I have been Catholic my whole life. Growing up, we went to church every Sunday and every feast day. We got ashes on Ash Wednesday. I was married in the Catholic Church, and my children were baptized and confirmed.

Disgusted as I was by the institutional failures of the Church – and even in the face of growing knowledge about the criminal conduct of the Church hierarchy in the widespread sexual abuse of minors (and seminarians and women) – I was able to comfort myself with the notion that, while the broader institution was corrupt, my own church – a small, diverse, not very wealthy parish – had supported and sustained me and my family over the years. I taught CCD and I served on the Parish Council, as did my son. My kids were both alter servers. I worked on fund-raisers; I went on retreats with our pastor.

My children and I sat in the front pew at Sunday Mass, gazed upon fondly by choir, priest and parishioners no matter how fidgety, mutter-y, or giggly they got. When I had a biopsy for breast cancer and sat crying silently in the same pew, people stopped to hug me. When the planes hit the Twin Towers and the entire tri-state area reeled, our church was open every day to those of us who wanted to sit somewhere – anywhere – and try to find peace. The deacon dressed up as Santa Claus and passed out gifts, and at the annual Christmas pageant, I watched generations of small children kneel next to stuffed sheep and gaze in wonder at someone’s swaddled baby doll lying in a manager. I left many a Mass with a sense of joy and a renewed commitment to be stronger, more patient, and kinder — to look harder into every human face to find the face of God.

Until the new archbishop of our local diocese released the names of priests who had been “credibly accused of the abuse of minors.” Our local newspaper published a list of 188 names, which I scanned in smug certainty that I would not recognize any of them.

But I did. Not one but two. Both are dead, and my son and my daughter assured me they were not themselves subject to any inappropriate behavior or aware others in our parish who were.

One name was that of a retired priest who came a few Sundays a month to say Mass. We didn’t know him well, but we loved him. He was funny, which my children appreciated; they also liked the fact that he said Mass quickly, which we attributed to his service as a chaplain on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. I found his sermons not just pithy, but resonant. The other name belonged to the long-time and much-revered pastor at our church. A man I had liked and admired and respected for his compassion for the less fortunate, for his commitment to social justice and for his gentle wisdom about human failings.

My Catholicism has been one of my oldest touchstones in the face of constant change, something I knew – something I would always know, no matter what or where I was. Now I feel like an American tourist in 1970s Berlin, looking into every face and wondering, “How were you complicit in the evil?”

I know my faith endures. I know my faith community is larger than any single priest or deacon. My church, however, no longer sheds any light on my struggle to see the face of God in this vastly imperfect world.