More Ways to End the Vocations Crisis

My recent article on the self-inflicted crisis of vocations to the Catholic priesthood engendered a lot of discussion, from which I conclude that my suspicion is correct. Many Catholics are content with strategies of suicide, because they do not really want the Church to prevail in her war against a world deranged. Since in our day the derangement is most obviously about things having to do with marriage, sex, children, the family, and those differences between men and women that are attested and variously respected by every culture that has ever existed, in every geographical area and at every stage of technological development, that means that they want the sexual revolution to change the Church rather than the Church to defeat the revolution. They are anti-missionaries, come to preach the gospel of chic hedonism. In our time, when someone says, “I don’t agree with all of the teachings of the institutional Church,” you can bet your house that the disagreement has nothing to do with three Persons in one God, but rather two persons in one bed.

You can flush the people out by observing their reactions to good news. Mention that the sisters of Our Lady Queen of Ephesus, in Kansas City, are devoted to the magisterial teachings of the Church, that they are joyful messengers of the Lord, that they celebrate the complementary virtues of manhood and womanhood, and that if their average age were too much lower they’d have to face a truant officer. Note the reply.

“Well, that’s good for them.”

“They’re just one convent.”

“If that’s their choice, I respect it. But their day is past.” I translate: Old-fashioned prigs!

“Correlation doesn’t imply causation.” No, certainly not. The rooster doesn’t make the sun rise. But the slogan is mainly used to duck the obvious. As I’ve seen it used, it means, in socio-speak, that if you take your kid fishing a lot, and your kid grows up with a hobby called fishing, we can’t conclude that there’s any connection between them. Young women filled with love for the Church and for Jesus do not naturally gravitate towards women who are filled with love for the Church and for Jesus.

Or say that priestly orders that maintain devotion to the mysteries of the faith are doing very well. Mention the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter. Tell about what a couple of priests of Opus Dei did to save a jewel of a church from destruction—Saint Mary of the Angels in Chicago. Suggest that something similar could be done in your neighborhood.

“That order attracts reactionaries.”

“Opus Dei is evil.”

“We have to become a new Church for a new time.”

A former student of mine worked for a year at a live-in women’s center run by bitter old nuns—by the Feminist Nunsuch. It was down the street from Saint Mary of the Angels. The sisters refused to allow the priests to come over to celebrate Mass there for the people. “We don’t need them,” they said.

Now, if that’s your attitude, I am not speaking to you, not in this article. Wellington doesn’t ask Napoleon how he should arrange his battle-lines.

If you do not believe what the Church teaches regarding the neuralgias of our time, I am not speaking to you. If you believe that women should be ordained, or that a man can marry a man, or that the government should permit people to snuff out their children before they reach a certain state of cuteness, or that the Pill is good for what ails us, or that divorcing men and women can call Solomon’s bluff, saw their children in two, marry their new squeezes, and be patted on the head by the Church for doing so, while the abandoned spouse is played for a chump all around—I am not speaking to you.

If it’s your worst nightmare that men might be kindled with ardor for the Church—the real one, not the mythical Futurechurch, known only to the illuminati, those who have taken a night school course in ecclesiology and who wear special glasses—then obviously we have nothing to talk about. You want the Church to conform to the world; you want the Church to suffer a shameful defeat. You want to deform the Church to infect it. I want the Church to cure the world by transforming it.

If you do accept the teachings of the Church but you are content with the status quo when it comes to vocations, I am not speaking to you. You’ve had things your way for forty years. Enough already. I want results. I want victory. So in that spirit I make these recommendations, to those who also want victory:

Do the obvious things that will attract men. You want men? Go get them. Tell them that you need them to do the job, which is true. Set up a men’s reading group, and read real works of theology and Catholic philosophy, works that are daunting in their significance for a deadening secular world. Read Romano Guardini, The Lord. Read Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Read C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man. Those, for starters. Invite teenage boys to join in, and treat them as absolute equals. Set up a weekly morning prayer in the rectory for the men of the parish, early enough to catch most of them before work. Let them pray on their knees, on the floor, as I’ve seen done at one extraordinarily vibrant parish in Connecticut. Let them hear a sermon that takes the truth to them and gives them their marching orders of the day. Notice how quickly and completely all the differences of class and education are forgotten.

Let them forge friendships in the vicinity of the sacraments. Announce a monthly meeting for men, for confession, discussion, and fellowship. Make sure there is food and beer.

The hymnals have been neutered. Get rid of the neutered hymnals. If you do not have the funds to replace Worship III, Gather, Glory and Praise, and others of that ilk with real hymnals, then incorporate into your worship some of the old manly hymns of the Church militant. We have copier machines; this can be done. At least once a month, sing one of those hymns. That is not much to ask! Sing Soldiers of Christ, Arise, or Fight the Good Fight, or Rise Up, O Men of God. The women will be happy to sing these too, if truth be known.

Return all attention at Mass to the action of Christ. What good and true man wants to give his life to a coffee klatsch? And Mass is not a coffee klatsch. It is not a comfy gathering of nice people with a taste for spirituality. It is the sacrifice of Christ, reenacted by the priest in persona Christi; it is the single holiest thing in the world. When J. R. R. Tolkien was writing to his son Michael, during the dark days of the German bombing of Britain, he told him to bind his heart to the Eucharist: “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death.” Yes, Death, which on earth ends all, but whose foretaste in the Eucharist, says Tolkien, gives the dimension of depth and reality to all that we seek and love on this side of the grave.

So put the tabernacle where it belongs, in the central place of honor. Get every layman out of the sanctuary after the prayer of the faithful. Put the chair of the priest on the side. Get the singers out of the view of the aud –, I mean, the congregation. If you don’t have baritones, find one.

Do not reduce the Catholic faith to a political appendix. Preach Christ and Him crucified. Remember that human beings are unified only from above.

Semper fidelis. If you are teaching in RCIA, and you do not warmly embrace the doctrines of the Church, moral and theological, then you need to do plenty of praying on account of your confusion, and you should recuse yourself immediately. If you are teaching CCD, same thing. If you are teaching in a Catholic school, the moral burden upon you is heavy. Pray every day for your students and for the light to see what has been revealed to the Church and why. Your job is not to play Satan in the garden. Do not deceive yourself on that score. You must decrease, and Christ must increase.

If you have the wherewithal, separate boys and girls for certain units or courses in your Catholic schools; certainly for physical education, for the touchier elements of health, and perhaps also for literature and religion. Unless it’s an all male school, the boys will have mostly women for teachers. Then there should be some time during the day when they can be themselves, without social complications; reading Moby Dick instead of or in addition to Pride and Prejudice; arguing with one another in the company of a male teacher of theology, rather than holding their peace in mixed company. The girls will doubtless also enjoy the change of pace. They too will feel more at home during those times when they can be themselves too; and it will make the re-union all the happier.

You have to remember what boys are. If your worldly business depended for its survival upon attracting them, you would not be so foolish as to dismiss what your eyes tell you, not to mention the entire human race. You would say, “Since this is the job to be done, these are some clear measures to take.” Take them. The Lord who chose twelve men to be His apostles, and knew how to do it, will bless you.