What Is At Stake?

Is our credibility what really matters? Isn't the salvation of souls what matters? the hell with what anyone else thinks, the hell with credibility, with popularity.

If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son
but handed him over for us all,
how will he not also give us everything else along with him?

I came upon ... well, I'm just forever stumbling onto things i should have read weeks, months, sometimes years ago. How did I miss these matters at the height of their currency?
I am easily distracted.

Anyway, Zenit reporting on Fr Lombardi castigating Sandro Magister led me this,
about Jean Cardinal Daniélou.
It is some weeks old.
And the good cardinal? Long gone.
He died before I was aware that the Church consisted of much more than my family and my town and my parish - and people who thought and believed and acted, and were,  pretty much as we did and were.
Oh, there were some with bad taste, but....

Anyway, talk about having no credibility! He died, wink wink nudge nudge, at the house of a woman, wink wink nudge nudge, where he had gone to dispense charity, wink wink nudge nudge,because her husband, wink wink nudge nudge,was in need of  money for bail, wink wink nudge nudge.
Oh, and did we mention she was a hooker?

Well, his brother, (gay but pretty un-marginalized, except, apparently, by some of the family,) had this to say:

“Jean was always perfectly kind toward me. All throughout his life he held remorse over the way in which the family had treated me and left me without support. He said this often to friends we had in common. When my friend Raymond died, he confided to Pierre Gaxotte, in the hallways of the French Academy, that he was very sad, thinking that I would be deeply wounded by this.

“Being appointed to the rank of cardinal was a liberation for Jean. He was finally free of the Jesuitical constraint under which he had certainly suffered. The last years of his life were the happiest.

“His death and the scandal provoked by it, when he had become one of the leading figures of the Church, was a sort of posthumous vendetta, one of those favors that the gods bestow on those whom they love. If he had died just a little while sooner or later, or if he had been visiting a lady of the sixteenth arrondissement under the pretext of works of charity, instead of bringing the revenue of his theological writings to a poor and needy woman, there would have been no scandal.

“Jean had always dedicated himself to disregarded people. For a certain period he had celebrated a Mass for the sake of homosexuals. He tried to help prisoners, criminals, troubled young people, prostitutes. I deeply admired this ending of life similar to that of the martyrs, whose fragrance rises to heaven amid the opprobrium and sarcasm of the crowd.

“He died as true saints die, in ignominy, in mockery, in the disdain of a spiteful and vile society. During the last years of my brother’s life I was living near Rome and was, in the opinion of the clergy, an apostate* [see below] of a certain stature. There were some who mistook us for each other and some critics had even attributed to my brother my book ‘L'Érotisme divinisé,’ saying: ‘It smacks of the spirit of the Jesuits, however.…’ My brother saw to demonstrating that scandal is not given by our beliefs or actions but by the irony of the gods, who laugh at this jumble of rules for living and so-called ‘truths that must be believed,’ the paternity of which men attribute to them.”

*Well, yeah, he was. Not because of his sexual attractions, but because he was convert to an "eroticized" form of Hinduism.