In in a religion in which God is love, hardness in place
of brotherly love is without any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than
unethical conduct. This is one way of saying that religion does not reduce to
ethics because more important things are involved. This is not to excuse
corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy alone is repugnant to anyone who takes
the clerics in the Curia at their word that they are following Christ in their
living out of the Gospel. Even so, going after such hypocrisy without even
sympathy for the human nature, which we all share, evokes the Pharisees whom
Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run by Pharisees does more than
unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by Jesus because matters of
the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far as Jesus’s preaching is
concerned.
From the essay on the film, "Monsignor"
