I understand completely - your posts are great! If only all Catholics could recognize that the changes since VII have greatly diminished the role of the priest and the sense of sacrifice in the Mass. The manly men disappeared, and the seminaries became hotbeds of homosexuality, leading to the priest abuse scandals. But now, traditional orders and seminaries are bursting at the seams. We will take back our Church!
The “manly men” have disappeared? The ingratitude in that false statement staggers the mind.
You libel thousands of holy and dedicated priests, including my pastor…thousands of holy and dedicated men, I might add, that you have never met!
If that is what you have been saying about our pastors, why is it that you are surprised that young men do not want to follow in their footsteps? Who is going to dare to follow men whom their mothers and fathers criticize so unfairly, save those who say to themselves “I can do better than that”? What a humble way to start to a holy and humble priesthood! Do you see the disservice this kind of talk about today’s priests does to tomorrow’s priests, not to mention those of today? I should say it would take a manly man, to allow his life to be consumed in exchange for treatment like that.
You will take back “your Church”, will you? I have news for you: those priest abuse scandals in the state of Oregon didn’t come from priests ordained after Vatican II, on the whole. The accusations are 30 and 40 and 50 years old, against priests who were weaned on the TLM. Those men were formed in “your Church”! I will not speak of every one, but the lion’s share of accusations came against priests raised the “traditional” way, removed from the society of women other than their relatives by the age of fourteen or so. You can ask the psychologists what that does to a man’s psychosexual development.
You seem to think that there were no scandals or accusations about Catholic priests and homosexuality or pedophilia in the priesthood until now. Maybe you think child sexual abuse was invented by the clerics who came up with the NO. Guess what? It has only been in the last 50 years that anyone believed the boys (and girls) who had been abused…well, except the Catholics who left the faith because nobody believed them. They went out and told their stories, and they were believed. It was a scandal against us that we didn’t want to face. I know a family that is not Catholic because of problems the great-grandparents had with their priest and how he conducted himself around young people. There wasn’t a second Catholic parish available to them, this priest was not removed, and so they went to the Protestant Chuch. This was in the Midwest in about 1906. So let us get off of how perfect the ways were in the old days. I have another friend, converted because she married a Catholic, whose father left the Church because of physical abuse by the nuns at his gradeschool. There have always been problems.
The “traditional” way was to give Father carte blanche unless he was caught red-handed…and then, do you think he was booted out? Nope. They just moved him somewhere else and hoped he’d make good on what they did not realize was an impossible vow to resist the temptation in the future. They’d never let a thief go back to being a bank teller, but they expected a man who lacked self-control around children to be left alone with them, unsupervised, and to never sin again. They meant well, but the old days were not the good old days, when it comes to dealing with these problems.
We need to admit that if the Church had been so perfect as so many romantics want to believe, Vatican II would not have been convened. I suppose you can criticize the effort to meet the problem, but let’s not pretend that no problem existed.
May I make this observation, then? You don’t
seem to show much reverence for the priesthood, except a theoretical priesthood that most of the priests you actually know apparently don’t belong to. You
seem very critical of the heirarchy and contemptuous of most of the laity. You
seem to imply that you and others devoted to Latin and the TLM exceed all these other Christians in holiness, that if they were just more like you, our Church would be just perfect.
Is this the fruit of regular attendance at the TLM? If all is as it
seems, then frankly, the fruit doesn’t speak as well for the tree as you
seem to think.
Or perhaps I am suggesting that rash conclusions might be rightly drawn from statements you don’t mean but make out of frustration or that do not mean what I think they seem to. Perhaps I take you entirely wrong. Let us hope so. Let us both take a more charitable view of the other, then, and get this conversation back on more charitable ground.