One Priest’s View on the Vocations Crisis

Excellent article, Father Kloster.

I do however, believe you might be just a bit too charitable.

From my vantage point, it appears to me that the vocations crisis is not seen to be a “failure” by the hierarchy at all, but rather as a sweeping opportunity. For no one can be so obtuse as to be unable to see the successes in the Catholic Church, the apostolates and dioceses and parishes where vocations continue to stream forth.

No, this crisis cannot possibly be a true “crisis” in the eyes of the Pope and his heretical and sodomy- and gender-bending allies, but rather an event of glorious and pregnant possibilities!

What Catholic who can walk and chew gum at the same time cannot see the reality that there is a vast movement in to morph the Catholic Church into a Italian branch office of the Anglican Communion, complete with the spiritual voids, conflicts, disunity, destruction of morality and dissolution of authority and doctrine that exists in that haphazard and collapsing sect?

Indeed, I believe it is safe to say that many outsider’s may already see us as what I fear we may become.

No, Father, you are too kind.

The cure for the vocations crisis is liturgical rigidity, unembarrassed evangelization, orthodoxy and the dispensing of strict Church discipline, which are all expressions of true love for God and man.

Indeed, vast numbers of excommunications, laicizations and interdicts must be in the future for the GROWTH of the Church to resume. Hard for me to see the Church remaining the Church without a lot of the latter three, too.

Get the bad stuff out of the Catholic home. Get the good stuff in. Problem solved.

TV out. Lives of the saints in.

Vocations would FLOOD into monasteries, seminaries, cloisters, classrooms

We have, above all else, a parenting crisis.

The “vocations crisis” is only ONE aspect of it.

You have got this exactly right. If we get our liturgy right, and restore ascetical practices, the vocations will follow.
It is time to admit that the liberalising experiment has been a catastrophic error. I defy anyone to argue that removing the communion rail, introducing ‘eucharistic ministers’, abandoning ad orientem – any of these and countless other novelties, have had any positive effect in building up the Church.

Perhaps you don’t consider the Monstrance or the Tabernacle as being the actual Real Presence of the Holy Name Jesus.

The article was full of religious material like the Mass and dressing to represent the clerical state. What does the Roman Collar mean? It is a bold announcement of a man’s dedication to Jesus. Everyone knows my article was not about Satan or even a secular subject. Lighten up.

As an aside, I hope you bow your head each time the Holy Name of Jesus is proclaimed. o{]:)

And having now watched multiple vocation’s directors look for all of the wrong things in young men who are discerning, one has to wonder if that is intentional or incompetent. What element of a priest’s duties are fostered by being glib about sports? And, no, I’m not kidding.

The lack of priests is intentional. The middle management of the church has two aims: to force the church to use women as pastoral administrators and by that means accustom the laity to the idea of women priests. I suspect that this is what Francis would like to see, if not in his lifetime, than sometime in the next 50 years.

Yes, Catholics today are Kennedy Catholics: They wear Catholicism when it suits them.

Cardinal Cushing was soft on abortion in the late 1950s when the Massachusetts legislature was trying to legalize it. No protests from Cushing, the perfect model for the Kennedy’s.

When Cardinal O’Malley allowed abortion-for-all Ted Kennedy to have a Catholic funeral, it was clear that the USA Catholic Church was totally lost. Catholic bishops are such hypocrites.

Wait…you walked away from the Holy Eucharist? From Jesus Christ…body, blood, soul, and divinity?

Suzan:

Rest assured, the devil is most welcoming!

My “experience” is dealing with the clergy over the last 50 years in various capacities and having noticed that the things that Fr. Greeley has written about mirror what I have seen in the Catholic clergy over the same time period:

— a marked effeminacy in the clergy since the late 1970s when homosexuality went main-stream in the USA and the Catholic Church.

— clergy publicly engaging in the most outrages behavior which seemed to be some type of public homosexual demonstration: The worst example I recall is at the Chrism Mass at St. James Cathedral, Seattle WA, some time between 1988 – 1996, a priest in his 50s with gray hair down to his shoulders was seated with the other clergy but wearing a skin-tight black ballerina leotard which left nothing to the imagination. This priest chatted with Archbishop Hunthausen who did not tell him to leave and have some respect for the congregation and himself.

— when priests die young, i.e. in their 50s, it is a high percentage chance that they died of AIDS. Death certificates are usually public records and if you know what to look for, you can tell that the priest died of AIDS even though the the cause of dead is listed as an AIDS-related disease, e.g. pneumonia or weird cancers that have an AIDS association. I recall one priest who was a convert to the faith in his forties who went through RICA with one priest I knew who was a stereotypical queen. Within 4 years of his converting to the Catholic faith, he was ordained to the priesthood because he was the apparent boyfriend of the queen priest who I had known going back to his seminary days in the 1970s and who is now the rector of a cathedral in an archdiocese. The convert priest died within 4 years of ordination at around 50 years of age which the death certificate listed as some type of weird brain cancer which rarely occurs and then only in the extreme elderly. A late vocation in his 40s was planning to go to the seminary and died of some mysterious disease before he made it in the seminary door. I recall him wanting to give intensive back rubs to people, even the clergy, at the most inappropriate of times so there may have been an AIDS issue there. One of the cathedral organists dropped dead of AIDS in his early 40s but he was completely out and constantly soliciting sex from anyone who would listen to him so there was no big surprise there.

— also when priests die young, the obituary often lists things about them that the priest never owned up to with the faithful, e.g. being the state chairman of Dignity and running Dignity hoedowns at the local gay bar for the last 30 years without the average parishioner knowing about it.

— when priests who you thought were so effeminate and lacking in any masculine qualities and were only fit for ministry in a nursing home or insane asylum where they would not give scandal by their womanish and catty slurry peach, limp wrists and wispy physical demeanor are magically elevated to the episcopate within 20 years of ordination, you might think that they had something going on with the hierarchy to get them made a bishop.

The old saying goes like this: Pre-Vatican II, the top 10% of college graduates went and studied for the priesthood. Post-Vatican II, the bottom 10% of college graduates go and study for the priesthood.