catholic church – Wide Spread Interests

by-grace-of-god:

I am just going to say it:
When I see the Church get mixed up in political issues my 1st thought is, “You’re painting the exterior while your house is on fire.”

65-75% doesn’t go to Eucharist regularly. An even greater number have abandoned sacramental Confession. Even though the population goes up, baptisms, confirmations, Catholic marriages, and numbers of priests and religious plummet in the west. Your parishes are emptying out and getting closed. Catholics in NA, SA, and Europe are more likely to identify with secular morality than Catholic morality. Oh…and yeah…you have a rancid cesspool among a minority of your clergy whose fidelity to their vows is akin to a 1980’s cassette player. Your colleges and universities are mostly Catholic in name only, your education systems are in shambles. The devotional life in most catholic households is dead. Your liturgies went from a focus on beauty and the transcendence to a banal broadway play. You wring your hands about youth while you do absolutely anything you can to make us indistinguishable from the secular culture. That leaves us priests on the front lines who are trying to live up to what we said we would do at our ordinations spending too much time explaining the troubles that beset us.

I, and many of the clergy and lay faithful, want the Church to succeed in forming her flock and getting the flock to heaven. We love Christ and His Church. We love our flocks. We mourn the fatal wounds inflicted. We believe that we are to be in the world, but not of the world. We are to be a luminous alternative to the darkness of evil. We have the treasury of God’s grace at our fingertips. Please do something substantial about the problems that inflict the Body of Christ. It is more than new policies and procedures. It is a culture of faith, beauty, and strength.

– Fr. Bill Peckman