Identity Crisis of Catholic Priests. Wherein Fr. Z rants.

At Crisis, there is a piece about the crisis in the Catholic priesthood.

No, this was not penned by a bishop.  Nor by a priest.  Nor even by a seminarian.  Constance T. Hull wrote it, wife, mother, homeschooler who has some philosophy and theology.  She has written for several publications.

She nails this.  My emphases:

For decades, priests have been formed in a manner that has reduced them to glorified social workers, social justice warriors, administrators, and fundraisers, and it shows. This same formation is what has led many priests and bishops to ignore health and safety protocols and laws for public demonstrations while at the same time cutting off the faithful from the Sacraments and the public celebration of the Mass— the “source and summit of the Christian life”—during the holiest season of the year. These priests have inverted the goods of this world and put them over and above spiritual goods. They have replaced the City of God with the City of Man.

What these well-meaning priests and bishops have failed to see in their desire to attend demonstrations is that they are actually aiding in the growing alienation of the Church from public life. They have accepted that the Mass and the Sacraments are non-essential, but that protests and demonstrations are worth defying social distancing requirements during this pandemic.

And…

The crisis facing the priesthood is not a matter of human sexuality, as so many want to argue. This is not about priestly celibacy and pent-up sexual frustration. The clergy sex abuse scandal is a symptom of a much deeper problem. Clericalism is also only a symptom of a much deeper problem. The real issue is the priesthood has become separated from its Eucharistic identity and its calling to be crucified with Christ for the salvation of souls.

“A long long time ago”, February, PRE-COVID-1984 – remember before Coronavirus? – Card. Sarah and Pope Benedict issued a book about the crisis in the priesthood.  Sarah and Benedict both wrote about the flawed formation priests are getting.

And it’s not just formation.   It is also, has been for a while but now in an accelerating fashion, the trampling of priests from within the Church herself, and not just from without.

What to do?

FATHERS. LEARN THE TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS AND CELEBRATE IT.

A compelling reason to learn it, Fathers, is because, clerical and lay alike, we are our rites.   Who is the Roman Catholic priest if he doesn’t know his own Rite?  Who is he?  If you don’t know your Traditional Roman Rite, then you don’t know the Roman Rite.

You don’t know who you are.

Fathers, you don’t need permission to learn the TLM.  You don’t need permission or approval to learn it and to say it.

Time and again, priests have told me that learning the TLM changed them profoundly.  They began to grasp aspects of their priesthood which they hadn’t gleaned before.  In turn, that produces a knock on effect in other aspects of their work, in particular how they celebrate the Novus Ordo.  Congregations note the differences.  The knock on effect continues to knock.

For some of you priests out there, learning the TLM will be difficult.   Things that are worth pursuing are usually hard.

One thing that will be hard to overcome is the lack of Latin.

Ohhhh how the Enemy our souls brilliantly maneuvered his agents when Latin was eradicated from schools and seminaries!

The Enemy doesn’t want you to learn the TLM.  At all cost, the treasury door – nay rather, armory door! – must remain slammed and barred against you.   The Enemy will not easily let you claim your armor and weapons.  You must be denied your priestly patrimony!  A thousand distractions will assail you.  Doubts will pop up.  The demonically oppressed, even your pastors or bishops and other clergy, will undermine you or persecute you or bully you into giving up.

This will happen to many of you.   When it does, invoke your angels and Mary, Queen of the Clergy, to protect you.

You can do this.  Latin isn’t a mystical Eldorado that only a few can attain.  As my old mentor Fr. Foster, famous Latinist, used to quip facetiously but factually, “In ancient Rome even the dogs and prostitutes knew Latin.”  Over the centuries, countless priests of room temperature IQ learned Latin for the Mass.   They didn’t have to dissertate with the eloquence of Leo the Great.  If St. John Vianney could do it, so can you.  And most of you may wind up being good at it.

Remember: Latin is a language, not multivariable calculus.

No project which we undertake in the Church will succeed unless it flows from, is connected to, and returns to our sacred liturgical worship.

By the virtue of Religion, we have to order our acts rightly.  This means pleasing worship of God.  Benedict XVI’s gift to the Church in Summorum Pontificum, was precisely intended to bring about a healing and renewal of the whole Church through a renewal and healing of her worship, such that we can create a bulwark in the face of future tumult.

Fathers.  You can do this.   It will be hard.  It has to be done.

One way to respond to what Card. Sarah and Benedict XVI wrote, and to respond to The Present Crisis in the Church, and to give something beautiful to God and his people is to…

… learn the Traditional Latin Mass.

Give it to yourselves.

When you give it to yourselves, you are really giving it to the whole Church.  The knock on effect you will initiate will reap many good fruits.

The problems that were emerging more slowly before COVID-1984 are now manifesting with astonishing speed.

We don’t have a lot of time.  Get to work!

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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16 Comments

  1. Matheus Oliveira says:

    Absolutey on point, Pater. Thank you! This helps us seminarians immensely on keeping up with the good fight. Other than sneaking our Latin books and TLM pew Missals into our dorms, how can we try to learn to futurely celebrate it?

  2. Joy1985 says:

    Matheus Oliveira, that is sad that these things have to be snuck in. The Catholic church allows, supports and has both the EF & OF Masses. Just remember , like myself, born in 1965, many of us devout Catholics have never been to a EF Mass. The OF Masses I’ve been to have been reverent and of course proper and allowed.

    Also I pray specifically, purposefully, DAILY for all seminarians, Priests, Consecrated Religious and you are included in those prayers.

  3. Orual says:

    Matheus Oliveira, I don’t know how much internet you’re allowed as a seminarian, but the FSSP has some wonderful training videos on YouTube for priests wanting to learn the TLM. Also, the Latin language itself is not difficult to read or pronounce. It’s pretty straightforward with just a few simple rules to remember. I learned a lot from listening to Latin prayers and chant on YouTube and I’m a simple lay person.

  4. frfleming says:

    Since Covid-1984, I have celebrated only the EF for weekday Masses. As a priest of almost five years, I can attest to the fact that Liturgy forms ya. I have learned more about my priesthood in the last two months celebrating the Extraordinary form than I have in the last 14 years of formation and priesthood. We need solemnity, we need solid prayer, we need solid priests, so we need to know the Traditional Mass.

  5. tho says:

    Imagine the Navy Department issuing an order that henceforth, bulkheads will be called walls, decks will be called floors, heads will be called toilets, starboard and port will be called right and left, so on. and so on. It would destroy what has been done quite well for centuries. It set Naval men apart and gave them an esprit de corps.
    Well VII issued an order that practically destroyed centuries of tradition, and left many Catholics high and dry. We are engulfed in chaos, with a Pope whose slogan is “make a mess”, as if the spirit of VII didn’t do a good enough job. Maybe a few more church, convent, or seminary closings will wake our leaders up.

  6. Richard McNally says:

    So much has been done to dumb down/water down the Catholic faith since the Second Vatican Council. A term which captures it for me is “Presider” used to refer to the priest’s role in the liturgy. It has affected the self-identity of priests and the understanding of the priesthood by laity. A protestant minister may preside at worship, and perhaps in a protestantized Eucharist, which is what we have often in the NO, that may make sense. But in the full Catholic sense of the Mass it makes no sense at all. I think of the men in my own religious community who died as martyrs, did they really think that what they did earlier in the day was just “preside”? Mattheus, I hope you can learn the Mass of the Ages and celebrate it when you are a priest. The Church has no vibrant evangelical future with just the NO and a merely “presiding” priesthood. One of the greatest blessings of my priestly life was learning and now celebrating the usus antiquior as often as I can.

  7. GregB says:

    From the article:
    *
    The real issue is the priesthood has become separated from its Eucharistic identity and its calling to be crucified with Christ for the salvation of souls.
    *
    This is part of the problem, but the statement doesn’t go deep enough. The current crisis in the Church is a crisis of covenant, and of sacrament. Of all the abusers in society, only the priest has the sacrament of Holy Orders. You can’t really equate an abusive priest to other abusers without totally devaluing the sacrament of Holy Orders. The abusive priests have undergone an ontological change, and they take this ontological change along with them when they commit their abuse. They defile their ordinations when they abuse. And before someone brings up Donatism, I would point out that the teaching about Donatism is malpractice insurance that only indemnifies the parishioner beneficiary from receiving defective sacraments. In contrast, James 3:1 says:
    *
    Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness.
    *
    Also in Matthew 18:6:
    *
    6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
    *
    These verses suggest that the abusive clergy themselves have no similar malpractice insurance indemnification to cover their misconduct.
    *
    The Eucharist is the living embodiment of Christ’s New Covenant ratified in His Own Blood. A priest’s commitment to his ordination is going to influence how seriously he takes the Holy Eucharist.
    *
    Covenants are the way that we establish the bonds of kinship with God. Do we Catholics treat our covenants with God seriously, or do we blow them off as being rigid legalisms?
    *
    Satan was very shrewd in attacking marriage and the family. There is no greater way that he can use to get us to debase our covenants. Holy Matrimony is a covenant. The issue in divorce is about the permanence of the marital covenant. Satan is using our sexual licentiousness to get us to defile our covenants. The answer to the demands of clerical continence is for the priest to strengthen and deepen his relationship with God. Christ was clear in Matthew 19 about being eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
    *
    To me a Church in which her covenants are dead and disposable, is going to be a Church where the vertical dimension is dead. A purely horizontal Church will be spiritually flat-line.

  8. That was a good essay that articulated my feelings quite well. What is really painful to watch is the officers on a sinking ship staying the course as it continues to sink all the while insisting that nothing is wrong and that they are right. I read this week that my diocese is threatening bankruptcy, blaming the convenient whipping boy Covid-19. Some years ago they had a $180 million fund to cover possible lawsuits, but apparently that is gone and lawsuits are still being filed. When will they admit to being not only financially bankrupt but morally and spiritually bankrupt, which is far worse?

    My advice to potential seminarians– find a traditional order, get decent formation, have a strong, hard Catholic identity, and don’t fall for the model of the Church as a global NGO with the bishop or the ordinary as the local CEO. That part of the Church is imploding as we speak.

  9. R. Guadalupe says:

    As lay persons, we definitely should pray specifically for priests. For those who would like something a little more specific, might I suggest looking into joining the Prayer Crusade for Priests? I have been been doing this for many years. I pray for all priests, and I am also assigned a particular priest to pray and make sacrifices for. The priest I have been assigned is a diocesan priest. The daily prayers are about 5 minutes, with a decade of the rosary and a first Thursday Holy Hour.

    https://sspx.org/en/prayer-crusade-priests

    “An apostolate of the SSPX open to lay people in order to pray for the sanctification of the priests and the vocations.

    The Prayer Crusade for Priests is a work of the Society of St. Pius X in the United States for the sanctification and perseverance of priests and for priestly vocations. It is composed of lay Catholics, banded together in a united effort of prayer and penance for priests.“

  10. Antonin says:

    Whatever direction a priest, religious, or lay person is called to should be respected. There is a place, and always has been a place for political and social activism by priest, religious, and lay people. In my experience being around all three types in some closer proximity, where things fall apart for all three is when prayer life is neglected and it is easy to do. Just because somebody is doing ”churchy” stuff does not mean that they are being prayerful. The issue (and this is my personal experience too) is whenever the discipline of a rooted, clear, consistent prayer life gets sidelined, all else falls apart.

    It is a matter of personal responsibility but it wouldn’t hurt if the kids of prayer was reinforced bynlur shepherds. Without that emphasis on political activism or moralism doesn’t ring true.

  11. Antonin says:

    I mean the life of prayer or leading a ”saramental life” as is said in the Byzantine rite. All are called to live a sacramental life.

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  13. idelsan says:

    There are a couple of intensive latin on line courses here https://www.polisjerusalem.org/language/latin/
    Thi school it’s supossed to be very good at teaching latin, classical greek, old hebrew as modern languages

  14. robtbrown says:

    The real issue is the priesthood has become separated from its Eucharistic identity and its calling to be crucified with Christ for the salvation of souls.

    And the Eucharistic identify has itself been separated by Christ’s Passion and Death.

    It is not merely Christ the Victim. Each priest is also identified with Christ the Priest Who offers His own Passion and Death. Not just psychologically but in reality: Just as Christ the Priest offers His own sacrifice of Body and Blood, so also does each celebrant, using a power given him by Christ, offer Christ’s own Body and Blood. (cf Letter to the Hebrews).

    When the above has been forgotten, ignored, or denied, what is left is the priest becomes a presider at a meal.

  15. Laura says:

    Father Z — which would be a good missal to give a young, new priest to encourage him to learn the EF?

  16. Semper Gumby says:

    Antonin wrote: “Whatever direction a priest, religious, or lay person is called to should be respected.”

    Reasonable. Though, respect should be earned, demanding it tends to be counterproductive. Perhaps you mean “courtesy” is in order. Okay, but even in “courtesy” there are pointed remarks to get the attention of those in error, followed by correction. And one can reasonably view the “calls” of certain clergy, religious and laity these days with healthy skepticism.

    “There is a place, and always has been a place for political and social activism by priest, religious, and lay people.”

    Make distinctions here, Antonin. Take a closer look at the realities of our situation. Is that activism for the glory of God or for Karl Marx?

    From the article:

    “For decades, priests have been formed in a manner that has reduced them to glorified social workers, social justice warriors, administrators, and fundraisers, and it shows.”

    Now, certainly not all priests, but she has a point.

    “These priests have inverted the goods of this world and put them over and above spiritual goods.”

    That’s a problem, which leads to this specifically:

    “They have accepted that the Mass and the Sacraments are non-essential, but that protests and demonstrations are worth defying social distancing requirements during this pandemic.”

    Thus:

    “The real issue is the priesthood has become separated from its Eucharistic identity and its calling to be crucified with Christ for the salvation of souls.”

    Antonin, in our Fallen World there will always be disappointments, injustices and outrages. More specifically, the U.S. Constitution’s Preamble seeks not a Perfect Union, only “more perfect.” Certainly, “establish[ing] justice” is a worthy endeavor. That project, given our human nature, will never be completed.

    Prayer is to bring us closer to God, the Source of Justice. Prayer that merely lends respectability to, in your vague phrase “political activism,” seems to me as thin rations at noon on a hot day in the vineyards of the Lord.

    Heaven on Earth is seductive. It is selfishly lounging beneath a shade tree indulging in utopian daydreaming rather than toiling prudently and as best as one can with the realities of the situation before us. It is also lethal to body and soul.

    frfleming: Thank you for your priestly service.

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