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By Eric Banecker, First Things - Looking back, though, these five years have been quite memorable in the life of the Church, and not always for happy reasons. Just weeks after my classmates and I were ordained, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report came out. Then there was the McCarrick scandal. Then the Amazon synod. Thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the first time I presided at an Easter Vigil, I was alone with just three other priests. In the midst of that shutdown and the riots in American cities, I was sent as an administrator, then pastor, into the heart of one of those cities. I arrived in a parish where, just weeks before, the smell of tear gas had wafted over families as they sat huddled in their backyards.