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Post by maolsheachlann on Oct 16, 2019 13:45:46 GMT
I wrote this article, "How Can We Foster Vocations"?, for the Catholic Voice. I asked a few priests which human factors had the most influence on them pursuing a vocation to the priesthood. The assumption behind the article being that today, God calls many men to the priesthood who never actually become priests-- for whatever reason. www.lumenfidei.ie/how-can-we-foster-vocations/
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Post by assisi on Oct 17, 2019 18:34:33 GMT
I wrote this article, "How Can We Foster Vocations"?, for the Catholic Voice. I asked a few priests which human factors had the most influence on them pursuing a vocation to the priesthood. The assumption behind the article being that today, God calls many men to the priesthood who never actually become priests-- for whatever reason. www.lumenfidei.ie/how-can-we-foster-vocations/In an old interview now revisited in Crisis online magazine Josef Pieper says much the same thing about vocations: Interviwer: A friend of mine was recently at a seminary down in Guadalajara, Mexico, where there were over 2,000 seminarians. In the U.S., though, and in Western Europe, there is a serious shortage of vocations to the priesthood. To what would you attribute this, and what do you think is necessary for this situation to change? Pieper: No one knows for certain. Family life, I think, is the answer: prayer at meals, going to Mass together (when my children were young we had five bicycles and we would all ride together to Church) reading together aloud stories of the saints. I feel that these are some of the fundamentals. Interviewer: Is this, then, what is missing in countries in the West that have so few vocations? Pieper It has at least very much to do with this. When you ask a priest how he entered the priesthood, every second one, I think, will tell you, his mother or his father, or some other human being—not books.
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Post by assisi on Oct 27, 2019 20:57:54 GMT
I wrote this article, "How Can We Foster Vocations"?, for the Catholic Voice. I asked a few priests which human factors had the most influence on them pursuing a vocation to the priesthood. The assumption behind the article being that today, God calls many men to the priesthood who never actually become priests-- for whatever reason. www.lumenfidei.ie/how-can-we-foster-vocations/In an old interview now revisited in Crisis online magazine Josef Pieper says much the same thing about vocations: Interviwer: A friend of mine was recently at a seminary down in Guadalajara, Mexico, where there were over 2,000 seminarians. In the U.S., though, and in Western Europe, there is a serious shortage of vocations to the priesthood. To what would you attribute this, and what do you think is necessary for this situation to change? Pieper: No one knows for certain. Family life, I think, is the answer: prayer at meals, going to Mass together (when my children were young we had five bicycles and we would all ride together to Church) reading together aloud stories of the saints. I feel that these are some of the fundamentals. Interviewer: Is this, then, what is missing in countries in the West that have so few vocations? Pieper It has at least very much to do with this. When you ask a priest how he entered the priesthood, every second one, I think, will tell you, his mother or his father, or some other human being—not books. Another old revisited article from Crisis magazine, this time from Walker Percy, addresses vocations: "The only chance the Church has of ever making converts, or even getting vocations within her own people, is to remain true to herself. God knows, it’s hard. The Holy Father is trying to cleave to these very unpopular teachings on monogamy, abortion, contraception, and all the others. The poor man is having the hardest time in the world. He’s going squarely against the entire zeitgeist of the modern world. But if he doesn’t do it… well, what’s happened with so many religious orders? They’ve become so “liberal,” so unrecognizable as religious orders, that they’re not getting any people coming in. Why bother? Vocations are down dramatically. Why not? They were not down when I became a Catholic; we had a flourishing Benedictine community right in the little town where I lived. The nuns have disappeared, folded. They’ve gone in all kinds of different directions, every kind of feminism".
In 1989 it would have been Pope John Paul II who was Pope. The embrace of liberalism seems to be, for the church, the embrace of decline and the watering down of belief.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 19, 2020 22:38:17 GMT
I tend not to link to CRISIS much these days because they've gone overboard with the altar-and-throne nostalgia, but this article highlights something quite important: www.crisismagazine.com/2020/an-identity-crisis-in-the-priesthoodnamely the role of the loss of priestly eucharistic/sacramental identity, and the way in which this is not only not revived but actually suppressed by various ecclesiastical power-holders who see priests as essentially social workers. I think there are two major related sources of this spiritual ennui, which feed off each other. The first, which was there before the Council, was a tendency to take tribal Catholicism for granted and to see the sacramental role in terms of personal power/authority. The second is to assume that the answer to the first is to abolish the sacramental role partly as authoritarian, partly because it has become a bore to the priest himself. (The undercurrent of complaint that priesthood is too demanding for the priest is quite noticeable on some contributions to the ACP site). Am I oversimplifying? Any thoughts?
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 8, 2020 19:47:53 GMT
This thread from Rod Dreher's blog may be relevant. The issue of racial guilt is not as important here as in America (where slavery and its legacies have been a festering wound in US society from the beginning; to really study Jefferson's hypocrisy, corruption and self-deception about slavery is really terrifying, like watching a soul deliberately turn away from the light and go out into the darkness). The way in which US Evangelicals still assume American culture is "theirs" and don't realise how hostile it has become is very relevant to the Irish Catholic situation, as is the suspicion that many church activists are so anxious to be liked by the world that they have forgotten what it's all about (like those clerics who recently uploaded a clip of themselves dancing a jig on the altar steps at the end of Mass) www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/spiritual-warfare-church-officer-class-surrenders-evangelical-catholic/PS: Just in case anyone thinks what I said is too hard on Jefferson. What makes it so terrifying is that he knew better but did evil just the same: www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/ Present-day comparisons with abortion supporters who know abortion kills a human being but support it just the same because they would have to change their lifestyle are fully warranted.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 1, 2020 20:21:22 GMT
This discussion of the phenomenon known as Moralistic Therapeutic Deism with reference to conservative Protestant churches in the US (as contrasted with Rod Dreher's own Orthodox Church) is relevant to this thread. Basically Dreher argues that the problem with these churches is that they are focussed so exclusively on catering for the casual visitor in the hope of persuading them to make a fundamental decision for Jesus that (a) They take a therapeutic approach, that God simply wants us to enjoy ourselves and feel good. They play down or forget any idea that God might want us to make sacrifices for the greater good. The parable of the man who finds a treasure hidden in a field and sells all he has to buy the field, and with it the treasure, will explain what he means - the fact that many people will assume that any church which wants sacrifices is advocating sacrifice for its own sake and not for a higher end will help to explain how this problem arose (b) these churches, having acquired members, assume that membership and commitment is enough and there is no need to encourage members in further spiritual discipline to form them as disciples. (Again, this can be partly explained by their fear of a Pelagian/Gnostic approach which would lead members to see themselves as a spiritual elite saved by their own efforts with God playing a secondary role. The Protestant emphasis on salvation by grace alone and not by works is relevant here.) This mindset is not a million miles from certain Catholic post-Vatican II approaches which emphasise accessibility above all else. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pilgrim-tourist-seeker-friendly-finder-friendly-gyrovague-christianity-therapeutic/Any thoughts? Bear in mind the danger of avoiding one error by running to the other extreme
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 4, 2020 20:13:27 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 25, 2020 20:51:18 GMT
An article which uses some online RADHARC films from the early 60s as a basis for discussing the liturgical changes expected (as distinct from what actually happened) and whether the subsequent collapse should be seen as a sign that all was hollow under the surface, or that even those who seem well-rooted can be confused by rapid change. Personally, I think the author's views are a little too rosy and should show some awareness that the Ireland of those films was also capable of some very nasty Pharisaism (cf the Mother and Baby Homes). That doesn't mean there was nothing good about it, but we should realise that our present national disasters reflect our fathers' faults as well as our own. www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2020/08/a-glimpse-into-catholic-life-in-ireland.html#disqus_thread
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 1, 2020 0:27:17 GMT
This certainly symbolises the theme of this thread. 144 years of service - not perfect, I suspect, but significant. Who remembers it now? Neutron Bomb Catholicism - the faults of old and new - emptied out the convent; the destruction of the buildings is only a footnote since the spirit is gone. www.rte.ie/news/regional/2020/0930/1168390-skibbereen-fire/
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 8, 2020 22:02:20 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 18, 2020 20:42:18 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 26, 2020 18:37:29 GMT
What is striking about this column by Fr Brendan Hoban on the ACP website about the disuse of confession and the obsolescence of the confessional box in Ireland, inspired by a recent documentary is not the state of things described. It's the passive acquiescence of all the priests described (including Fr Hoban) in the attitude that confession is obsolescent, that people who don't go to confession are not missing anything and that it's unnecessary as well as futile to try to promote it. That dead-dog-floating-with-the-stream attitude encapsulates loss of vocation. www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2020/10/confessional-box-now-a-relic-of-an-old-ireland-brendan-hobans-weekly-western-people-column/
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 17, 2020 21:01:49 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 17, 2020 21:32:45 GMT
This article is very shocking and I think it has implications for Ireland. I may have been critical of old-style Irish tribal Catholicism, and we have seen some of its faults and hypocrisies, but I think it was genuine Catholicism nonetheless. It produced hypocrites and criminals and conformists, but it was also capable of producing many everyday sains and inspiring missionaries like Bishop Shanahan and Bishop Galvin (whose life I've been reading lately) who gave their lives to spreading the Faith among strange people in strange countries. (Bishop Galvin does not fit into the sociological framework now used to explain away old-style priestly vocations. As the eldest son, he would have inherited the family farm if he hadn't chosen to be a priest, and he could have had a comfortable life as a diocesan priest if he hadn't chosen to be a missionary.) Similarly, I believe some of the "change agents" like Cardinal Daly saw genuine flaws and problems ahead and were really trying to address them- yet at some point the neutron bomb went off and except for a tiny minority we were left with people just going through the motions. Hardly anyone seems to be addressing why it happened - the trads either won't accept it has happened or believe all was perfect up to 1958, the libs don't believe anything was lost that is worth re-examining or recovering. Still, here we are and we have to start by looking the horror in the face without despair, and trusting in God to help us do the best. gaudiumetspes22.com/2020/11/11/the-mccarrick-report-and-the-de-facto-atheism-of-the-church-2/
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 2, 2021 21:04:38 GMT
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