A Good Article on the JPII Priests
Orthodox, traditional and dangerous to know. The guys they profiled remind me of the priests at my church, St Mary's, where they have crazy things like confession every day (twice on Saturdays!), daily rosaries, weekly exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, Solemn High Mass Sundays at noon, etc. Y'know, Catholicism, and plenty of it.
There's also some interesting stuff at the end about that phenomenon "known among Catholics as 'the bleeding'" (to revive an old joke):
Ditching mandatory priestly celibacy would throw a thousand years of Church discipline into disarray for what would be, at best, a marginal increase in the number of priests in the developed world. Just doesn't seem worth it to me. It's a quick-fix solution: change one rule, and everything will be better, without our having to make any real, internal change. The Catholic laity wants more priests, wants priests in numbers like in the old days, but for what? To perform weekday Mass for a few elderly women? To sit in the confessional waiting for the same half-dozen penitents while the rest of the congregation is out livin' it up in a state of mortal sin? And otherwise to sit quietly in their cells? Vocations have declined, ultimately, because the Catholic laity has allowed its faith to be weakened. Is it really harder to live a life of celibacy in 2004 than it was in 1904, or 1804, or 1504? Or is it that we're no longer raising Catholic men up to the challenge, or who see life in God's priesthood as worth the sacrifice? Vocations will only rise anew when the faith of the laity is renewed; anything else will be, at best, a band-aid. And in the meantime, we can always import good priests from India and Anglophone Africa.
You know what small (or perhaps not so small) thing might actually do some good on this score? If we to remember our Catholic sexual ethics. We commonly speak (as I have in this post) of priests as being required to be celibate, as if celibacy itself were one of the characteristics that separated the priesthood from the laity. And yet, of course, all unmarried Catholics are called to "celibacy"; it is just as much a sin (and a mortal sin, to boot) for a layman to have sex with someone who's not his wife as for a priest to do the same. What divides priests from laymen is that the former cannot marry; we might be better off to speak, not of "priestly celibacy", but of "priestly batchelorhood". For the faithful Catholic man, the choice is not between celibacy and the life of a swinging, 1970s-style ladies man, but rather between perpetual celibacy dedicated to the service of God and temporary celibacy while in pursuit of a wife. (Incidentally, a remembering of this notion might also do wonders to defend the Church's position on homosexuals, that those experiencing same-sex attraction are called to be chaste: all unmarried people are called to be chaste.)
There's also some interesting stuff at the end about that phenomenon "known among Catholics as 'the bleeding'" (to revive an old joke):
To solve the current priest shortage, many Catholics want to open the priesthood to married men. But conservatives argue that the major problem is inadequate recruitment.Not too shockingly, I'm in the "conservatives" camp here. I'm of that view for many reasons. One of them is that I think the "if only priests could marry!" line is founded on a premise that's simply false: that there are enough Catholic men out there who would become priests but for mandatory clerical celibacy that allowing priests to marry could "solve the current priest shortage". Does anyone really believe that there are thousands of such men in this country? Has anyone actually met one of them, a man who was convinced he had a vocation for the priesthood, but just couldn't follow God's call because he wanted to marry too badly?
Ditching mandatory priestly celibacy would throw a thousand years of Church discipline into disarray for what would be, at best, a marginal increase in the number of priests in the developed world. Just doesn't seem worth it to me. It's a quick-fix solution: change one rule, and everything will be better, without our having to make any real, internal change. The Catholic laity wants more priests, wants priests in numbers like in the old days, but for what? To perform weekday Mass for a few elderly women? To sit in the confessional waiting for the same half-dozen penitents while the rest of the congregation is out livin' it up in a state of mortal sin? And otherwise to sit quietly in their cells? Vocations have declined, ultimately, because the Catholic laity has allowed its faith to be weakened. Is it really harder to live a life of celibacy in 2004 than it was in 1904, or 1804, or 1504? Or is it that we're no longer raising Catholic men up to the challenge, or who see life in God's priesthood as worth the sacrifice? Vocations will only rise anew when the faith of the laity is renewed; anything else will be, at best, a band-aid. And in the meantime, we can always import good priests from India and Anglophone Africa.
You know what small (or perhaps not so small) thing might actually do some good on this score? If we to remember our Catholic sexual ethics. We commonly speak (as I have in this post) of priests as being required to be celibate, as if celibacy itself were one of the characteristics that separated the priesthood from the laity. And yet, of course, all unmarried Catholics are called to "celibacy"; it is just as much a sin (and a mortal sin, to boot) for a layman to have sex with someone who's not his wife as for a priest to do the same. What divides priests from laymen is that the former cannot marry; we might be better off to speak, not of "priestly celibacy", but of "priestly batchelorhood". For the faithful Catholic man, the choice is not between celibacy and the life of a swinging, 1970s-style ladies man, but rather between perpetual celibacy dedicated to the service of God and temporary celibacy while in pursuit of a wife. (Incidentally, a remembering of this notion might also do wonders to defend the Church's position on homosexuals, that those experiencing same-sex attraction are called to be chaste: all unmarried people are called to be chaste.)
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