{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.022950819672131147, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.074626865671642, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Dante and the Scandals of a Beloved Church

The Church of the twenty-first century is no stranger to the word “scandal,” with headlines on a weekly, even daily basis, dealing with sexual abuse by priests and the Church’s past tendency to cover up these failings. Often reporters remark on the “surprising” faithfulness of devout Roman Catholics to their Church despite the abuses of some of their priests—actions that have obviously hurt and damaged family members and friends. To Dante, however, these failings and what appears to be the paradoxical faithfulness of Church members would be neither remarkable nor contradictory. Living in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Dante was fully aware of the sinfulness of members of the Church on earth—the Church visible—and, at the same time, deeply committed to the Church invisible, existing in heaven but including also all the faithful members of the Church on earth, the Body of Christ. In fact, The Divine Comedy can be seen as Dante’s exploration of how both Churches—visible and invisible—exist together and how a faithful believer needs to affirm the Church rooted in heaven by relentlessly confronting the evil of the Church visible, wherever and