The Enemy Within

The Church is our refuge in time of need during our suffering.  Christ indeed is our consoler.  But we must be careful and discerning too.  There are wolves among the sheep.


Benedict XVI said that ‘the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from outside enemies, but is born out of the sin within the Church, so the Church has a deep need to re-learn penitence and accept purification’.  At the time, the crisis of the scandal of pedophile priests was at its peak, and Benedict, who was fighting it with all his might, particularly referred to that. But there is no doubt that his ‘penitential’ Church, which sees itself as needy of forgiveness and purification, was not liked by the most popular interpreters of his pontificate.

At the same time, the words spoken by Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, few days before his death, also seem enlightening. It was the 8th October 1982, and the former Substitute for the Holy See under Paul VI, was speaking to the seminarians of the dioceses of Florence. He said, ‘who are the opponents? Let us think well, who are the biggest opponents of Jesus? They are the religious, those who most abide by God’s word… Religion was the great obstacle that Christ found on earth. It is religion, religious men, who in the end sent him to die. The opposition comes from the closest people rather than the furthest. The opposition, the resistance that the Gospel finds, is actually strongest, more deeply rooted and more enduring in our own home than it is outside’.

Benelli also described the ‘men who have settled in the Church, they have found their means of fulfillment in the Church, be they bishops, priests, baptized. They have settled and they are the biggest and most effective opponents to the newness of the Gospel, the repeated newness, that needs to repeat itself forever, it must resurface as news and must of course offend the sensibilities of those who are now seated, those who are well settled in the Church…’

The cardinal added that ‘it is people who observe, claim to observe, think that they are following God’s commandments, but in the end, they do not serve the Church, they serve themselves. They use the Church and protect their laziness, they protect interests which they might not be fully aware of, but they protect themselves, their own point of view’.


The Florentine cardinal, a diplomat and the undisputed protagonist of the Vatican scene in the 70s, concluded that ‘it is not the opponents, not the ideologies against Christianity, not those who are on the other side, they are not the great enemies. The biggest enemies are the Christians who have settled, who have built their own version of religion…’


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