A clarion call to restore our beautiful Catholicism

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I don’t usually read his blog, but was reading it anyway, and these paragraphs from Father Heilman particular struck me. It sounds like he must have attended seminary at a time that Michael Rose wrote about in his book “Goodbye Good Men. I’ve met a lot of seminarians and I don’t think that seminary formation is still like what he describes, though.

“By the time I entered seminary in the 1980s, our training seemed to have an overriding theme: We were called to completely rethink former notions of Catholicism. We seemed to look at our ancestors’ way of believing and practicing their faith much like we would look back at those who believed the world was flat … they meant well, but they just didn’t know any better. This is why it is often referred to as the heresy of “Modernism,” as it looks to erase the old in favor of the new.

For example, we were not offered one minute of Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in all of my seminary training. Also, it was understood that if someone was seen with a rosary, they would need “extra” spiritual direction (or even psychological counseling), as the rosary raised a red flag of fanaticism. Scripture studies included “explaining away” such miracles as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as the “miracle of sharing.” Our formation was almost entirely cerebral, with little or no attention to the spiritual or supernatural. Many of the theologians we focused upon during our studies have since been revealed to be heretical.”

Link here.
 
Father Heilman has said this is what seminary was like for him. I don’t doubt it as I am just a lay person and yet saw the lack of attention to devotions when I was young; the explanation of Loaves and Fishes as people just sharing food was in a popular bestseller in the 70s ( I can’t remember if it was Richard Bach’s “Illustions” or something else).

Those days are long gone though and nobody who’s still Catholic thinks like this now except maybe some elderly hippie types.
 
JimG said:
Scripture studies included “explaining away” such miracles as the multiplication of the loaves and fishes as the “miracle of sharing.
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One of my high school teachers taught us that.
And she wasn’t particularly radical or liberal or anything. She taught us solid moral theology.
But she was of that Baby Boom era…
 
Some people can’t handle the supernatural aspects of Catholicism.

Fr. Heilman, Fr. Z, Cardinal Burke and others fortunately have called this right out in the open and done a lot to re-establish the supernatural. I may roll eyes at them when they’re going on about ad orientem, but they are right on the money about this issue. And a lot of other priests who aren’t entirely traditional, like Fr. Blount, who is a creationist but also a huge charismatic, will say the same thing.
 
For this reason, to thwart the influence of the world and the evil one on the faith…

we pray.
 
I am associated with a seminary on my college campus and know several seminarians at another nearby seminary. I can assure you that both are nothing like what the OP posts and what was experienced in the 70s-80s. I am SO impressed with the men being ordained lately: they are wonderful, solid priests, psychologically stable and in love with the Church. Daily rosaries and Holy Hours are part of formation.
 
That is why one seminary director recently said: “We are looking for quality, not quantity.”
 
Limoncello4021 said:
I am associated with a seminary on my college campus and know several seminarians at another nearby seminary. I can assure you that both are nothing like what the OP posts and what was experienced in the 70s-80s. I am SO impressed with the men being ordained lately: they are wonderful, solid priests, psychologically stable and in love with the Church. Daily rosaries and Holy Hours are part of formation.
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That is my experience as well. Both my son and daughter are involved in Catholic Youth ministries and the seminarians involved are pretty much without exception, holy and mature in faith.
 
edwest211 said:
I’m sorry to hear this but ‘things went nuts in seminaries in the 1970s.’ Women religious were also affected by modernist ideas.

http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/whats-going-on-with-the-lcwr
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There is a lot of misconception about how wonderful religious life was before the 60’s. Speak to any person 80 and over who was raised in Catholic schools by nuns and you’ll get a different story. A big problem was that many girls joined the convent for reasons other than a true vocation and it was pretty hard to change your mind even from the novitiate.
 
My late mother (died 2001 at 83) who was taught by sisters, has told me similar stories.

I certainly would not want to go back to pre-Conciliar Catholicism in Quebec. It was Jansenist, clericalist, and toxic. I know of first-hand stories of couples being denied absolution for using natural family planning, and for the wife not being either nursing or pregnant.
 
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The priests we’re getting nowadays do seem so much better than the ones I was seeing in the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s. I suspect it’s because nowadays, there is so much flak associated with being a priest that only the holiest and most special and most tough even go for it, and the screening process also gets rid of a lot of the problematic ones.
 
Yes, I know. Having lived through part of the 1950s and onward, nuns had a different, better attitude. Starting in the late 1960s and early '70s, a strange influence began to appear.
 
edwest211 said:
Starting in the late 1960s and early '70s, a strange influence began to appear.
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Yeah, liberated hippie activist nuns (If they stayed in the convent at all). Nowadays, the ones who are still alive are elderly liberated hippie activist nuns.

They went hand in hand with the types of Berrigan-influenced priests who go to the annual military air show and lay down in front of the gates (yes, they still do this).
 
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A few years back, we were visiting the priest who married us in 1980. A Monsignor who had attended the same seminary with him was also visiting. They told of a Seattle-area* seminary which they attended in the 1970s and which had subsequently closed. “That’s too bad” I said.

“No, not at all!” came the response. “We wanted it to be burned to the ground and the earth salted. It was horrible.”

Prudential rebellion can be a good thing. Both are local pillars of the faith.

*Ah, there’s the problem!
 
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@JimG That is so sad to hear. Was this more a product of the era or just certain seminaries?
 
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