Card. Sarah: The Priesthood is in Mortal Danger. Wherein Fr. Z rants to priests

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With all due respect to Fr. Z it’s not an either/or proposition. You can’t ignore the social gospel of
The Church. Providing humanitarian and social services is an integral part of evangelization.

He should study the work of all the great Catholic missionary orders. Providing for the material, medical and educational needs of the people was always the first priority of evangelization. It’s hard to praise God on an empty stomach.

The missionary orders were there to evangelize, not proselytize. Evangelization requires living the entire Gospel. Matthew chapter 25 would be a good place for Fr. Z to start. Priests are pastors, not just sacrament dispensers.
 
Not necessarily. Some are gifted for that, others can do more harm than good by being awkward with words. 1 Peter 4, 10-11.
 
Excited for when Fr. Z relocates to the amazon and solves all their problems by offering he TLM.
 
Actually that is a quote from Cardinal Sarah. I should have noted it.
 
Unfortunately, the false quote ‘preach the Gospel and if necessary use words’ has gained traction due to false ecumenism. Atheists and non Catholics volunteer too. A Catholic could be working right along side of them and think they are good to go and so that atheist or protestant will leave that day without hearing the Truth about Jesus Christ and His Church.
 
My own feeling is that the still-unfolding, never-ending saga of the abuse scandals — refreshed every time another state attorney general gets in front of a microphone — is a far greater “mortal wound” to the priesthood than the absence of Latin or some ordained viri probati in the Amazon, which, based on the last things I read, may not be happening anyway.
 
OraLabora said:
He should study the work of all the great Catholic missionary orders. Providing for the material, medical and educational needs of the people was always the first priority of evangelization. It’s hard to praise God on an empty stomach.

The missionary orders were there to evangelize, not proselytize. Evangelization requires living the entire Gospel. Matthew chapter 25 would be a good place for Fr. Z to start. Priests are pastors, not just sacrament dispensers.
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Do you know whether or not he has studied the great Catholic missionary orders? I read the article, I did not see where he said to proselytize. While it is true priests are also pastors, we need the sacraments.

From the article:

Even if the priest is trodden on by his more powerful clerical brethren and unfairly attacked by world-mired laity, he is in the safest spiritual place he can be if he acts out of love of God, Church and patria .
 
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OraLabora said:
Evangelization requires living the entire Gospel.
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we don’t need the entire gospel, we can’t do anything by ourselves. it only takes preaching the good news of salvation and the Holy Spirit will do the rest.
 
MagdalenaRita said:
While it is true priests are also pastors, we need the sacraments.
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Of course we need the sacraments. That’s the crux of the issue in the Amazon. They don’t have sufficient access to them.
upant said:
we don’t need the entire gospel, we can’t do anything by ourselves. it only takes preaching the good news of salvation and the Holy Spirit will do the rest.
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That’s magical thinking. Jesus taught us to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. He said doing it to the least of our brethren was like doing it to Him. We must cooperate with the grace we receive.
 
OraLabora said:
Of course we need the sacraments. That’s the crux of the issue in the Amazon. They don’t have sufficient access to them.
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Yes, it’s kind of a circle… We’ve stopped evangelizing (the protestants there are doing that), priests are not being raised up and so no sacraments. That puts us back to what Fr. Z said or actually Cardinal Sarah said, "the priesthood is in mortal danger.

I completely agree with Cardinal Sarah and Father Z.
 
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Evangelical protestants don’t have the sacraments. Their pastors can marry, and almost any layman can self-style him/herself a preacher and meet their spiritual needs as they understand them. Apples and oranges.

To properly evangelize we need priests, but the reality on the ground is that we don’t have enough and hence evangelization suffers and so we can’t form enough priests as a result. We can continue to bury our heads in the sand and watch the Church there die out to the Evangelicals. It isn’t a circle, it’s a spiral dive.

Or we can break the circle by being practical while at the same time not doing offense to doctrine, since married priests is a disciplinary, not doctrinal matter. . . .
 
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OraLabora said:
Evangelical protestants don’t have the sacraments.
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Yes, I realize that. My point was that because they are evangelizing they are taking many Catholics out of the Church. Again a loss of priests. loss of sacraments.
OraLabora said:
We can forget about going back to a lost era
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No one is talking about going back to a lost era. Besides that there aren’t any lost eras in the Catholic church. It is a history of saints, Sacraments, Divine Revelation and Traditions that Jesus promised to protect. We also should be about protecting the Church’s priesthood.
OraLabora said:
Fr. Z seems to have way too much time on his hands. He should roll up his sleeves, learn Portuguese and volunteer for duty in the Amazon. He’d save a lot more souls than he does sowing division over liturgical minutiae.
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In all charity, Father Z more than likely is right where God has put him. I am sure that if God wants him to learn Portuguese and go to the Amazon, he will direct him. I also think God alone knows how many souls Father Z has brought to the Church and to Christ.
 
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yankeesouth said:
Card. Sarah: The priesthood is in mortal danger. Wherein Fr. Z rants to priests. | Fr. Z's Blog
The real problem in the Amazon is not the ordination of married deacons. The real issue is that of evangelization. We have renounced proclaiming the faith, salvation in Jesus Christ. Too often we have become humanitarian assistants or social workers. - Cardinal Sarah
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Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin struggled with this in the States with the Catholic Worker Movement. Mother Teresa frequently struggled to prevent the same thing from happening within the Sisters of Charity; there is a human tendency for something to turn into a social worker organization/club with only a veneer of the faith. It’s a cyclical struggle that we all have to guard against. Corporal and spiritual works of mercy need to go together and if either is missing our authenticity crumbles.

God assist us. Peace.
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MagdalenaRita said:
Yes, I realize that. My point was that because they are evangelizing they are taking many Catholics out of the Church. Again a loss of priests. loss of sacraments.
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It’s much easier for them to form preachers without the sacraments, and without the restrictions of celibacy. They can pick them directly from the local pool of believers, married or not, male or female. Female priests are out for us, with reason, but married need not be especially as married priests already exist in the Church.

We can dance around in circles watching the airspeed build up rapidly in the spiral dive until the wings break off. Or we can take practical steps to regain control. If she doesn’t, the Church will have nobody to blame but herself.
 
Exactly. I agree with Fr. Z and Cardinal Sarah. We must do more than just be social workers. And to whoever pointed out the quote about use words if necessary is fake, thank you! St Francis never said that.

And thank you also for mentioning Peter Maurin (he wasn’t a priest, however). People always mention Dorothy Day but rarely Maurin.
 
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Good points and people tend to forget that even now those rites that do have the exception for married priests, the priests have restrictions on their marital rights with their wives.
 
I read Dorothy Day’s autobiography (The Long Lonliness), which was pretty long, and I thought Peter Maurin was a priest the entire time, lol. I must have been glossing over some.

Anyway, yeah: it takes a pro-active effort cooperating with the grace of God to keep a religious organization or even an order for religious from distancing itself from the sacred & spiritual. The reason is that it makes the group less controversial to the mainstream and people prefer that more comfortable position .

His Eminence isn’t the first to warn about this and he won’t be the last. Every new generation needs to be evangelized over and over again, for those born in the faith and those outside.
 
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OraLabora said:
That’s magical thinking. Jesus taught us to visit the prisoners, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc. He said doing it to the least of our brethren was like doing it to Him. We must cooperate with the grace we receive.
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what about the unbeliever? your good works do nothing for his salvation. he needs the gospel preached to him or all is for naught, saved by grace is catholic teaching.
 
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