The Church Still Carries Light Worth Following – OpEd
There is a moment many believers recognise but rarely name aloud, the instant when faith stops feeling like comfort and starts feeling like a burden you are not sure you can carry.
Mine arrived on an unremarkable Tuesday evening. I was alone with my laptop, reading another story about institutional failure, and the comments section showed no mercy: the Church is finished, Christianity has lost all credibility, and why would anyone bother staying? I had no clever defence ready. I closed the screen and sat in the dark, managing only the most honest prayer I could summon: “Where are you in all of this?”
That night did not fix anything, but it cracked something open. Because once I stopped staring only at the headlines, I began noticing a different story unfolding, something quieter but far more persistent. The darkness is real and it roars, but it has never been the only truth. It never will be.
The feast of the Immaculate Conception arrives each December 8 like an uninvited question. It is easy to wave it off as theological abstraction, something for academics to parse while the rest of us manage actual crises. But strip away the doctrinal language, and you find something startlingly concrete: the audacious claim that God’s grace can meet human fragility at its weakest point and still create something whole. That is not pious sentiment. It is a direct challenge to the cynicism we have learnt to treat as realism.
We live in an era that assumes brokenness is the natural state of things and that people are best defined by their worst moments. The Immaculate Conception refuses that verdict. It insists that integrity, moral clarity, and freedom from self-serving motives are not naive fantasies but genuine human possibilities. Mary’s sinless beginning is not meant to place her beyond our reach, it reveals what humanity was designed for and what we remain capable of becoming, even now.
The contemporary Church wrestles with exactly this question of possibility. Scandals have carved deep wounds. Trust has eroded to nearly nothing in some places. Believers feel adrift, while outsiders wonder if the institution has anything left to say that matters. Yet the woman at the centre of this feast offers a different kind of testimony. Mary does not argue her case or issue statements. She embodies a faith so transparent it needs no institutional backing to validate it. Her witness operates quietly, and maybe that is exactly why it cuts through when everything else sounds like manufactured noise.
The renewal we desperately need will not emerge from strategic initiatives or carefully crafted apologies. It is already happening in places we consistently overlook. I have watched a young priest give up his meagre salary to keep the parish food pantry open through a brutal winter. I have seen a council of exhausted grandmothers vote to sell ornate candlesticks no one had touched in years, then quietly erase the medical debts of three struggling families. I know teenagers who arrive every Saturday with paint and work gloves, asking for nothing except the chance to make someone’s collapsing porch a little less hopeless.
These acts rarely surface in news cycles. They are too small, too ordinary, and too stubbornly gentle for a culture that runs on outrage. Yet they are the only things that genuinely transform anything. They embody what Mary’s life demonstrates: holiness is not about rising above the world’s mess but walking directly into it with a heart uncorrupted by bitterness or calculation.
The Church has always contained both saints and frauds, often working side by side, sometimes wearing the same vestments. What has changed is that institutional failures now echo endlessly while countless acts of quiet faithfulness vanish without comment. We have mistaken protecting the institution for protecting the Gospel itself, and the cost shows in empty pews and shattered confidence.
But despair remains a luxury the Gospel explicitly denies us. Jesus never promised we would be blessed once church leadership finally perfects itself. He blessed the poor in spirit, the meek, and the peacemakers, the exact people keeping faith alive right now in hospital chaplaincies and homeless shelters, in recovery circles and pregnancy centres operating on donated hope and stubborn love.
My friend Maria fosters children the system has given up on. When people marvel at her dedication, she deflects: “Someone has to believe these kids bear God’s image. Might as well be me.” There is your entire renewal strategy, hiding in plain sight. We do not need a flawless Church to begin acting like the Church. We need flawed people willing to live as though the Gospel still tells the truth, because it does.
The Immaculate Conception confronts our habit of reducing people to their failures. It declares that the deepest reality about any person is not their worst day but their capacity for goodness waiting to be activated. In Mary’s unrehearsed “yes” to God, we find not an impossible standard but proof that grace still operates through ordinary lives. Her radical openness becomes revolutionary precisely because it is so rare in a world obsessed with image management and self-protection.
The light has not vanished. It is simply waiting for more of us to stop cursing the darkness long enough to pick up a candle ourselves. I still rage against institutional betrayals. I still mourn what has been squandered and who has been hurt. But I no longer believe the Church’s best chapters are already written. I have witnessed too many quiet resurrections, too many places where mercy prevailed without official permission, where love proved more durable than scandal.
The Church can shine again because she already does, wherever ordinary believers refuse to surrender the story to cynics and opportunists. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from death continues raising dead things, ruined relationships, dying parishes, wounded hearts, every single day. All that is required is for more of us to join the work already underway, trusting that grace remains as real and relentless as it has always been, even when we can barely see it through the fog.