A little culture

When I'm working at my desk, my iTunes shuffles my library, and sure enough today it played a talk by Archbishop Dolan which he gave at Mount St. Mary's Seminary a few years ago (he was Abp. of Milwaukee at the time). In it, he quoted the Italian poet Carlo Coretto:

How much I criticize you, O Church, and yet how much I love you!

You have made me suffer, O Church, and yet how much I owe you more than anyone else.

I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.

You have given me so much scandal, and yet you have helped me understand sanctity.

I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false--and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you because I am you, although not completely.

And where would I go? To start another Church? I could not, without the same defects, because they happen to be my defects. It would then be my church, not yours. And I'm old enough to know better.