Nothing could prevent St. John Marie Vianney from running at the call of a dying penitent.

Not inclement weather. Not the lateness of the hour. Not his own grave fevers.

In this trait of selfless duty to people in need, the priest they called the Curè of Ars was emblematic of the entire Catholic priesthood. Yet this is an easy legacy to forget in times like these, when the defects of a few wayward priests seems to give the whole world a chance to take stock of just how “bad” the Church is.

Latin Americans who have paid attention to recent events should know better.

This April 12, at 3 o'clock in the morning, the president of the Venezuelan Bishops' Conference, Archbishop Baltasar Porras, received a strange call from General Romel Fuenmayor, the military man responsible for the capture of the just-deposed President Hugo Chavez.

The soldier informed the archbishop that President Chavez — a man known for his disdain for Archbishop Porras, having publicly referred to him as “the devil” and “the Judas of Venezuela”—wanted to meet the archbishop in order to ask him for spiritual advice. Without hesitation, despite the barricades along the city streets, Archbishop Porras took less than 20 minutes to show up at Fort Tiuna, the place designated to incarcerate Chavez.

Although the archbishop did not reveal the nature of the encounter, he did allow that the deposed president “received the spiritual assistance that any baptized deserves from the Catholic Church, no matter who he is.”

The next day, when Chavez was humiliated and transported to the military island of Orchila, Cardinal Ignacio Velasco, Archbishop of Caracas, still recovering from a recent surgical procedure, flew in to visit Chavez. The cardinal came, he said, because he heard the man was entering into a deep depression and wanted spiritual advice.

The stories of notoriously anti-Catholic dictators turning to the Church in their time of need are nothing new in Latin America. We have seen this scenario before with Juan Domingo Peron in Argentina, General Juan Velazco Alvarado in Peru and any number of once-hostile politicians and generals in Mexico. Some of them, like Chavez, returned to power after their falls; not a few of these quickly forgot the promptness and charity with which Church ministers responded to their pleas for help.

Nor has such forgiving, patient love on the part of the Church been limited to political figures. The famous French anti-Catholic François Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire, demanded the presence of a confessor each time his health began to fail. After each recovery, he would explain to his peers and the public that he had merely been mocking the sacrament of penance. Yet, even after each successive, ridiculing equivocation, a humble priest would respond to his every call.

St. Toribio of Mogrovejo, the second archbishop of Lima (Peru) and the patron saint of the bishops of America, once said that Catholics should not be surprised by the fact that the ministers of God are weak, sinners and sometimes full of shortcomings. On the contrary, “the true wonder, the true miracle is the fact that [priests] exist, that the priesthood still can deliver the graces of God to all the corners of the world.”

The holy archbishop of Lima knew what he was talking about: Thanks to his zeal to bring the sacraments to every corner of the wild Andes, most of the former Inca empire was devotedly Catholic in little more than 50 years.

This triumph of the Gospel was not only to the credit of St. Toribio, of course. Indeed, it was mainly the fruit of hundreds of missionaries, most of them unknown to history. They were not highly educated men, and most of them were sent all by themselves to preach Christ crucified. Many went out and many never came back. Some may have died as martyrs; we celebrate their memory only on All Saints' Day. Maybe some others were very bad sinners who scandalized the people with their offensive acts. Yet, through it all, the Lord saw to it that the Gospel reached souls by the preaching of the Word and the celebration of the sacraments.

Recently, an old Colombian peasant, standing in line to pay his last respects to the murdered archbishop of Cali, Isaías Duarte Cancino, expressed what many simple Catholics have known for centuries. “I come here,” the peasant said, “because he was like a father, like a shepherd. He was always there for us, even if he did not have the power of politicians. He had the power of his ears, the power of his big heart.”

Old as he was, the Colombian peasant surely knew plenty of stories about scandalous priests, men who were completely unworthy of their vocation. Nevertheless, he was able to understand where the real Church is, was and always has been: wherever Christ is proclaimed and those in need are loved, served—and forgiven—in his name.

Alejandro Bermudez is the Register's chief Latin America correspondent.