The Church History Intro
Church history is a mixed bag—there are good reasons to love and hate the
Church. To address this history, Pope John Paul II used the arrival of the
new millennium to lead the Church into a greater willingness to apologize for
the human failings within this divine institution. Similarly, some Protestant
denominations made declarations of apology for various wrongs.
While it’s hard not to be cynical about the Vatican’s defensive,
technically worded, thirty-five page "apology" on behalf of individual
Catholics, not the Church (cf., Memory and Reconciliation: The Church
and the Faults of the Past, 03/07/00, @ www.vatican.va), it was John Paul’s
personal attempts to apologize throughout March of 2000 that won over people’s
hearts. Highlighting these events was the pope’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
for in it we saw his tender heart of compassion for all peoples.
In all these things we are reminded that the Church is a work in progress—as
are each of us in our own lives. Whether we blame the institution and/or its
members, history tells us that God has been willing to allow the Church to
disagree, fracture, evolve, and continually screw-up. In highlighting a few of
the Church’s screw-ups, my point in this section is simple: since the Church
has been wrong about so many important things over the past two thousand years,
could it be that the Church has also been wrong regarding queers?
