But remember… the problem is the Traditional Latin Mass! If only we could shut it down, the seminaries would fill up again.
Right?
The average age of a priest in the United States is 67. The large ordination classes of the fifties and early sixties are at retirement age. pic.twitter.com/shgBYbVUC0
— Father V (@father_rmv) March 5, 2022
Time, the inexorable “biological solution” is going to grind our presbyterates into the dust to which we all return. It is happening fast now, dear readers.
In 2016 I wrote that a priest friend, during my trip to his southern US diocese, said that they were going to lose 50% of their priests to retirement or death in five years. It will only get worse there and elsewhere.
Ah, the Church of Rahner’s dreams! It’s a new Pentecost!
Snark aside, unleash the TLM and every other aspect of the Vetus Ordo and you’ll soon find that there isn’t room enough in seminaries.
Dire numbers.
Loss of 50% in 5 years.
38 dioceses ordained ZERO.
Delere reprimere fallere falsis nominibus unitatem ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
A priest friend told me that this year there would be NO priests ordained for the Archdiocese of New York.
That didn’t just “happen”, unforeseen out of the blue. “Wow! Look what happened to us!” No.
It was engineered. This is what the Church of Rahner and Co. wanted all along. That, and THIS: From LifeSite – “Austrian bishop hangs banner of nude trans activist over main altar for Lent“. Really. Get it?
Undermine the priesthood from within and you accomplish so much more than the Protestant Revolt could ever, and that was, at heart, an attack on the priesthood.
I saw a video from the “live Mass stream” of a regular diocesan parish. It was for a morning TLM. Interesting detail: there were a bunch of (I’m told) seminarians present in choir dress. After Mass there was Exposition of a goodly length. Checking the parish’s bulletin, I found that, during Exposition, the priest was “in the box” hearing confessions. This was followed by Benediction. The number of seminarians for that diocese that chose to be at that Mass was, if the diocesan webpage is any indication, more than half of their total seminarians for the diocese.
Time grinds on and the foes of traditional sacred worship have their blades out, but the TLM cannot be stopped.
It is the way.
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This is all of a piece with this synod on sin-odality, whose purpose is, apparently, to explore “how God wants his Church to be”, but the exploration will be in terms of new “models” of priesthood and laity, or NO priesthood at all because “everyone is equal”. No more “clericalism” (when “clericalism” is interpreted to mean “approving of there being clerics in the Church).
The mantra being used to force this “discussion” down our throats is that we must “be open” to God’s will being “manifested” by the Holy Spirit, in so-called “discernment” through dialogue. But in order to hear the Holy Spirit when you listen to somebody, the Holy Spirit would have to be speaking through that somebody, and if that person is, instead, hanging up banners of nude trans activists, I am pretty sure whatever I am hearing from them is from some other source. So “dialogue” and “discernment” are being weaponized. This is cultural marxism, and modernism as described by Pope St. Pius X, but of course the modernists in the Church hate Pius X and his encyclical Pascendi Domenici Gregis, and they try to laugh it out of consideration as being “obsolete” or even just plain wrong.
When these “discussions” reach the parishes, what is an effective way to turn the tables on the heresiarchs? Any suggestions?
David Sonnier created something he called the “Springtime Decay Function” or words to that effect, describing mathematically the observed rate of decay in the number of priests and seminarians in the US. Depending on a linear or logarithmic curve fit, his extrapolation reaches ZERO priests in the USA by about 2070.
I’ve commented elsewhere that this lines up with Pope Leo XIII’s vision of Satan’s 100 years to flog the Church and the 100-year anniversary of the closing of the Bestest Most Groovy and Actually Only Council Ever in a way that surely seems “coincidental”.
Right Father, this is what has become obvious at this point, it’s not an accident!
We watched our own nation be taken over by people who clearly hate what and who we are, and they proceeded to attack it and do every idiotic thing that was guaranteed to fail and guaranteed to make things worse. How could they do this, we wondered, don’t they realize? Yes they realize! They realize only too well and driving our nation into the ground is the entire point. Looks the same with many other nations. Even now, with current events, we see it, lies, international manipulation, stirring the pot, agitating, it is the GOAL, destruction is the goal. Because why? Nobody’s THIS bad accidentally. This all goes way beyond incompetence. We ran out of conspiracy theories because they all came true.
Same with the church. We wondered, really, for about 30 years, and in the last five or so, we get it! They MEAN to do this! The destruction IS the goal. Aha!
Oh boy. You really understand what a hot mess things are once you finally take that red pill and you see it. It ain’t easy and it leaves you staring sometimes.
But there it is.
All I can say is, the more things fall apart, the more we rely on God. Interesting.
We’re believers. There is no way for human beings, especially not the corrupt, stupid ones we’ve got running things now, to get us out of this. If there is any way out for church and the world, it’s going to be all God.
The large ordination classes of the 50s and early 60s are largely dead by now. The classes of the late 70s are starting to retire.
The last of the 50s classes even alive here are in their late 90s. The oldest will celebrate his 70th ordination anniversary later this year.
The priestly numbers look grim, but the women religious look worse.
Dear Father, We have been part of a Traditional community for decades. Our school, and summer camps have brought many good vocations. Traditional Nuns, and Brothers. Three of our young men are approaching Ordination in the FSSP. For me, I have seen some of them from birth to now. I thank God and pray for them all. Our hope for the future.
Like forest fires that cause devastating destruction to forests, yet are necessary to allow new forests to grow, so too will this clear out the old dead wood and make way for new life to grow.
It looks grim now, but give it time.
“Hic via est,” isn’t that what the kids are saying these days?
It is difficult to overestimate how much of this crisis is manufactured.
People are in charge many places that have a nearly pathological ideological hatred of the clergy & religious life.
The powers that be in the (false church) want a “different church” because the protestantized ‘church’ we have now it not protestant enough! However, there is NO ‘god of surprises’. God does not change His mind for He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. We can be called names but so was Our Lord. It is for us to remain faithful and to be prayer warriors that push back to the evil in this corrupt and immoral world and to the evil in the infiltrated, corrupt, and immoral ‘church’ which is not the Roman Catholic Church.
Thank you for posting the link regarding the Bishop of Innsbruck. Bishop Glettler has long been a proponent of providing his colleagues in the art world with opportunities to present what he believes to be sacred art in and on those churches he has overseen (please see: http://virtualsacredspace.blogspot.com/2010_11_20_archive.html ; https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/innsbruck-feministische-parole-verhuellt-dom-a-1220004.html ; https://www.katholisch.at/aktuelles/125128/glettler-plaediert-fuer-koalition-zwischen-kunst-und-kirche). The LifeSite article describes an action which, whilst revealing, is also not unexpected.
On the plus side, all the Hippies from the sixties and seventies who are responsible for the current horrible state of our Church will soon be dead. We will be a smaller Church, but the current generation of priests are more orthodox and faithful to the Magisterium.
“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” -Michael Hopf
Why would a young man want to be a priest when an army of aging baby boomers have taken over 90% of his sacred duties?
Well on the plus side, we have said all along, one of the things that had to happen for true reform back to tradition was for the old guard to literally die off, so there’s that.
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I just recently read: “We do not have a vocation crisis. We have an ordination crisis.” This be because of what we found in the book “Good-bye, Good Men”. Worthy seminarians are being hounded out. They have no rights. The hierarchy does not like holiness. They do not want us to fold hands, they want us to HOLD hands. Others, trying to enter, are themselves repulsed by the liberal, permissive attitudes that are easily observed during their interview process. The hierarchy is polluted beyond what most people realize. What squeezes through is a tiny trickle, through one good bishop, one good seminary, one good diocese.
As a priest in one of the “borderline” dioceses (I suspect it’s because we have a significant number of extern priests), I can agree that the prospect for the future is frightening. Retirements are outpacing ordinations, and each year since 2013, we’ve gone down a notch in the number of our seminarians. Two of our priests have five parishes under their care, two have four, and ten have three parishes.
Meanwhile, in my parish, the majority of young men who have shown an interest in the priesthood are servers at the Traditional Latin Mass. Since TC came out last year, there has been a noticeable chill, despite the fact that our Masses are continuing as before. If the current situation continues unabated, we are in for some incredibly stressful times.