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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – My last two Friday on Faiths have talked about the Rev. Billy Graham. Last week I shared that I got to meet Dr. Graham while I was a student at Syracuse University.
I learned something else last week that is very disturbing.
The campus chaplain, someone who I knew personally, was a pedophile. I learned this only last week. His crimes date back to the 1970s, more than a decade before I knew him.
This isn’t how I want to remember that time in my life. Our chaplain was an excellent preacher. I remember him as a kind and generous man. He’d invited me and many other students into his home for Sunday dinner. I, as a much younger person, wasn’t sophisticated enough to know that anything was amiss. As I read the story of him now, of course, there were clues. He was ordained as a Catholic priest. Yet when I knew him he was a married, protestant minister. That’s unusual. Later in his life he transferred from upstate New York to California. That’s unusual, too. After I graduated from college, he switched denominations from Methodist to Lutheran. These are all the signs of someone who is running from their past.
Here’s what I struggle with: God forgives sin. All kinds of sin. Forgiveness is mine, and yours, if we confess and repent. Yet are there some sins that are so depraved that they are unforgivable? I believe that there are murders and rapists in heaven, if they were sincere in asking for forgiveness in the name of Christ Jesus. Until a week ago, I would have told you he was a man who did much good – and, obviously, he is also responsible for terrible, life-ruining, evil.
What am I to make of a man such as this? I honestly don’t know.
Chris Conley
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