The courage of survivors in taking civil action against the Church is a welcome reminder of how authority among the people of God should be properly shared and exercised

The word “apocalypse” conjures up images of catastrophe and pain, but theologically the word means a revealing of something we did not know before, or could not see clearly and now can. With knowledge, everything changes. A feature of apocalyptic theology is a distinct rupture between what came before and what unfolds now: between sin and salvation, between our self-destructive ways (Romans 7:15 ff) and life in Christ (John 10:10).

But pain and catastrophe do, of course, often accompany revelations. The truth hurts. The sexual abuse crisis in the Church is certainly apocalyptic: the revelation that sexual predators and enablers are more widespread among the clergy than any of us imagined painfully tells us many things about the Church that we did not know before, or did know but chose not to address.