Fr. McTeigue again… kaBLAM! Video offerings: Can Christ Heal Broken Men? & Want Priests? Stop Hating Men!

I must share these videos.

First, among his defense of manhood, which is enough…  his description of “Fr. Cheerful at St. Typical’s”… oh my.  When he describes the banality of what many men find in parishes … oh my.

Excerpt

You’ve heard me talk about St. Typical’s before. It’s an outpost of the business of churchianity. It’s the place where you have your weekly anti-hell insurance renewed every week. So you show up on Saturday and Sunday. You endure painfully bad music. You endure an even worse sermon. You get your liturgical participation trophy in one hand to facilitate your hasty exit. You put a couple bucks in God’s tip jar. And the deal is, as long as it doesn’t take too long and as long as you pay up, you can run out the door and get on with real life. And if by bad luck you die that week, it’s okay, because God owes you heaven.

So, long as you “pay up”. Yeah… where did we hear that recently?

And there is this one…

From this one:

There are all sorts of people to blame: families, absent fathers, the schools, the culture, the internet, the churches, Christian communities. But I want to give a shout-out to my brother priests, and in particular, to my brother priests who are pastors at St. Typicals. Guys, you know who you are. You say, “We’re a welcoming community,” which usually means you don’t work very hard at enforcing standards because some people might get snippy or complain. You say, “We meet people where they’re at.” True story: 99.99% of the priests who tell me that phrase—“we have to meet people where they’re at”—have absolutely no plan for leading people anywhere once they meet them where they’re at.

And

Extended quote…. but listen to the WHOLE THING…

How are we going to fix this? How are we going to make it better? Well, here’s how not to make it better. Imagine saying to a group of young men, “Hey guys, have you ever thought about being a priest? Because here’s what you’ll do. We’ll send you to a parish and you’ll be in charge. And by being in charge, what we really mean is that if things go wrong, you’ll be in trouble. You’ll get fired. Your name will be on the lawsuit. And it’ll be great because you’ll be the spiritual father—insofar as you’ll be calling meetings. And you’re going to show a lot of masculine initiative and courage and daring by…listening. You will be the spiritual father by listening a lot to committees and assemblies and congresses and councils and senates and more committees and more listening. And people whom you don’t know very well, whose competence and goodwill are not readily apparent to you, are going to tell you what to do. Won’t that be great? And on top of that, whenever there’s an HR dispute, you’ll have to fix it. Whenever the toilet backs up, you’ll have to fix it. Whenever it snows outside and the roof leaks, you’ll have to fix it. And when other people get your community into debt, you’ll have to fix it. And in exchange we’ll ordain you and demand that you be celibate. Won’t that be great? And we’ll teach you to think of your celibacy only as a restriction, only in terms of the things you can’t do, and we’ll never really tell you why it’s worth it.”

And that’s what we’re telling our young men over and over again: do this difficult, demanding, largely not-masculine thing. Sacrifice home and family and spouse and freedom. And then we’re going to make you a bureaucrat and an HR manager and a property manager. And every now and again you’ll do some sacramental something. Then we’ll badger you for not praying, and we’ll mock you because you don’t have the time to prepare a decent sermon. You know, that’s what we’ve been doing for decades. And the proof of that is the nearly universal decline in numbers in seminaries and ordinations. There are exceptions of course, and I’m sure you’ll tell me about them. But those are the exceptions.

So what we need to do is recapture the transcendent, mystical, spiritual aspect of being a man—to reclaim the masculine archetypes of pilgrim and warrior and to be united with Christ in his role as priest, prophet, and king.