The shortage in priests is the result of liberalism and 

by Michael H. Brown

         Last March the Vatican came out with a statement that made no sense to many in the West. The worldwide crisis of clerical vocations, it said, had ended. There were now plenty of men studying for the Catholic priesthood, according to the Congregation for the Clergy.

         It was true. Where there had only been 60,142 seminarians preparing for the priesthood in 1975 -- in the years right after the Church had been stripped of so much of its tradition -- by 2000 the number had soared to 109,828, or nearly twice the number.

         It made no sense because in the United States and many modern countries -- in Holland, in France, in England -- the opposite was true. Seminaries were empty. There were parishes that had to share priests. Some years a diocese was lucky to crank out a single new priest. 

         It was a crisis of modernism. Swept into a tizzy of psychology and philosophy, attempting to fit into the new "scientific" society, and afraid now to declare anything as "sin," the Western Church had lost its mystical component as well as its moral authority. It had become intellectual. He had tried to be hip. It wanted to be open-minded.

         And as a result, the smoke of Satan -- as forewarned by pope Pail VI himself -- entered the sanctuary. Men who would have made fine priests, who would have carried on the great traditions of the priests who were now heading toward retirement, who were manly and chaste, who believed what the Church had taught for 2,000 years, began to shy away from the sterility of the new Western setting as a new breed of priests, a good number homosexual, began to fill the seminaries.

         This is not to disparage

         And when that happened good men, strong men, masculine men -- 

And that was for a very good reason: while many of the poorer nations stuck with the strictures of the faith, while they respected the age-old traditions, while they interpreted Christ the way He was meant to be interpreted and trained their men in the true Presence, in the West a flood of modernism had tried to redefine reality into one in which psychology and philosophy ruled and anything went as long as it felt good. 

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