We’ve now had decades to study the map….

In geometry, when two lines diverge from the same point, the farther they extend, the farther apart they get.

In a journey, if you take a road leading the opposite direction of your destination, the farther you go from it.  If you are smart, and you really want to get to your goal, you have to turn around, go back, and find the correct road.

If you are smart.  Or … if you are at least not perverse.

Errare est humanum.  Perseverare est diabolicum.

A false road was purposely created for our naive feet by the City of Man’s diabolical civil engineers and we were lead astray.

But we’ve now had decades to study the map….

Are we on the path of the Church?  On the path of the world?

I read at the National Catholic Register that the 412-year uninterrupted presence of the Discalced Carmelites in a monastery in Lucerna, Spain will end.

The community of Discalced Carmelites of San José monastery in Lucena in Spain’s Córdoba province, to whom Pope Francis sent several messages because of his friendship with a former prioress, is being forced to leave after the order’s presence of more than 400 years in the city due to lack of vocations.

Mother Mary Magdalene of St. John of the Cross, prioress of the small community, explained in a statement that “with great pain and great sadness, because there are only three nuns left, the scarcity of vocations and being requested by another Carmel in need, we saw that it is God’s will that our mission here had concluded,” reported the Iglesia en Córdoba (The Church in Córdoba), a weekly newspaper of the Spanish diocese.

Thus the 412-year uninterrupted presence of the Discalced Carmelites in the Lucena monastery will end. The nuns arrived there in 1612 from the city of Cabra, where the community was founded in 1603.

According to the newspaper ABC, the death of the former prioress, Mother Adriana of Jesus Crucified, in September 2023 left the community below the minimum number of five nuns. However, the community was granted a special status that had the support of Pope Francis and the bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández.

With the recent departure of another sister, the future of the community was sealed. The three nuns will soon move to a community located in the Diocese of Salamanca to which they are joined by a “long and close relationship of sisterhood.”

[…]

Lack of vocations.

I do not believe there is a lack of vocations.  There is a lack of vocations realized, responded.

On the other hand…

At the Catholic Herald of the UK I read an interview with the Abbess Cecilia of Gower Abbey, motherhouse of now multiplying daughter houses of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles. They are poised to take over an empty abbey, founded by Saint Thomas More’s great great-granddaughter, in Colwich, England. They are traditional Benedictines, busting at the seams with vocations, and expanding.

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20 Comments

  1. monstrance says:

    Check out The Sisters of Carmel in Colorado Springs, Carmelite Monastery of The Sacred Hearts. Cloistered. They sell some good stuff.

  2. ThePapalCount says:

    Can anything be made more clear.

  3. BeatifyStickler says:

    I hope we are at a point where the younger generation can start to see and have the humility to accept it.
    The nuns in Gower often sing my children to sleep. My kids have specifically asked for it like a lullaby. Them and the men of Fontgombault.

    It would be nice if a daughter house was established in this barren wasteland of Canada. One can hope.

    I know if my kids have a vocation we can safely say where they will likely find it. Tradition of course.

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  5. KateD says:

    There is not a lack of vocations in the Catholic Church. There is a lack of vocations in the Novus Ordo. Who wants to give their life for lukewarm Christianity?

    Giving ones life to God is a act of valor….those who are called are encouraged to give their fiat when they are inspired by the practice of faith which meets that passion.

    It ain’t rocket science….

  6. Benedict Joseph says:

    Led astray and deliberately so. How can you effectively catechize youth without a sufficient number of religious? Obviously you can’t. Left without a knowledge of the faith the young are receptive to whatever comes along. Left without a knowledge of the faith how can they determine a vocation to any way of life, let alone a contemplative vocation?
    Led astray and deliberately so.
    I remember so clearly the sisters who taught me in high school in the sixties slowly drifting out of their community over the four years. I remember the Carmel down the street where my sister was in formation begin to collapse. So long ago, and the powers that be have learned nothing over close to sixty years. Why? Because they actually see no need to correct the catastrophe. They don’t actually recognize it as such.
    One is left to wonder when Gower, magnificent, standing in utter contradiction to the decomposition engineered in the last mid-century, will get its Apostolic Visitation and be prescribed a few tweaks to bring it into a synodal consciousness, not unlike what Huntsville did a decade ago — population collapse from 44 down to 14 if I heard correctly.
    Ah, but what are numbers?

  7. TheCavalierHatherly says:

    “In geometry, when two lines diverge from the same point, the farther they extend, the farther apart they get.”

    In plane geometry, yes. In non-Euclidean, on the surface of a sphere, they meet again. And the Modernists, much to their surprise, will be very upset when that happens, and they turn around to behold themselves hemmed in by tradition once again. There is no escape. All the cleverness and perseverance of the devil added up to nothing when he provoked a crucifixion that was his ultimate undoing.

    This is why the sphere was considered by Plato to be the most divine shape. They’re silly little detour will only lead back to what they are trying to escape from.

  8. Sportsfan says:

    I’m not getting to close to the edge of TheCavalierHatherly’s comment.

  9. BeatifyStickler says:

    @benedictjoseph, what happened in Alabama. Never heard this before. Did they lose members? How sad.

  10. happymom says:

    I hate to tell you, @monstrance, but the Carmelites in Colorado Springs are not in communion with the Church. The Bishop (and the prior bishop) has made repeated attempts to reach out to them, to no avail. I know they are deceptive about this. Please attend the FSSP instead.

  11. JonPatrick says:

    The powers that be in the Church see this divergence as a feature not a bug. They think that one evangelizes the world by being like the world. This is in spite of almost 2000 years of evidence that being in the world but not of the world has successfully converted millions. It defies logic and can only be explained by the influence of the diabolical

  12. EAW says:

    A saintly former bishop of my diocese once said there is no such thing as a lack of vocations, but that there definitely is a lack of answers. It is strongly suspected that at the time of his sudden death, he was about to designate a church for the FSSP (he did ordinations in Wigratzbad once). Some years later, his now retired successor did designate a large, but ailing parish church for use by the FSSP. Now it is thriving.

  13. Sevens Dad says:

    TheCavalierHatherly

    And if memory serves, the name of that line is called the ideal line.

  14. Felsenwatcher says:

    Demographics is destiny, they say. Several years ago I went on a retreat given by the Hermits of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and I came away from it filled with confidence in the biological solution. Its effect on the demographics of those in charge is already bearing fruit, and there’s no motu proprio that can stop it.

  15. Benedict Joseph says:

    @ BeatifyStickler: Perhaps I should not have mentioned it since I have no immediate knowledge, as my citation of “ten years ago” proves as well as citing an incorrect location as well as I can’t remember my source, though it was surely credible or I would have discounted it. I admit I was shocked at the time and remain so.
    A visitation was announced sometime after Mother Angelica’s death [2016]. Recommendations were made by the visitor – I believe it was an active Benedictine sister who lived with them for a month or more. The recommendations resulted in departures – I know not why. The population of the community was quite healthy at the time of the visitation. As I recall it was 44 but that could be inaccurate — it could be somewhat less. Sufficiently healthy to have made a foundation in Arizona and I think in North Carolina as well. We know the monastery was quite well occupied because we could get a view of the nuns in choir on occasion. The Diocese of Birmingham presently lists only twelve nuns in Hanceville.

  16. jhogan says:

    Were we not told that by their fruits we shall know them?
    Uttered two thousand years ago and still true today.

  17. Marine Mom says:

    happy mom
    Names, please, Bishop and prior Bishop
    False witness

  18. Ave Maria says:

    “There is not a lack of vocations in the Catholic Church. There is a lack of vocations in the Novus Ordo. Who wants to give their life for lukewarm Christianity?”

    Whoa! This is so for the most part. And also why the more traditionalist leaning Orders and Institutes, and Masses have been persecuted from within the Church. They stand in the way of the one world thing.

  19. Regarding the Carmelites in Colorado Springs… my understanding is that they are “independent” from other Carmels, that they don’t have a stable relationship with the local bishop, that they are aided by an independent priest who was formerly in the SSPX. However, they are not sedevacantist. They seem to be just getting along on their own. I suspect that if the pogrom against traditional Catholic continues, we will see a lot more of this.

  20. Liz says:

    My son was recently ordained for a traditionalist order and I couldn’t get over the amount of convents he and his classmates said masses for in their mass tours. He even lamented that he didn’t have more time to say masses for other convents that he had associations with. I think these sisters are what is keeping us afloat. Sometimes I fight getting discouraged with all that seems to be crumbling around us but truly we live in exciting times!

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