feminine-genius

Ponder this

Recently, the Holy Father made an unprecedented appeal for prayer and penance for the purification of the priesthood.

Pope Benedict XVI has instructed Roman Catholics to pray “in perpetuity” to cleanse the Church of paedophile clergy. All dioceses, parishes, monasteries, convents and seminaries will be expected to organise continuous daily prayers to express penitence and to purify the clergy.

Vatican officials said that every parish or institution should designate a person or group each day to conduct continuous prayers for the Church to rid itself of the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy. Alternatively, churches in the same diocese could share the duty. Prayer would take place in one parish for 24 hours, then move to another.

Vatican watchers said that there was no known precedent for global prayer on a specific issue of this kind. There are about one billion Roman Catholics worldwide. When Cardinal Ratzinger stood in for the dying John Paul II at the Good Friday procession of Easter 2005, he stunned the faithful by deploring publicly “how much filth there is in the Church, even among those in the priesthood”.

Vultis Christi recently profiled a woman dedicated to this task, Maria Sieler, who consecrated herself to Christ and found her vocation was to pray and suffer for priests. Our Lord even visited her often, first imploring her to be generous with her oblation of self, and then encouraging her to suffer for the priests who were disappointing Him so grievously by their lack of fidelity.

She had painful revelations, notably concerning the unworthiness of priests and their tepidity with regard to the love of Jesus:

“How I love my priests! How I thirst for their love! I would see my life relived in them. They must be the joy of my Heart, but how I am rejected, offended, and disdained by them! They become a shame for my Heart and a scandal for my Church! Souls who should be saved by them are going to their perdition because of them! Souls ought to be able to find again the way to my Heart, through priests . . . but so many priests live self-seeking lives, (caught up) in their passions, and souls cannot come to Me through them, because the way traced by these priests is sullied. It is neither pure nor straight. I so love my priests. . . .”

Certainly, these hard words contain nothing new, and they are not addressed radically to all priests: Christ has communicated to other prayerful souls the same laments spoken to Maria Sieler, and He has always had the gentleness to clarify that they are directed only to certain priests. But the faults of consecrated souls are especially grave; they affect the salvation of the souls entrusted to the very ministry of priests.

Father Mark asked readers for information on her foundation, which is called Work of the Great High Priest. Until that is found, it wouldn't hurt to begin our own soul-searching about two things: what can we offer up for the good of the priesthood, and how can we show our support for the priests in our lives. We may want to make this a significant part of our Lenten observances this year.

Maria Sieler, help us to persevere!

Hmmm, wonder what she does

This zealous California woman has taken steps that she thinks make her a deacon. In a confused article, mixing up validity and liceity, the participants all indicate their ignorance of the Church they seek to serve.

Epigraphic evidence shows that the Catholic Church had given women sacramental ordination until the ninth century.

Really? That sent me scrambling for a dictionary:

ep‧i‧graph [ep-i-graf, -grahf] –noun

1.	an inscription, esp. on a building, statue, or the like.

2.	an apposite quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter, etc.

Oh. So women now give a special priority to hieroglyphics? Church history (usually transmitted in words) and the writings of the Church Fathers (also word-based stuff) don't cut it? Did the historians and early Christians not see those pictures? Or suffer a disconnect between what they wrote and what they drew? All too silly for the serious student to take seriously.

In all sincerity, I wonder what "the deacon" does in those visits. Probably what she was able to do as a layman, unless she's witnessing marriages. So sad, all the misguided energy that could be channeled through her feminine genius.

Since when...?

Obviously, the entire Church should be on its knees storming heaven for vocations, so that we have shepherds in the coming years. Nothing replaces the ordained clergy as an integral life-giving element that personifies the bridegroom. The sacramental graces provided by the priest sustain his bride and provide children for the kingdom.

It's good to know about this initiative out of California to pray for new vocations to the priesthood:

In Roman Catholic schools across the San Fernando Valley, youngsters pray each day for the priesthood - prayers urged by church leaders facing a critical shortage of pastors that's changing the face of neighborhood parishes.

With the Roman Catholic clergy aging and a shortage of newly ordained priests to replace retiring pastors, plans are evolving to divide the duties of pastors among churches or even to allow lay people to take over parish operations.

Currently, 18 of the pastors who oversee the Valley's 50 or so parishes are 66 or older, and could retire in the next five years, say officials with the Los Angeles Archdiocese. With an average of one new priest being assigned to the region each year, the church is looking to the laity for answers.

Obviously the red flag in this initiative is the idea that laity can ever fully replace the clergy. This woman quoted below has delusions about the nature of the priesthood and makes us wonder what's been going on in The Valley:

"The majority of the laity has no clue," said Kathleen Schwartz, a lay member hand-picked by Mahony to sit on the regional council. "Because of that, we have to develop a comprehensive plan to make sure the people in the pews understand."

It was Schwartz who proclaimed at one pastoral council meeting that while Catholic schoolchildren had been asked to pray for the past year for vocations, God is answering those prayers by forcing the church to look at options.

She is a member of a growing Catholic call for married priests and women in the priesthood. She also advocates even greater involvement for deacons and lay people, who for years have been performing some duties of the priesthood - distributing communion, hearing confessions, performing weddings and delivering sermons.

Really?! The laity have been hearing confessions in LA? That would be news to lots of folks. Interesting that those who advocate women priests are also the crew who belittle sacramental confession, so her apprisal of the situation is more perplexing than ever. Perhaps the sermons that the laity and deacons are preaching (the former forbidden, the latter allowed) must be charged with "examinations of conscience" that send the congregations straight to the un-manned confessionals, forcing the laity to pick up the slack. Wonder what sort of penances they give.

Of course the entire article is misleading, because the push for women priests is not growing but significantly muted since its heyday in the 1970's and 80's. (How do I know? The Holy Week Chrism Mass is the bellwether and the Stole-Ladies haven't been seen in years.)

Thankfully, this priest has a better idea of how the vocation works:

For Msgr. Peter Moran, the 67-year-old pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Northridge, the solution lies in God's hands.

"I'm sure the Lord is still calling men and women to ministry in the church," Moran said. "It's up to us as faith communities to foster that call and make the vocation more inviting.

Moran was the youngest of an Irish family of 14 that produced three priests and two nuns. It was a time when families shared meals, chores, playtime and evening prayers. Fathers worked, mothers raised kids and material possessions weren't so much the focus.

And it was a time that sex was a private matter, a gift from God to be shared in marriage. It wasn't the stuff of headlines that embarrassed a church, scarred young victims and depleted church funds to settle lawsuits.

"We've lost the sanctity of our sexuality, and we've paid the price," Wilkerson said. "We have to take back the gift of sexuality God has given us."

The church sex scandal is just a piece of the problem, Moran said.

"I have no doubt it's put a damper on young men approaching the church or vocations," he said. "But if God is calling young men today, that ultimately will not be a hindrance. There are a lot of negative forces working ... secularism, the priest scandal. Dedicating one's life to a life of celibacy in the priesthood demands a vocation.

"God is calling young men, yet there are these in our culture. One thing is certain: It doesn't worry me because the Lord is in charge. He will raise up the vocations in his church."

We'll certainly keep this intention in mind.

Letting Fathers be fathers

The anonymous (but well-connected) blogger at Papabile offers an excellent commentary about what has happened in the priesthood, which meshes well with Dale's comments of last week, and my article of last year. He also emphasises that what is wrong is deeper than "homosexuals in the priesthood" but a lack of fatherly leadership. Says he:

Now, why do I think the problem is as great as it is? It primarilly goes back to the issue of Fatherhood. Many Priests aren't practicing it, aren't interested in it, and are unable to relate to regular men in any sort of way. They want to be caring, sympathetic, empathetic, loving, etc. In an of itself, there is nothing wrong with these qualities. However, these qualities are oftentimes held above other qualities that are proper, integral, and constituative to fatherhood: strength, honesty, fortitude, directness, etc. The active avoidance of these qualities is an active denial of the generative properties of fatherhood qua fatherhood. In many ways, it is contraceptive (c.f. definition of capere) in nature. Men make, men do, men generate. The qualities that are inverse to that are passive in nature, and more usually much more associated with motherhood (though still a part of fatherhood).

Now most of us have priest friends and have to take this comment seriously. This is not a means of judgement, per se, but how many times do we love priests from whom our husbands remain distant -- perhaps for theological reasons, perhaps something else. He continues:

Now let me tell a little story. Twice, when I worked for the Church, I had Priests come on to me. I was in my twenties at that time. I was sickened by both incidents. Yes... one was your typical liberal, and one was your typical neo-con. Doctrine didn't matter in either case. When I reported it, it was made clear to me that I should handle it myself. I did. (Sexual harrasment law at that time, and to a large extent today, still doesn't acknowledge the possibility of same sex harrassment.) In both cases, these Priests seemed to have only female friends (other than their fellow Priests), the neo-con being obsessed with lace and a female adoration group, and the liberal being obsessed with ecumenism and womyn liturgy. They both lacked any leadership qualities, and most of the men where I worked wanted nothing to do with them. They showed no inclination toward strength, directness, honesty, fortitude, etc. They were, for all purposes, better sisters to the females than they could have ever been a Father.

This problem affects both the left, middle and the right of the Church. And, I believe, The Scandal is really only indicative of most of the Church's other problems. Almost all of the other problems, when you really look at them, are related to a lack of Fatherhood.

Just one man's experience, but it makes sense to me. We have to remember this in our motherhood as well, as much as we want to totally tame our sons, we cannot squash the manhood in them.

Understanding why SSA is about more than sex

While our primary focus at feminine-genius is to understand authentic femininity, we don't live in a vacuum. We must also understand both masculinity and the corruption of sexuality which manifests itself as "same-sex attraction" disorder. The timeliness is obvious -- with the homosexual lobby pushing for its agenda and the seminary visitations on the horizon.

The current crisis in the Catholic Church does not have a single cause, but one of the contributory causes is the failure of the American hierarchy to understand the causes of same-sex attraction and the effects of ordaining men with same-sex attraction to the priesthood. Several official documents have stated that we do not know the cause of same-sex attraction and that the inclination in itself is not sinful. While it may be understandable that the hierarchy does not want to take a position on what is after all a scientific question, the fact is we do know a great deal about the causes of SSA in men.

There is no scientifically credible evidence that same-sex attraction is biologically determined. Yet, from various statements it appears that the majority of American clergy believe that homosexuals are born that way and can’t change. This perception has distorted the way in which the clergy at all levels have approached the problem.

Many people see men with same-sex attraction as sexually neutral. They think that because these men are not tempted to engage in sexual activity with women, celibacy will be easy for them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Men with strong same-sex attraction have by definition strong sexual attractions and because these attractions arise from an emotional deficit and are disordered in their origins they are more, not less, difficult to master.

Same-sex attraction is not a neutral condition. The Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is intrinsically disordered in its ends – that is to desire something (sexual intimacy with a person of the same sex) which is always objectively wrong is disordered. But same-sex attraction is always disordered in its origins and in its effects.