Editor, The News:
For 30 years, or more, the oft-heard lament, and petitioned prayer, from Catholic clergy, has been the lack of priestly vocations; with an aging priestly population.
It’s become difficult for casual observers to deny the crisis, regarding the dwindling number of clergy.
The priesthood suffers from making itself irrelevant, by leaving anti-Christian culture un-critiqued, while simultaneously leaving Christianity, or rational Western culture, un-apologized, i.e., undefended.
Moreover, concepts such as sin, specifically the seven capital sins, and how they parasitically subsist on the human soul, are almost universally left unmentioned.
Instead, Catholic clergy present a non-judgmental, affirming, unconditionally loving Jesus, as if Christ and Billy Joel, love you, “just the way you are.”
To criticize is: To contrast an event, performance, activity, phenomenon, etc., with a standard. In noting the disparity, it can then be assessed what effort need be employed to bring the object of criticism in agreement with the standard.
Rather than taking the opportunity of a scandal, e.g., the clergy pedophile cases, as an opportunity to indicate the ubiquity of moral degeneration (did not Jesus choose Judas to teach that even amongst the elect is treachery?), and the need for the individual to strive to conform/submit one’s will to the standard, i.e., the Lord Jesus Christ; clergy behaved sheepishly, as if they were covert participants.
Historically, the Catholic Church teaches self-possession (the habits of the seven cardinal virtues) as the necessary criteria for submitting one’s will to Christ’s. Many a sermon could critique, and relate current events (i.e., the culture of death) to the Apocalypse, very likely, a battle waged daily in individual souls, and likely lost, unless awareness of such a battle is made manifest by a priest of the order of Melchizedek.
Hence their relevancy.
Thomas J. Donegan
New Castle
