Thought For The Day

Imagine if Rome decided that episcopal promotions were based not on knowing the right people, but on performance.

There’s a vacancy at a major metropolitan see? Only bishops who have a proven record of attracting vocations, making converts, and whose flock shows healthy numbers of baptisms, weddings and Mass attendance would be considered for the opening. You can bet bishops would be more focused on battling the Church’s declining demographics if there was such an incentive to do their jobs.

I’d also love it if performance was taken into account when the USCCB was seating bishops as heads of various committees. After all, proven competence at one’s job should be a consideration, certainly more than one’s talent for glad handing or the quality of one’s golf game.

Conversely, I think it’d be great if those bishops who’ve been abject failures at their job lost their right to vote on policy decisions made by the USCCB. Why should a man who is provably bad at his job in his own corner still be able to steer policy for the Church nation-wide?

Ideally, bishops would be keen on bringing in converts and inspiring vocations and keeping butts in pews because they love Christ and they are on fire to evangelize. But human nature being what it is, it wouldn’t hurt if preferment were tied to performance, and mediocrity had consequences.

It is exactly the results they want. “We have too few men willing…so we MUST open the priesthood to women too.”

I seen it already with too few parish priests. A heterodox bishop appoints a lay Administrator, which always seems to be a woman. They have laity lead communion services, always a woman lead event.

All part of the plan…

In 2004, I discussed with a monsignor of my acquaintance some data in The New Oxford Review which indicated that the ratio of seminarians to estimated parishioners varied wildly over the landscape, averaging about 1 per 13,000, with two dioceses as high as 1 per 2,000 and with two dioceses below 1 per 200,000. Or, I tried to discuss it. He wasn’t the least bit interested.

He retired in 2009 and died in 2016. I presume one of his shirt-tails wrote his obituary. It included this piece of text, “There he presented a “Mission Manifesto” that spoke of the impending tragedy in the Church due to the shortage of ordained priests, a tragedy he attributed directly to the doctrine of priestly celibacy and the refusal to ordain women.”

He was a pleasant man. The way he ran his parish was what you’d expect. He employed a music director who proved impervious to counsel; about 85% of her selections were drawn from music composed after 1965, played on an upright piano. He refused to have votive candles in his church (“puts smudges on the wall”).

One might almost imagine it to be intentional…

The Altar Society in our small parish has 16 young men.
These servers range in age from 8 to 17.
They serve both the Ordo and TLM.
They Cantor the Psalms.
We do morning and evening prayers, Liturgy of the Hours.
We have Jesus adored 24/7.
We lead our diocese in religious vocations.
Latin classes are open for all ages.

Vs.

One or two servers for the Ordo Mass.
More girl servers than boys in most Churches.
A lopsided demographic for many a Church without a future; average age of parishioner 57. [ estimated..not statistical data to support my estimate.]
No Perpetual Eurchristic Adoration chapel available.
No TLM available.

No wonder the world is where it is. The Catholic Church must go back in order to move forward.

I live in Cincinnati. Our Archbishop, Dennis Schnurr has pushed for vocations from day one. We had 7 priests this year and will have 7 next year.

We say a prayer for vocations at every Mass in every parish.
One of the first thing he did was remove a heterodox nun from the Seminary. For 20 years she was responsible for turning away any man that confessed a belief in ordinary Catholism. Pray the rosary… rejected. Homosexual experienced…accepted. etc.

All according to the plan…however there is no human mastermind organizing all of these people. It is all intuitive.

I’m reminded of the fellow who wrote for the New Oxford Review about his experience seeking a berth as a seminarian. (He had two or three failed attempts). He’s told by one vocations director (in Rhode Island, IIRC), “We don’t need priests from 1952”.

This is my Archdiocese. I would like to add that we have three new Seminarians joining this year and tentatively five new ones for next year. The three men joining Seminary this year are all Orthodox, Traditional, and willing to sacrifice for the Church and people of God. Things are moving here, slowly, but progress is being made. Soul searching still needs to be done, but God has not and will not abandon His people.

Re: Phil’s comment.

“More girl servers than boys in most Churches.”. Our pastor recognized that the predominance of girls was driving the boys out.
Where the girls outnumbered the boys the boys stop joining. He quietly started to encourage adult men and their sons 2 act as servers. Soon there are more boys than girls and the men stepped back. Now they are all boys. Many seminarians start their vocation as servers.

The leadership of the Church has chosen the path of repression and implosion. Barring the Second Coming, you won’t see things get better in the lifetimes of anyone writing here.

IMO, categorical predictions are best avoided.

IMO, categorical predictions are best avoided.

A frequently-unfulfilling hobby, to be sure. And yet, the personnel decisions the Argentine Jesuit has made will spread his miasma for years. The conclave may surprise, but given the supine reaction to his decrees and appointments, I won’t put a lot of cash on it. Vatican I is a helluva drug. Rather like spiritual heroin, in fact.

Lavender…but I like my accidental typo better.😎

Conservative, traditional dioceses seem to have more seminarians. No female servers at our church, thankfully.