My Journey Back to a Broken Church

It's not an easy time to be Catholic. In fact, I hadn't regularly attended Mass since the 1990s, but like many lapsed Catholics, I still kept tabs, feeling gutted with every new scandal and disclosure of abuse. Things began to look up with the arrival of Pope Francis in 2013. Even so-called cultural Catholics like me could feel hopeful. With Francis, the church played to its strength, which has always been love. "Who am I to judge?" Pope Francis famously said, and even my most cynical friends responded in kind. "Maybe, I'll go back to Mass." All such talk ended by 2018, when a Pennsylvania Grand Jury alleged that more than 300 priests had abused 1,000 children across the state, setting off a flurry of subsequent revelations and horrors.