A friend just shared this with me.
Today’s featured book is Losing the Good Portion by Leon Podles, an in depth exploration of why men are alienated from contemporary Christianity–one of the best, and only, books exploring this crucial problem, which is aptly summarized in this cliphttps://t.co/lfDpamJ37p pic.twitter.com/zvXue4fusD
— Rogue Scholar Books (@RogueScholarPr) May 22, 2021
Coat of Arms by D Burkart
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Thanks Father Z, cosmology lesson as only you can impart.”
on ROME 24/4– Day 35 (-6): adventures in symmetry: “Hmmm. Those kind of tassels have always reminded me of fancy curtain tiebacks so I have avoided making them but…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Fr.Z sez: …The Voyagers are destined—perhaps eternally—to wander the Milky Way and then become characters in Star Trek…. V’ger!! https://youtu.be/gxAaVqdz_Vk?t=96”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Being from Florida, I remember when both Voyagers launched – you could see them from our house. At that time,…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Too bad the Curia has drifted too far from its power source…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977, from Cape Canaveral. Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral on 5 September 1977.…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “I guess Voyager I gives new meaning to the poem High Flight. Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Now this is very interesting. Not just looking up at some small dots of light overhead!”
on ROME 24/4– Day 34 (-7): The burial place of… PLATO?!?: “The final resting place of Plato puts me in mind of a memorable excerpt I once read about Aristotle in…”
on ROME 24/4– Day 34 (-7): The burial place of… PLATO?!?: “Someone pointed out the St. George’s Day Google Doodle with its background account to me – with one of the…”
on Three items of interest: a conversion, a connection, and a con job: ““George Farmer, aka Candace Owen’s husband. He is a revert” If I’m reading the interview correctly, first a convert, then…”
on Three items of interest: a conversion, a connection, and a con job: “Not to detract from anything Imrahill said, but well, the papally-attested infallible ordinary magisterium about a catholic truth, not the…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Understatement of the year: they don’t make them like that anymore!” on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “What happened to Voyager 2? And what sort of “science” data will Voyager 1 soon be able to resume transmitting?…”
on So very cool that it needs its own post! VOYAGER 1 is TALKING AGAIN!: “Not too shabby for a 77’ model.”
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A Daily Prayer for Priests
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since Sat., 25 Nov. 2006:
^^^*What he said!*^^^
Why men are alienated from contemporary Christianity???
What he said. If I can’t go to the Traditional Roman Mass, then it’s off to the local NO parish. It’s the one in town with the frustrated opera soprano who not only sings, but by her expressive gestures, painfully YEARNS for us to help her “sing a new church into being…” Then, I get to listen to Prayers of the Faithful that will say things like “So that we each purge the innate systemic racism from our hearts, let us pray to the Lord…” or “so that we can look to role models like George Floyd to see the face of Christ in the suffering, let us pray to the Lord…”
Frankly, I’d rather say a full Rosary and head out to the range with my Daniel Defense M4A1, a few clips, and some shootin. You never know when those Antifa soyboys are going to try to be tough.
There are many places without this. But one of the most notable examples is the Russians. They are schismatics, but they are growing in their strength and devotion in Russia.
Check out the new cathedral to the army built last year for the 75th anniversary of the ‘great patriotic war against the Nazis.’ They built much of the church out of the destroyed armaments. And even the dome isn’t onion shaped but meant to look like the helmet that (St?) Aleksander Nevsky wore.
Check out the images here: The Main Temple of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation – The Main Temple of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation
http://hram.mil.ru/hram_media#&gid=1&pid=1
My favorite Chaldean Priest could fill a hall with 200 young Catholics for Bible Study every Wednesday. Because he didn’t pull any punches. He didn’t fluff the Gospels. He still doesn’t and the Chaldean parishes are filled with young men.
Nothing thrills me more than going to Adoration and seeing men stopping in to pray at lunchtime.
The actual statistical statistical situation is more complex, and Catholics are not that all different from Evangelical Protestants, and neither have the huge dichotomy found, for example, among Black Evangelicals:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/sex-ratios-in-the-pews-is-there-really-a-deficit-of-men-in-american-churches
I am NOT saying that we don’t have to find ways to get men to go to Church, but the problem now is that fewer of both sexes are going to Church.
Perhaps if was publicized that more young women were going to Church, even if not really true, more young Catholic men would show up to meet them . . .
Fr Thompson, I think the real problem is not the number of males, but the number of men.
In many places in the Church one unfortunately gets the impression that preponderance of congregants are women of both sexes.
I turned it off pretty soon because to me the choice of wording was demeaning. At my parish it seems like there are equally many men as women. I steeled myself and turned it back on to see if he would make any good points but he doesn’t, he claims if you have men you have everything and if you have women you have nothing.
Catholic worship is always led by a man, so if there is a stylistic problem don’t blame women and it might not make sense to see it as “feminine” when what is meant is sentimentalized. I attended a horrible funeral Mass today where, after zero opening rite we were asked during the “penitential rite” to think about how we might have done something bad to the deceased and ask his forgiveness, etc in that vein, I grabbed my bag and almost left right then. It was not the only virtual deification of the deceased in this funeral. I stayed out of desire to pray for someone who had been a friend. It’s not women’s fault that priests change up the Mass in whatever kind of touchy feely ways they come up with.
That man has a point: Paul, Elijah and David certainly had their rough moments.
Here is a video relevant to this post and to the 24 May post on a Carrington Event (in such brutal circumstances Catholics and Protestants will have to cooperate, it’s best to understand each other better before a serious event).
“What’s not in your military biographies is the depth of your faith…I thought we’d start this morning by letting you express that…your journeys have been defined by your faith, and sustained by that.”
– Pastor Jackson to Lt. Gen. Boykin and Lt. Col. North, May 16, 2021, Murfreesboro, Tennessee (not far from the childhood home of Sgt. Alvin York).
https://youtu.be/p33I3x7HgYE&t=3m
@Chrisc: ” one unfortunately gets the impression that preponderance of congregants are women of both sexes.”
I think you are on to something with that observation that’s been bothering me for decades. In the typical NO parish, the zeitgeist is squishy, tapioca-textured, inoffensive comfort. From the insipid broadway show tunes masquerading as ‘worship music’ to the army of laity storming the sanctuary to ‘help’ Father.
Life is warfare, defending your faith is strategic, and it’s not going to be won by nuanced accompaniment on a journey to self discovery (lol). As our host has said, you can survive on whirled peas in a creamy goo as an adult, but to thrive, you need red meat (preferably with nice grill marks and a decent cabernet). Men, I believe (as an unapologetic member of the species as such) , want to be challenged, not pandered to…and will gravitate towards activities that present a hurdle to overcome. And a faith (or practice of such) that is more like a sewing circle making burlap banners will drive MEN on to other pursuits on Sunday morning.
Just my $.03 (inflation since 1/20/2021)
So true! Hit the nail on the head! I’ve been saying the same thing for years.
Too many effeminate priests; not enough manly ones. Effeminate priests do not attract manly men.
Sincerely,
a manly man
Anecdotal evidence: Where I used to live, we were 8 minutes from a marine base. We had a pretty decent Irish (but long-time resident of US) pastor, who was not effeminate, but was also not visibly a man’s man. Sort of middle of the road. And the parish was like that too. The church was fairly full (with 5 masses a weekend), but a lot of Catholic marines were not showing up. Then that pastor got moved, and we got as parish administrator (not officially “pastor” because he had never been a pastor before, so this was a probationary period for him) who was also a Navy chaplain, had served marines before, and was most definitely a man’s man. Loved to go out shooting with the guys. Had his own weapons. His preaching was much more gritty and straightforward, “here’s the facts, live up to them or you’ll regret it for eternity” sort of preaching. He added times for confession, and added another mass to the schedule, and STILL was packing in more people and way more marines so that (at least in the 2 central masses Sunday morning) people were lining the walls.
He also made some mistakes, made some comments that were dismissive of the chancery’s capacity to tell him what to do, and was pulled from the assignment and replaced with a different pastor. His mistakes were the sort you would expect from a man’s man who refused to pull punches when talking about a squiggly bishop. If the squiggly bishop had been a man’s man, he probably would have put our parish administrator in his place by coming down to the parish and telling him to shut up about X, Y, and Z. Our bishop did what 98% of all bishops today will do: yanked him and never put him into a position of authority again. So, we reap what we have sown: we cannot get solid men as priests because we have bishops who will not tolerate such men as pastors – because they themselves are not such men and can’t recognize the cast of such men as worthy.
And the machinery for selecting new bishops is wholly in the hands of a bureaucracy well-established for churning out more such men as future bishops. No pope will solve the problem until he fixes the machinery for selecting bishops. A “reform” will be needed, but most likely it will have to be a complete revolution that completely rejects both the men and the bureaucracy that have been doing it.
I will add that according to other anecdotes, the bishop of our diocese back in the 1950’s, when he heard about sexual misconduct of one of the priests, did the manly thing of immediately driving to the rectory, confronting the priest, verifying the facts directly, and throwing him out of the rectory. No appointing a committee. I daresay that if the bishops of the 1960s and 70s had done the same, the sexual scandals coming to light over the last 20 years would have been non-issues. So, again, we are reaping what we (or at least, those in positions with the power to have done differently) have sown.
Men go to Church because of who they are, and how the Church formed them. It has little to do with church decorations. It might be in defiance of the Church enemies. The enemies of the Church? Those are the gays and the pedophiles, and the feminists. They are the ones redecorating and reimagining and stealing the Church. I don’t need to read another book about it.
I was Catholic for about three years before my husband converted. He was attracted to the Faith, and had good memories of Catholics inviting him to Mass, but when it came time to be instructed, the couple of parishes I’d been going to where we moved didn’t sit well with him at all. For my part, I hadn’t really done much shopping around, and didn’t even know what I was missing. “The nun wearing a pantsuit told be I’d have to wait next year for RCIA because they’d already ‘built their community’.” “The people held their arms out in a weird blessing salute” “They sang ‘Our God is an Awesome God’.” “The sign of peace is practically a mosh-pit for the priest.” So one day, he went to a Daily Mass near work and heard the priest talk about sacrifice and martyrdom! He went to the RCIA, and reported, “They teach the Catechism!” “There are a couple dads with a lot of kids.” “There are Holy Hours.” Guess where he wanted to be baptized? Ladies, listen to men when they tell us what they do and don’t want in Church.
Though I am a practicing Catholic, daily Mass etc…there is one thing that thoroughly irks me and it is what I call the female hierarchy of our parish. I have seen many times during Masses are female lectors, servers and Eucharistic ministers of communion all at the same time! The only male was the Celebrant. There is one woman, who I know means well is such a busy body before or right after Mass up in the alter area doing this and that that all she needs is an alb. I know they all mean well and are not doing anything that they are not allowed to do by the bishop. Still, it feels like a feministic parish and it puts me off.
This isn’t a problem new to this century; St Michael McGivney had the same problem in his parish, not enough men coming to church! He craeted events to foster their involvement and went on to found the Knights of Columbus.
Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t go to Confession afterwards, but if I see one more Faith Community Communing Yoga Faith Together led by Parish Council Susan…
https://youtu.be/AhI6H8vW8dA
I believe the idea is to convert men like him so they want to sing love songs to Jesus and to Mary. We want him to become fully a man, truly strong, so he is like St. Francis and his early companions (plenty of whom were martyred), or like Francis Xavier, or the North American Jesuit Martyrs, or Charles de Foucauld and Maximilian Kolbe.
Semper, I needed a laugh today and that provided it! I do hope you at least say “sorry” like Blutto did after you trash Susan’s yoga mat.
InFormationDiakonia: Good point, but instead of trashing the yoga mats maybe they get shipped off to Mike Lindell for recycling.
Under the car changing the oil? Give your back a break with a MyChuckNorrisMat.
Slaughtering hogs in the backyard and tracking mud through the kitchen on the way to the deep freezer? Try a dozen MyChuckNorrisMats.
Crazy Commie brother-in-law visiting next Thanksgiving? Use fifty MyChuckNorrisMats to line the guest room’s walls and ceiling.
“the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.” – 2 Cor 5:17
The Astronomer wrote: “Frankly, I’d rather say a full Rosary and head out to the range with my Daniel Defense M4A1, a few clips, and some shootin. You never know when those Antifa soyboys are going to try to be tough.”
A-men.
https://youtu.be/rn6w255CGkk
Elizabeth D: “Catholic worship is always led by a man, so if there is a stylistic problem don’t blame women…”
I beg to disagree.
Lest I should start a p!ssing contest over it, I won’t list all the nonsense I’ve encountered, especially regarding Mass. I’ll just say I’ve seen plenty of ignorance and intolerance from both sexes. I admire the example of Mother Angelique. …Sadly, I’ve met many women in the Church who might well be horrified by that example.
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