GREAT CAESAR’S GHOST!!!
This is GOLD. Let this be your examination of conscience, pals. Fr. McTeigue rips the mask off the vocations crisis.
What (most of you) are doing… gotta change.
I want lots of comments here. I want you to share this around as much as possible.
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A Daily Prayer for Priests
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When father was going through the litany of meetings and committees and synodal listening, I was screaming at the video to stop. Wow, that would wilt the soul of anybody.
Kudos to Fr. McTeigue!
I’m sure others will have important things to say about the main, meatier points of the video, but I particularly appreciate that he can address the crisis of masculinity without making it an occasion to blame women exclusively for it, as it so often happens, and which is very off-putting. One, because for every Susan From the Parish Council there’s 3 Mrs. Smith who have humbly and patiently withstood al kinds of liturgical and administrative nonsense from pastors and council, while praying and offering every day for priestly vocations and never dreaming of things like pushing for women’s ordination. Two, because it’s very Adam-when-confronted-by-God to blame others for the formational and liturgical choices made by bishops and seminary formators, and for the desertion of lay men as well. And three, because in consequence, it solves nothing, and it is rather counterproductive.
On a sad side note, in some sectors we are reaching the point where we wouldn’t even be asking men to renounce family, because they discern into “the single life” (women are doing this too, btw). The vitriol that Rorate Caeli has received for stating the common sense notion that there is no such thing as a vocation to the single life is baffling. And sobering.
This made more sense once I figured out he was saying “warrior” and not “worrier.”
About 8:05 mark, in the back of my head I began hearing…The Impossible Dream.
https://youtu.be/oo7VlD66ISM?si=XSlbz7s6fPynI1G0
Thank you for this video Father!
Thanks for sharing this Fr. Z! Gold indeed. Simply outstanding in every way. Loved the description of priests as “special forces” and “warriors”, not administrative paper pushers.
I’ve never understood why bishops who aren’t having success with vocations don’t go spend time in the dioceses that are experiencing success. It seems they don’t think they have anything to learn. Thanks again.
Most churches have a feminized sanctuary. We need to especially get rid of the altar girls, this discourages boys from serving mass and serving mass is one path to the priesthood. Although admittedly in serving the Novus Ordo mass you are primarily a book holder and gofer. The altar boy really comes into his own at the Vetus Ordo where he has to provide the responses and a more demanding role.
Then in a parish setup where priests are moved every few years, the laity provide the continuity and end up running things – Susan of the Parish Council and Karen of the Liturgy Committee call the shots. This needs to change.
This priest will be reassigned as prison chaplain to alligator Alcatraz by 5:00 pm today.
The North American wilderness required tough men,
Father –
I have the honor and privilege of caring for my parish priests (our pastor is 41 and our retired priest in residence is 81) and visiting seminarians who have stayed with us for their pastoral rotation. I buy groceries, wash their laundry, and provide a hot meal every Wednesday with enough leftovers to carry them all week. It is a joy!
I am sure I speak for you, Father, as well as my priests and beloved seminarians when I say they all merit our respect and the dignity we should give them – not only as servants of the Church, but because they are all good men. Those I serve cherish their calling and want to do their very best faithfully lead the souls the Bishop entrusts to them. They are very kind, with pleasant and friendly manners. They have true vocations of service to God, the Church, and to us in the laity. But that doesn’t mean they should be treated as doormats nor as frat boys.
This week, I read of an incident involving the seminary of the Archdiocese of Denver in which seminarians were hazed while on a skiing trip organized by the rector. It was despicable and inexcusable. I would not want any son of mine, nor any priest or seminarian, to be put through what those young men endured from their rector, who should have been trusted to have far better judgment with the responsibility he was given.
Priests – and future priests – are called to be holy, faithful, and courageous. They aren’t a bunch of pansies, nor do they expect to have an easy life. They are the sergeants and lieutenants in the vast army that is the Church, as I see it – with the laity as the foot soldiers, our bishops as the majors, our cardinals as the colonels, and our good Pope Leo as the general. Parish priests and seminarians – as well as religious Order priests – are called on to be strong men who lead with the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Just my two cents. God bless and protect you, Father, and all here.
A lot of Tolkien and Chess in that video, good warrior spirit.
This is an excellent video. There is so much that can be said about this subject, especially in light of what we have seen in the Church over the last 60 years. I will just add this – get women out of the sanctuary (lectors, EHMCs (better yet eliminate them all together) and altar severs). Service at the altar should be the font of vocations.
Seminaries are run by the lavender mafia. Normal men have a hard time making it through to the end. Even in ‘conservative’ seminaries I have run into many men that are way too effeminate.
If Our Lord had followed ‘the synodal way’ and listened to his local committee, he would never have allowed himself to be crucified. Then where would we have been?
We are also starting to see the fallout of a contraception culture and how it has hit every facet of life.
It seems the priest doesn’t even have much say in what goes on at the local parish so long as Susan from the parish council has Bishop Goodnice on speed dial.
It strikes me that the same people who bang the “participation” drum for Mass – “Welcome to St Mary’s, here’s your tambourine!” – are the ones who tend to pile committees upon committees and have meetings to plan meetings.
We could shift parish life from vocations wastelands to a form of “say the black, do the red,” when priests focus on the sacraments first instead of needing to be in a two-hour meeting to help the art committee pick the burlap colors for the Season of Creation banners that will go up in the sanctuary.
*It’s interesting this is coming from a Jesuit.
*He paints effectively a horrible picture of priest life.
*He doesn’t tell us how to get from here to there.
*Does God still give men priestly vocations if they live in a hopelessly heretical archdiocese.
Wonderful, yes, but to whom is he speaking? The women sacristans, lectors, and EMs are just in their middle 60s, some of them. So is the liturgical dance director. I fear they intend to enjoy their exciting new freedoms for many years. Who has the authority to dare end their rule?
I am puzzled by some of the comments to this piece. One of Fr. McTeigue’s points was to have lay people take administrative tasks off the hands of the pastor so he’ll have more time for Priestly things. Yet, some disparage having laypeople, described as “Susan from the Parish Council,” running things. There must be some middle ground, I suppose. And in my experience, men from the Parish Council (and often the pastor) are as clueless as Susan, and just as overbearing.
Terrific analysis of vocations crisis. We have new vocations director for Diocese of Orlando- he was unexpected celebrant at a daily mass, sang the Mass (OF) in Latin. At the cathedral. Shocking, glorious. Will send him this link.
If I’m allowed to impose on Fr. Z’s patience again…
I live in a diocese where I can’t remember ever seeing an “altar girl”, and where female EMHC are rarely ever seen at Mass (there is a number of them, but they have it for and because they do a lot of visiting the sick and elderly) and still our seminary struggles to get candidates… and it is a loud secret that that’s because seminary life for orthodox men is very difficult, to put it mildly, and the diocesan priest’s life closely resembles the picture Fr. McTeigue paints. We joke with a friend that a common friend of ours who got kicked then readmitted managed to get ordained because he must have dirt on someone important (again, we mean it as a joke, but it reflects common opinion of what goes on in that seminary). Certainly neither altar girls nor Susans are the ones hazing seminarians with midnight blood oaths to vice-rectors in yeti costumes.
Speaking of which, that incident reflects the kind of thing that happens when we lose the big picture and forget which are the priorities (causally and strategically) and where the sources of the solutions are. It appears the intention of the vice-rector was to get the seminarians to “man up”, but the way he chose to do it reflects a rather superficial and even vicious idea of what it means to be masculine.
Likewise we can all agree that women acting as lectors, EMHCs, and altar helpers is at the very least suboptimal, but if we do not ask why men aren’t fulfilling those roles we won’t solve that problem. Saying “because women are doing them” is kind of an egg-and-hen argument. Women started doing them because men stopped doing them. Which is why it doesn’t follow necessarily that by removing women men will engage en-masse. As Fr. McTeigue points out, there’s been an emasculation of priesthood and a loss of a strong sense of what it means to be a man and to be masculine. The equation of emasculation with feminization is, IMO, bad, not only because to me it hits too close for comfort to ideas such as “gender is a spectrum” and “gender is a social construct”, but because what is being referred to is vices of a different kind. Ephebophilic homosexuality is not feminine. If anything, homosexual men tend to be more virulent anti-women than the rest. Cowardice, vanity, envy, pettiness, etc, etc, are general vices, bad in everyone and not part and parcel of femininity. This is all to say, you cannot rebuild masculinity by just telling men to be not-women.
That aside, even if a struggling diocese managed to get an all-male sanctuary (as is the case in my diocese), as long as certain seminaries remain seminarian meat grinders, the priestly vocation problem won’t be solved either. A boy may get the priestly fire in his heart by serving at the altar, but if his bishop won’t ordain him (and/or label him a problem person, which ensures he won’t be admitted somewhere else) then he won’t get ordained, it’s a simple as that.
I very much agree with L. I think the important thing to remember is that we *all* are answerable to the Blessed Trinity. And the laity has a function at the parish, much more than taking up space in a pew. You cannot have it both ways, with Father doing everything, or with the laity doing everything. We can work together in an appropriate manner.
As for blaming “women in the sanctuary” for the lack of vocations – hogwash. No man with a true religious vocation is scared off by the presence of women, nor are women by the presence of men. I have been around enough priests and seminarians to know they are confident in their ministry and future ministry. The boys and girls at my parish who are altar servers have enough responsibility before, during, and after Mass to keep them occupied on the tasks at hand. If their minds wander, they are not server material. My pastor does not put up with distracted servers, whether they are boys or girls. They are expected to arrive at least 20 minutes or earlier ahead or Mass, to be dressed with modesty, with no silly haircuts, makeup, or jewelry, and to do their duty with dignity and reverence – boys and girls. And anyone who doesn’t is taken off the roster and sent back to the pews with their families. For the record, my parish has experienced a small boom in religious vocations, with 2 young men in the seminary, 2 young ladies recently permanent professed as religious sisters, and one young man in diaconate formation. My pastor has also escorted several teenaged boys and their parents to meet our bishop and tour the seminary when they expressed interest over the last 5 years.
The very same goes for Readers and EMHCs. The Church has permitted the laity in this area – both men and women – for the last 60 years. That includes popes who are canonized saints. I do not second guess them nor my bishop nor my pastor, who hold everyone who assists at Mass to a high standard of reverence.
I realize everyone here will not agree with me, and that is okay. It is time for *all* Catholics – whether we are Novus Ordo, TLM. or Eastern Rite – to stop criticizing one another when we are in obedience to our hierarchy and attend and assist at valid, licit Masses and Divine Liturgies with reverence that is not confined to one Form nor one Rite. Satan surely rejoices when we tear one another down.
Fr. McTeigue nailed it in this video!!
As others have said, lets get the laity – men (unless serving as acolytes) and women – out of the sanctuary.
Now that Father is busier doing all of the work in the sanctuary, we the laity need to step up and help with the work of the parish that doesn’t require a priest – that snow shoveling, the finances, cleaning the church, organizing, managing communications, etc.
I’ll also add most of the things wrong that Father described are also wrong in the businesses most white-collar men work in. Endless meetings, endless seminars, endless box-checking, group-think, etc.
Re to L: I would hope he means that the priest doesn’t have to dictate which devotionals are done at the parish, or manage the social dinners or concerts, or even his calendar.
I would say have the priest manage liturgical norms and pass the rest to his folk who have briefly spoken to him about starting up a Legion of Mary Praesidium or Holy Face devotion without the expectation of having him there.
We are the exception. Charlotte has a plethora of vocations and our parish has three permanent deacons to assist. Whether that sustains itself under our good bishop is TBD.
The vocation crisis goes way back. I remember back in the 1980’s, a friend of mine, who worked for a diocese, was attending a conference on this very crisis. The conference was apparently suggesting that they just needed to tweak their current programs. At one of the breaks, he sat with an elderly priest who commented that they (those in charge) should acknowledge the reality that what they were trying wasn’t working and do something different.
Fr. McTeigue is right; what many dioceses are doing is not working; they need to admit this and try something different.
There’s a rule of thumb that 95% of life is maintenance, regardless of which vocation you pursue. A man who wants to be all hero and no maintenance is more boy dreaming of heroism than an actual hero who puts in the drudgery to ensure that his heroic plans will work. This doesn’t mean that priests should not be delegating various aspects of parish maintenance to competent parishioners. But competent people do not like either hazy communication or micromanagement, the first meaning they will have to redo a lot of work, and the second meaning that they might as well not be doing the work. The pastor’s delegating doesn’t allow disengaging, not unless, as L said, he wants other people (probably *not* competent) to be running things.
The idea of a leader running everything via the synodal process is vaguely horrifying, due to the fact that the synodal process is meant to drive the discussion toward particular conclusions. The idea of a leader dashing off in the direction he chooses and everyone must follow as they may, is also horrible, and we can look in the general direction of the Carolinas to see it. Jacob traveled slowly for the sake of the young and tender in his tribe, which means he was listening to his people and paying attention in order to know what they needed. Priests (any leader, really, including fathers and mothers) should be making their decisions to please God, not necessarily their parish, but unless omniscience is granted with ordination, they cannot know what prudential decisions will please God without listening to get the lay of the land.
I expect that a good chunk of the priest shortage is due to homosexuals in vocations and seminary positions, as well as being fellow seminarians. But I expect it is also due to poor formation: they are not being given the tools to do their job, to learn how to rebuke kindly and clearly, to listen and still be the leader, or how to make their celibacy, prayer life, and ministry mutually supportive. Every human being has to deal with people somewhat like Susan from Parish Council, in work or out of it. That’s not going to be a dealbreaker for any man worth having. Having no tools to deal with them certainly would be.
There is an extremely good correlation between the number of priests, and the number of Catholics who actually attend Mass every Sunday. My suspicion is that they are caused by the same set of things. Laity have been badly formed for generations, have been provided no means of addressing problems with clergy for generations, have had nonsense fed to them at obligatory Masses/functions, while being starved of good sense, for generations. Many responded by leaving the Church. So prospective priests considering being stuck with those same things in seminary and after similarly seek another vocation. Who’d’a thunk it?
Replying to baileymxd, I didn’t have anything in particular in mind for what “ought” to happen. In my parish, we’ve had pastors who let parishioners pretty-much do what they wished with most things, especially if he didn’t care much about those things- the school, for example. He did allow female altar servers, noting that even though it was against the rules, other parishes in our diocese were doing it so it was unfair to ours not to do it. I thought it was unfair not to give everyone an example of faithful obedience. The poor man had other questionable practices such as permitting an Episcopalian to receive weekly communion based on the gentleman’s profession that he believed what Catholics believe about the Real Presence. And, he did lie about the results of a parishioner vote on whether to wreckovate our church, although I think he did this at the direction of our then-Bishop who seemed to have a mania for expensively screwing up church interiors. As one might expect in our unfortunate diocese, that Priest became rector of the cathedral and later was Vicar General of the Diocese.
His successor struck the right balance, I thought, in supervising all aspects of the Mass and other liturgies, while letting other things be taken care of by the laity. He also cared about Catholic education and about issues like abortion, so the diocese peremptorily canned him. His successor was a micromanager who wouldn’t let a flower be planted in a flower bed unless he passed on it. Of course, he didn’t have enough time to keep up with everything, so things languished until he got around to giving us the benefit of his vast expertise and personal experience (yes, that it sarcasm). In fairness, however, having seen how vindictive and petty the guys in the Chancery could be back then, I might have micromanaged everything were I the Priest because anything that went wrong would be my fault.
Our last two pastors have been good, striking a balance between micromanaging and neglect, while attending to their primary Priestly functions.