Editor's note: This is the second of a six-part series, "A Body Still Bearing Wounds," addressing spiritual issues at the heart of the archdiocese, prepared by the Archdiocesan Spirituality Commission.

It was 1944. College classes were over for the day, and I was walking down a main street in Oakland to get the bus for home. It was just an ordinary walk with ordinary things going through my mind.

A newspaper rack was ahead, but its headline was legible from quite a distance. It read, "ATOM SPLIT!"

For a few moments I was riveted to the sidewalk, then slowly approached the rack to take in a bit more of the article. At that moment I felt that I was looking through and beyond a split atom into something dreadful --- an almost primordial sense of confusion, of helplessness, of uncertainty. The fact that the world I knew had shifted, as do the great tectonic plates as they create our earthquakes, was real. It was a deep sense of loss, with the intuition that my world would never be returned to me. A loneliness came over me that something I valued, and perhaps had taken for granted, had disappeared, as a thief might steal in and snatch away my possessions.

My foreboding was correct. The atom bomb was dropped in 1945. The world, indeed, had changed.

On a smaller scale, but no less important, something like this happened to many of us Catholics when, several years ago, the sexual abuse of children by trusted people in the church became front page news. We found ourselves in a serious moment of truth. Our spiritual world had changed.

The tragedy of broken lives, of damaged reputations (perhaps irreparably damaged), the impact upon the great number of priests who had been faithful to their promise of celibacy and their commitment to protect life from birth to death, was profound. Something important, something of value, had been lost. Many stared hypocrisy in the face --- the difference between the exterior presentation and the private life. In Greek drama hypocrites, after all, were actors.

Stunned, we asked, "Could this really be? On such a scale?" As time went on it became clear that the answer was "Yes." Reactions were varied, across a wide spectrum. We were not naive; we knew how serious this matter was.

We mourned for the victims; we suspected what ramifications it might have in terms of the priesthood itself and for the entire church. We turned to Jesus' message. We reflected upon his words, "Let the one among you who is sinless cast the first stone." At Mass we heard the prayer just before Communion, "Look not upon our sins but the faith of your Church" (my experience is that the vast majority of Catholics made this distinction). But still we felt a heavy loss, deep sadness.

Some experience loss as an entity, boxed within itself. Yet, on many occasions from loss and death, new life can come. It is the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus lived out within our own lives. We all can testify to this. We again heard the dizzy inversion of society's values in Jesus' words. If you want to live, you have to die. If you want to win, you have to lose. If you want to be bear much fruit, you must be like the seed that goes into the ground and dies, a loss that can end in rebirth.

Over this issue, we, the church, are living now in the passion-death phase of the paschal mystery, the dying, the losing, the barrenness. We live with the hope that we are moving toward resurrection.

Will there be reforms? Most assuredly, although not as rapidly as some might desire. The fact that changes are being demanded by the church, by us, is an indication of how keenly we feel our loss. Out of loss, as the changes are enacted with courage and with love --- as, painfully, wounds are opened and cleansed --- we will heal.

In Homer's Iliad there are many losses. The most powerful and poignant of them brings the great epic to a close. At the hands of the Greeks, the elderly King Priam suffered the loss of everything: his vast kingdom, his wife, sons and daughters. The loss was total. His son Hector, killed and mutilated by Achilles, is left unburied in the Greek camp.

In the dark of night, Priam makes his way into the camp to the tent of Achilles. There, the old man begs for his son's body for proper burial. He kneels, takes Achilles' hands and says, "I kiss the hands of the man who has killed my children."

At that point of bitter loss, Achilles was moved to pity, helped Priam to rise, ordered that Hector's body be cleansed and he, himself, lifted the body onto a litter, assuring safe passage back to Troy. Loss giving way to gain; wounds giving way to health; death giving way to new life.

This is the conviction of our faith.

St. Joseph of Carondelet Sister Thomas Bernard MacConnell is a member of the Archdiocesan Spirituality Commission.