word: Infallibility.

Infallibility is the belief system that multiplies tragedy into catastrophe; turns shortsightedness into blindness. It is the simplest, meanest, most popular and destructive mistake in all of human thinking. It runs the world.

It runs the world away from God.

From its birth, the Roman church has founded itself on such a principle, on the belief that the Lord endowed his disciple Peter with particular powers, ordained in his successors. It is what makes the Roman church the Roman church, the absolute trust in the God-granted authority of its words and deeds, and of the men who speak and make them.

To be infallible is to be trustworthy in classic Catholic theology. It influences and locates the laity of the church, it colors and shapes every doctrine, teaching and act of the priesthood.

It is the church’s great blindness.

Infallibility means that the work of God cannot be done by an ordinary human being, and so contrives to transfer divinity to a place where it can never fully reside. Infallibility is a system built on a lie which produces nothing but wrong.

For the sake of fairness, let us know that infallibility is not the sole provenance of the Roman church. It dwells wherever men place final significance in fixed things. It’s consequence is inanity, cruelty, death. Infallibility confuses the text with the truth, leading people to believe, for example, absurdities like humans living with dinosaurs, as if the Flintstones was a Discovery Channel special and not an after-school cartoon. Infallibility confuses lust with love, destroying families and communities. Infallibility confuses free market principles with greed at all cost, breeding obscene wealth and decadent poverty, loss of justice and economic disaster.

And so it goes. Confusing humans with saints preserves a system that cannot bear the truth, until it casts off victims and coddles criminals.

But the true loss is not merely of the world. It is the loss of faith.

Grace draws its power from very fallibility. It is the real brokenness of this world, the humanness of person and text and shortcoming and even sin that breathes life into God’s promise, the resurrects sinners, that infuses days with joy, that incarnates hope. God does not send grace to remove humanity, but to renew it. Faith calls us to trust solely and completely this one promise, in his promise and not our own, to walk always humbly and fearfully of what we could do, dependent on what he will do.

Grace is a promise that comes to fallible people.

But when Jesus heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”