Fr. Heilman: The Depth of My Anger of Decades of Effete Bishops

[gracepoole]

I’m sure you’ll understand why responding to my 77-year-old mother with “Good grief” likely will seem a bit cheeky.

 

[Tis_Bearself]

Oh, I know. Moms, God love 'em.

 

[PetraG]

The first promptings soon fade into insignificance compared to:

1. the actual life lived in formation and how that is seen in the light of how they see their calling.
2. slow realisation of what a real future life will entail there.
3. even slower growth in understanding of what one is likely capable of and ones own needs. This changes significantly for young vocations and is a muddy area indeed.

… the first and most natural place where the flowers of the sanctuary should almost spontaneously grow and bloom, remains always the truly and deeply Christian family. Most of the saintly bishops and priests whose “praise the Church declares,” owe the beginning of their vocation and their holiness to example and teaching of a father strong in faith and manly virtues, of a pure and devoted mother, and of a family in which the love of God and neighbor, joined with simplicity of life, has reigned supreme. To this ordinary rule of divine Providence exceptions are rare and only serve to prove the rule…
Yet it must be confessed with sadness that only too often parents seem to be unable to resign themselves to the priestly or religious vocations of their children. Such parents have no scruple in opposing the divine call with objections of all kinds; they even have recourse to means which can imperil not only the vocation to a more perfect state, but also the very conscience and the eternal salvation of those souls they ought to hold so dear. This happens all too often in the case even of parents who glory in being sincerely Christian and Catholic, especially in the higher and more cultured classes. This is a deplorable abuse, like that unfortunately prevalent in centuries past, of forcing children into the ecclesiastical career without the fitness of a vocation…
A long and sad experience has shown that a vocation betrayed—the word is not to be thought too strong—is a source of tears not only for the sons but also for the ill-advised parents; and God grant that such tears be not so long delayed as to become eternal tears.
Pope Pius XI, Ad Catholici Sacerdotii, 1935

 

[Peeps]

Having been Protestant (Evangelical) for 47 years, I don’t understand much about Catholic seminary.

But one question occurs–do the seminary dorms/housing units have house parents?

It seems to me that this would give the young men people to talk to, human contact with people other than young men, and practical help in the seminary dorms. Also, the house parents could keep an eye out for young men who were exhibiting symptoms of depression, or who seemed to be struggling with the celibacy. In summary, just someone who is a loving “parent-figure” who can help with the transition between home and away-from-home. Someone to go fishing with, toss the softball around with, or eat home-made cookies with.

I think that there would be a lot of older Catholic couples, experienced in parenting boys, preferably with at least one son who was called to the priesthood, who would be be interested in serving the Church in this capacity for room and board and a small salary.

Is this already done?

 

[Yeoman]

On one hand, I understand his anger. The “progressive” movement in the Church has been in the driver’s seat for over 50 years now, and all we have to show for it is the dumpster fire we have now. On the other, the other priest isn’t around to speak for himself. I do agree that we have been plagued by weak bishops – but it was his uncle’s choice alone to respond with hostility. I guess I am not buying into “the bishops made him hate me.”

Blaming it on the Bishops exclusively is a bit much, I agree. But I’ll take it one step further, or in another direction.

Being in that generation that fits after the Boomers and before later generations, I’ve watched Boomers, in the church and out, have an absolute death grip on everything. In the Church, I’ve been amazed to watch this play out, with the conservative orthodox young, often the very young, struggling to get a voice of orthodoxy in against aging Boomers who still think they are the young.

There’s a younger, better, orthodox group out there in the laity and in the clergy. It’s time for the Boomer generation to step down, in everything.

 

[Yeoman]

I’ve been shunned by family. He shouldn’t imagine that was the bishop’s fault. It is his uncle’s fault.

I think we also need to realize that the 1960s and 1970s were going to happen with or without the 2nd Vatican Council. If you want to blame something, blame two brutal World Wars fought largely within Christendom. How did those happen? Not because of Vatican II.

There’s a lot of truth in that, and I’ve argued that there was something about World War Two that was a watershed in everything, including people’s relationship to the church.

The problem with living through a decade is that you are living through it. Which means, getting it right is not easy. But the other thing is that a person doesn’t have to accept the errors of the past either. I’m not saying that Vatican II was an error, but much of what the 60s and 70s gave us was not that great.

One thing it gave us is a generation that came up in that era that’s bizarrely unable to relinquish control over anything it has its hands on. Our last election in the US is a good example. We’re still electing Boomers to office long after they should have handed the reigns to the next generation. And if you work in an office, chances some old Boomer is calling the shots. A lot of the horrors we’re seeing now in the Church would be best addressed by a wholescale generational cleansing at the Bishop level, of both the guilty and the innocent, which would mean removing a lot of that generation that seemingly failed us pretty badly.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Your analysis assumes there are no counter attractions. It’s entirely possible for a man to be far more attracted to the priestly life than to the married life, even if he is very much attracted to women.

And there is no good reason to assume, especially nowadays, that homosexual men would not prefer the non-consecrated homosexual lifestyle to a celibate life.

 

[Ardent_Fire]

Yeah – boomers will argue that young people don’t REALLY know what it was like before the 60s and idealize the way things were, but when we look at the state of things in the Church now, boomers don’t really have any credibility anymore. Not to me they don’t. I was Generation X and my catechesis was horrible. Neither I nor my peers learned any of the basics of the faith or largely forgot them by the time we were teenagers, and my “progressive” parish priest was eventually defrocked for being a sexual abuser. Small wonder as all of this continues to get worse, that youth want to reverse course.

 

[Yeoman]

Your analysis assumes there are no counter attractions. It’s entirely possible for a man to be far more attracted to the priestly life than to the married life, even if he is very much attracted to women.

And there is no good reason to assume, especially nowadays, that homosexual men would not prefer the non-consecrated homosexual lifestyle to a celibate life.

That’s very true.

Frankly, I think one of the reason that we have the current scandal going on is that there were a fair number of clerics who entered the priesthood in prior decades for reasons other than a call. Or perhaps they felt they had a call as they were searching for a lifestyle that would not raise questions.

What I mean by that is that in prior eras homosexuality was so detested that homosexuals generally feared detection and the priesthood provided camouflage. So may have had some men enter it, if they were Catholic, simply because that provided a way around the question “why aren’t you married”. I know that even now older men who have never been married will get that question and are embarrassed by it, particularly because the assumption is that the must be homosexuals.

I think an analogy here might exist in regards to what happened in Quebec during the Quiet Revolution. When institutions that had been maintained by the Church were turned over to the province, priests and nuns left their roles in large numbers and joined the laity. Chances are high that they’d never really felt a call, but wanted to be teachers and the like, and that was the only way to do it.

The added problem here is that all sexual sin is deeply attached to the person who commits it, and the more debased that is, the more that’s true. People who engage in more conventional forms of sexual sin, like perhaps cheating on their spouse, become attached to that but aren’t likely to go deep into depravity. But people who are attached to the debased will go deeper and deeper, so we’ve seen some real horrors here. And because the door was open, it took on a weird character we’re only just finding out about. And, once the door was open, the Enemy came in. Some of this was just flat out Demonic.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Not arguing against your point. However, one needs to consider that the coming of age of the baby boomers was a real watershed event. Prior to that time there was a Catholic “population explosion” due to births and immigration. And the Church tried mightily to keep up, and did keep up, with that expansion in the production of priests and religious.

After WWII, the numbers of both were huge and rapidly growing. At the very same time, society as a whole began accepting a mild to major hedonism. Perhaps most symbolic of that was the “regularization” or “normalization” of Playboy Magazine and the Playboy Clubs. All of a sudden, pornography and objectification of women was combined with the utmost in consumerism and further combined with a patina of respectability in the form of a “philosophy” and articles by quite reputable people.

And given the ages of the boomers at the time, with all their hormones afire, the Catholic population was profoundly affected by all of those things; sex as recreation, extreme consumerism, relativistic philosophy, and all wrapped in a package that seemed to suggest legitimacy and at least as reasonable degree of respectability.

Priests and sisters went off the rails so fast they were practically a blur. In place of vows and a stringent personal morality, it was “taught” by many “intellectuals” in the Church that a “societal morality and commitment” was the thing, and political expression thereof was a superior substitute for the “medieval” values of personal morality and fervent worship.

It was Woodstock at every level, and the Church was not spared.

 

[Yeoman]

Yeah – boomers will argue that young people don’t REALLY know what it was like before the 60s and idealize the way things were, but when we look at the state of things in the Church now, boomers don’t really have any credibility anymore. Not to me they don’t. I was Generation X and my catechesis was horrible. Neither I nor my peers learned any of the basics of the faith or largely forgot them by the time we were teenagers, and my “progressive” parish priest was eventually defrocked for being a sexual abuser. Small wonder as all of this continues to get worse, that youth want to reverse course.

I’m Gen X also.

Just this last week I wanted a Boomer deliver a seminar about how lazy the Millennials are, etc. etc. A typical Boomer view.

And what baloney.

As a Gen Xer, part of a generation that was really left out as we were in the shawdow of the Boomers all the time, I’ve had the pleasure of watching younger generations come up with their own views. Their lives exist in sort of a ruin created by the Boomers, but often they’re much smarter and more oriented than the Boomers ever were. And they tend to be orthodox in all sorts of ways , even if they have to struggle to find the orthodox path that the Boomers plowed under, including in the Church.

Shoot, I’ve actually witnessed Millennials blister at Mass over departures from the rubrics and complain about the “Hippie” “teen youth mass” populated by old Boomers. But it’s hard for them to get a voice as they’re dismissed in everything. Only in the work place, where they’re pretty willing to tell a boss to pound sand and take off, do they seem to ever get much traction, but not much.

 

[Yeoman]

It was Woodstock at every level, and the Church was not spared.

It was.

But Woodstock is now old news. But the generation that went there, which came very much into societal control starting in the 1970s, is still there.

No single individual can be characterized by their generation, and there’s many exceptions for every generation. But we have to wonder why a generation that informed us to never trust anyone over 30, won’t trust anyone under that age now.

By way of an example, Nancy Pelosi was already in politics when our ambassador was lifted off of the embassy roof in Saigon. And she’s a major power still. Can it possibly be the case that a person who came of political age then, is relevant now?

Turning to church matters, that generation had a major impact on the Church, to be sure. But a lot of it was pretty bad and I suspect, and indeed have seen, that younger generations behind them would correct it. But they have to be allowed to.

 

[PetraG]

If you are saying that seminaries do not supply vocations but are every bit as capable as parents of ruining one, I sadly could not agree with you more. I know a friar who obviously had a vocation to be a brother. I saw later he was ordained to the priesthood, something I could not imagine he would do. Later, I saw that he had left. I suspect it was, tragically, a situation just such as you describe, where someone was induced to accept ordination to the priesthood when he did not have the vocation. I know others in his order who say that formation at that time was very poor and that there were many very upsetting cases.

I am not saying that families are always to blame when someone does not go to seminary, but that supplying a lot of arguments against a vocation is as bad as trying to force someone to accept ordination when he does not have a call.

I am saying that there is a reason that a greater share of seminarians are coming from more traditional families right now. They are the ones who still live their lives by “pious platitudes.”

(PS To say that sexual abuse was far too common and by grievous offense was almost always covered up is not the same as to say it was “widespread.” The vast majority of priests were not then and are not now sexual offenders.)

 

[PetraG]

It was.

But Woodstock is now old news. But the generation that went there, which came very much into societal control starting in the 1970s, is still there.

No single individual can be characterized by their generation, and there’s many exceptions for every generation. But we have to wonder why a generation that informed us to never trust anyone over 30, won’t trust anyone under that age now.

By way of an example, Nancy Pelosi was already in politics when our ambassador was lifted off of the embassy roof in Saigon. And she’s a major power still. Can it possibly be the case that a person who came of political age then, is relevant now?

Turning to church matters, that generation had a major impact on the Church, to be sure. But a lot of it was pretty bad and I suspect, and indeed have seen, that younger generations behind them would correct it. But they have to be allowed to.

Yes!! Now that we know how these things happen, the laity must do their part to ensure that the grievous offenses that can happen are not allowed to happen. We know where the bishops are free from error and where they are not. It is to their benefit to know with certainty that they will be held accountable if they fail so grievously to be faithful to their duty as shepherds.