The Humble God: Healer, Mediator, and Sacrifice

Sometimes it takes a lot of humiliation to learn a little humility. After the widely publicized clerical sexual abuse scandal of the past year, the Catholic Church has been challenged to learn again what it means to be a humble, pilgrim church. Certainly, whatever vestiges of the Church triumphant presently remain in the American Church, it is clear that church leadership—lay and clerical—cannot be based on self-preserving power and prideful isolation. Only a humble and repentant leadership can regain the trust of the faithful, and such leadership is possible only through a more explicit following of Christ, the humble one. While many of the early Church Fathers spoke of humility as the Christian virtue,1 no one was more insistent about its primacy in the Christian life than St. Augustine, whose views bear directly on the needs of the American Church at this time. By relating humility to almost every aspect of his theology, Augustine deeply influenced the understanding of Christian humility in the Western Church.2 As one whose writings were sparked in large part by polemics, pastoral concerns, and inquiries from church leaders as well as ordinary