Maybe there just aren’t saints anymore. Maybe there never were.

One may wonder after a report from L’Arche International that its founder, the revered Jean Vanier, allegedly sexually abused six women under his spiritual care. Called openly a saint by many, Vanier inspired countless people across the world, myself included. The trauma can hardly be overestimated.

For many, Vanier was our generation’s keeper of the eternally true human philosophy that each of us seeks and therefore deserves love, even the most marginal or disfigured. Vanier represented the respite of sanity and the humane. Through L’Arche, Vanier founded beautiful communities for the disabled and their companions, built upon an idea of love, belonging and what Vanier called gratuité. Since its inception in Trosly-Breuil in 1964, L’Arche has been an icon of kind humanity inseparably associated with Vanier himself. It’s always been Vanier and only then L’Arche. Whatever the nonsense or noise, whatever scandal, there were always Vanier’s gentle, paternal words to count on, the assurance of those lovelier things which remain. He was a model and the voice of our better selves, what our natures wanted to be.

But not anymore. Truth slaughters the reputations of the revered, and this latest scandal confirms what Iris Murdoch once wryly wrote, that a “saint described is a saint romanticized.” This is the brutal truth, the skeptic’s dissent, the honest unholiness of the thing: that our saints aren’t as saintly as we say, our heroes as heroic as we think. Abuse is not surprising; that our saints may have been abusers too, for some reason, still is. But maybe that’s exactly the lie we should stop believing, that there are ever people called saints, people worth looking up to, worth trusting at all.

The scandal is so great, the fall so tremendous, that it tempts us to quit our ideals, the notion of sanctity altogether and its attending mythologies, and even its founding concept, a God called holy. This is the more authentic, more believable atheism: that faith can be ruined by the evil of those who speak for God. This, to be honest, is just such the despair these many heinous revelations invite. Like darkness, like someone just turned the lights off, it’s the sort of thing that can snuff out the soul or at least its light, removing all we used to see by.

Yet maybe atheism isn’t the logical conclusion of scandal, but instead truth and a better account of sanctity. Anger subsided, maybe it’s honesty we can all agree on, believer and nonbeliever alike. And for those of us who can do nothing but believe in God, maybe truth is what will purify our faith, loosening it from the glamorous propaganda of institutions and the alluring illusions of celebrity and personal devotion. That is, maybe what these scandals are doing is reminding us what we repeatedly forget: and that’s our utter depravity, the democracy of human evil. There is in each of us nothing worth celebrity or adulation at all, nothing worth praise; we’re all wicked.

Which, strangely, is to appropriate a more authentic idea of holiness, a more genuine understanding of religion. Maybe that’s what’s happening. Our self-righteous delusions, the self-serving fantasies of our own false purities: perhaps these are being destroyed, not necessarily our faith. There is something plainly stupid about many religious people and institutions today, and that’s our unwillingness to see and confess our sins, to own our contradictions. And so, maybe that’s the bitter providential medicine, the good mysteriously to come from this evil.

Not only that justice is rendered, our cultures and institutions broken open, voice given to the voiceless and power to the powerless; maybe it’s also the case these scandals will make us more honestly admit our wickedness and need for grace. Maybe it’s the mystery of all this that it takes the world telling us our religion is fake to make us see that it really is. And thus, finally, to make us seek the real thing.

Humbled, we who still believe may rediscover a faith not for the proud and powerful, but for sinners and the weak, rendering us better Christians better for the world, gentler workers of purer love.

Which Vanier claimed to be; which we can still be.

This column originally appeared in the Dallas Morning News.