Time & Perspective Quote by Gerald Vann

Calling the Church a “long succession of scandals” is a deliberately conceded indictment: Vann starts by granting the prosecutor’s strongest line. It’s a rhetorical move theologians rarely make unless they’re confident they can reframe the case. By admitting the ugliness without flinching, he refuses the cheap comfort of institutional PR. The hook is that the truth can be used as a lie when it’s treated as the whole story.

The pivot - “though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth” - isn’t a plea to ignore wrongdoing; it’s a warning about reduction. Vann is pushing against a particular modern temptation: narrating moral history as a simple exposure story, where to name the scandal is to finish the argument. He’s also subtly defending the difference between an institution’s public record and the religious claim it makes. The Church, in his framing, is both culpable human organization and a vessel for something it repeatedly fails to embody. Scandal is not an exception but a feature of any project that claims holiness while being staffed by ordinary people with power.

Context matters: writing in a century that watched Christianity collide with total war, ideological extremism, and its own internal crises, Vann is anticipating the “gotcha” historiography that treats corruption as the final verdict. The subtext is bracing: yes, the Church’s sins are real; no, you don’t get to collapse a two-thousand-year argument about meaning, charity, art, and community into a single, grim anthology.