Kauai is the northernmost and coolest of the Islands, but the house a generous benefactor has afforded us has ample air conditioning anyway. Our AC is off most of the time, but I noticed that the compressors in the unit next to ours runs day and night, even though the outside temperature is 60 degrees. We Americans are scandalously given to wasting God's natural resources. We make up 4% of the world's population but consume 30% of the world's resources. We take six times more energy, food, and land than the rest of God's children, and we seldom give it a thought. Many feel badly about this, so we pass laws prohibiting waste. We also attempt to shame people through mass and social media into living more simply. Our schools teach "environmentalism" as well, but it doesn't work too well. People still crank their AC units to 60 degrees instead of opening the windows (and we still take vacations in Hawaii instead of staying local).
Some of the clergy of the Catholic Church struggles with this same propensity, they preach high ideals some of them scandalously flout. The religious term for this is "hypocrisy," although the climate change activists who spend much of their time flying jets to conferences in luxury hotels don't call it that. Hypocrisy within the Catholic Church has reached new highs in the last thirty or forty years, with pious cardinals and bishops calling out for the protection of children from abuse while themselves abusing.
Gerhardt Cardinal Mueller recently weighed in on the Vatican's response, or perceived lack thereof, to the McCarrick and other scandals in America. I think any person who refuses to play politics with sex abuse must thank Archbishop Carlo Vigano for boldly stating some exceedingly compromising facts, although he has done so with some imprudence and inaccuracy. But someone has to talk, because every day more good people trip over these sharp "scandals," causing bloody injury. The McCarrick and other crimes are leading many to lose their faith in the Church, and so lose their faith in the whole Christ (which includes the Church He founded).
"How can our leaders solve this mess?" Cardinal Mueller asks. "Rules, norms, and external discipline are not enough." he said. "We need spiritual renewal, prayer and penance, drawing on the grace of the sacraments, reading and meditating on the Bible.... We must be priests according to the heart of Jesus, the heart of Jesus Christ on the cross, who suffered and died for the love of all sinners and every human being.... There are priests who never go to spiritual exercises, never approach the confessional, never pray the breviary. And when the spiritual life is empty, how can a priest act according to Christ."
Someone asked GK Chesterton what was wrong with the world. He replied "I am." Although Chesterton may have died a canonizable saint, he had much that was wrong with him. But he did what Cardinal Mueller advises all of us Catholics to do when faced with the disgusting crimes of the Church from top to bottom: go to confession, read your Bible, fast and pray before the Blessed Sacrament. It's as simple as not eating breakfast on the Friday while you are on vacation in Kauai (and the neighbors have just dumped a load of food on you). I leave it to you, my dear reader, to ruminate as to whether your scribe actually pulled that off this morning. But I will say that we have kept our AC off, even the Big Guy in our group that's addicted to AC, for the last four days. "Make of everything you do a sacrifice" Our Lady told Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta. In other words, make of everything a gift to the good God, who has given everything to you. This is the essence of personal holiness, which is the only way back to sanity for our Church and our World.