c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) News is by its nature negative. Just read the headlines and you will find negative words in almost every one of them.

The Catholic Church has had its share of sensational headlines over the past three years, most of them regarding the sex abuse scandal in the priesthood. Despite that, and the numerous unhappy stories that have thundered out of this headwater scandal, the story of American Catholicism is fundamentally positive.

The problem, of course, is that good news never makes the headlines. Catholicism is a big family of believers and, just as in every family, there are setbacks, big disappointments and small tensions, like the arguments conducted by those confined to cars in motion about which route to take _ and whose idea was this trip anyway?

Then there are the disagreements about whom to invite to the wedding and where they are going to sit. There was probably an argument like that at the feast at Cana that Jesus understood as another signal of the lovable imperfection of the human family he had joined by taking on our condition.

Indeed, Jesus, who is present whether dour secularists mention his name or not, understood a truth that the church, imperfect in so many ways, has maintained throughout history: that men and women are lovable precisely because they are imperfect. What need for love _ or for faith or hope, for that matter _ if we were as glossily perfect as Xerox copies of the Declaration of Independence or plastic copies of the Venus de Milo?

The good, bad and wonderful news about Catholicism 2004 springs from this imperfection, from the fact that we are sinners in need of forgiveness and understanding. The pastoral Catholic Church provides exactly that to all its members, making room for them and saving the best wine for them at the wedding feast of everyday life.

The sense of sin that characterizes Catholics is balanced by their understanding that sin can be forgiven, that God does not hold grudges and neither should we. To the great signs associated with Catholicism _ one, holy, catholic, apostolic _ we may add another, that it is imperfect, and all its wonder flows from making room for all of us sinners.

We may accept the church’s infallibility in certain circumstances but it is the church’s fallibility that saves it, and us too, on a daily basis. Its attractiveness to others, and its strength to its own members, is its understanding of this human condition in which we make mistakes, hurt each other, and need to be forgiven and start over all the time.

The wonder of Catholicism is not that it is above blunders and sin but that, like the rest of us, it is in the middle of them all the time and works, imperfectly but steadily, to come to terms with them.

The Catholic Church has always been a combination of the good, the bad and the wonderful. Its extraordinary vitality _ examine parish life flourishing throughout the country _ comes from its commitment to overcome any bad news by its everyday preaching of the good news of the gospel.

MO/PH END RNS

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)