Forgive the short posts–I have a lot of thoughts and a little less time these days.
This is a response to a comment on the Orthosphere. I am trying to keep my critiques a little more segregated–no need to poke the hornets nest, especially since I am just as fallible as other commenters. But I also would like to be direct about what has drawn my criticism, since ambiguity serves to confuse rather than clarify the message. To wit:
If I’d have a son, I’d discourage him from joining the armed forces or becoming a priest. Joining the US military means being an agent of world Satanism. And the Church clearly does not want her sons to become priests, or else they would not spend a decade having psychologists looking for an excuse to weed them out, and they would not force them to operate under overwhelming presumption of guilt of any accusation of sexual impropriety. Until priests are allowed to wear bodycams 24/7, my standing advice is for no man to even consider it.
If compliance to the law is contingent upon the law-givers consistently living by that law, then there is no just exercise of authority.
Yes, the law-givers should consistently live by the law, but so should everyone subject to the law. If obedience to any authority is contingent on some person behaving some way, then one has misunderstood ones role vis-a-vis authority, and ones obligation to that authority.
Rather than applying a perfection test to lawgivers, perhaps we should be more concerned with the lawgivers applying a perfection test to us. Perhaps we should be more concerned with the Law Himself applying a perfection test to us. The Church needs young, bold priests, willing to take on the challenges of their vocation. Shoot, all of us need to be bold in facing the challenges of our particular vocation. How many husbands and wives fail the theological perfection test of the sacrament of matrimony? At least as many people as there are priests that fail in their duty to us as shepherds.
Maybe let’s try praying for our current, future, and former priests, rather than declaring an unwillingness to work to solve the problem until the problem is solved.
St. Paul, pray for us.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
I just replied to Bonald’s comment; it’s pending moderation. His comment, as it stands, is in desperate need of fraternal correction. Well done, Scoot.
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I didnt tackle the other stuff part of his comment because it is beyond my ability for charitable reply.
I understand that there is a deep discontent and malaise in the laity of the Church but I chafe at insisting others share the depths of this discontent. I dont want to unfairly malign Bonald but he is so depressed it is difficult for me to relate to him. He needs prayers, without a doubt.
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The problem with that thread — and I bought into this by not addressing it — is that APC Carrier begs the question in favor of priesthood being the same as joining the military. The priesthood is a vocation and a supernatural calling from God. Those who desire the priesthood owe it to God and to themselves to seriously consider the possibility of becoming a priest.
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They are spiritually different but like any vocation it demands one to offer ones mind, body, and spirit as a sacrifice for some higher purpose. The military is an explicitly deadly sacrifice, the Priesthood is a different variety, so is Matrimony. Nevertheless sacrificial. None of these are the same, but the call to sacrifice is. I take APC Carrier’s point to be–if your son is going to remove himself from the gene pool by an act of sacrifice, would you rather he die for your country or serve God? I agree with him that it would be better to serve God, since it is not necessarily a given that dying for your country is the same as dying for God.
What is disturbing is the second part of APC carriers comment and the second part of Bonald’s reply. Enemy Invasion as divine punishment, something about that rubs me the wrong way. I get what Bonald is saying about the Irish but Russia is not a force for God, properly understood–Russia is not even a force for properly understood morality, it is just one notch closer to the proper understanding than the crazy modern zeitgeist, which is not saying much.
Patriotism is a virtue, war is terrible, and Just War is a very very specific use case. We should not wish war and death upon our neighbors, and we should not wish conquest on our nation. We should wish for God’s will to be done, for the conversion of our representatives at home, and the conversion of our enemies abroad. The whole structure of this part of the conversation is assuming that mass murder and violence is preferable to cultural immorality.
We are pro-life in this house. Death is not the preferred treatment for the immoral–conversion is. We must preserve the opportunity for conversion, not destroy it.
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Afterthought: Every man–every man must confront the vocation of the priesthood. I took one step towards it and that was enough to know that I was not called to it. Men who desire to faithfully serve God make good husbands and fathers; Men who desire to be good husbands and fathers make good servants of God. The two vocations are mutually beneficial, and just because marriage is more common doesn’t mean it is less important. Fatherhood/Husbandhood is as important and as serious a commitment as the priesthood. A man is metaphysically changed in both cases. People tend to discount that fact.
Besides this fact, Husbands and Fathers ought to raise sons who would be good priests, and priests ought to care for a flock such that it produces good husbands and fathers.
I could go on. Vocation is very important and it is not a good idea to be cavalier with commitments made before God, of any sort.
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Yup. Both Marriage and Holy Orders leave an indelible mark on the soul. Every man has a calling to the married life. In a very real way, the priest sacrifices this natural vocation of marriage for the higher vocation of the priesthood.
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Someone explained it to me once that a priest is Married in persona Christi to the Bride of Christ that is the Church. This makes logical sense too when we consider the (insane, misguided) effort at women priests–they would be clerical lesbians.
I didn’t know this until a priest did a “teaching Mass” for my local Young Adult ministry, but parents will traditionally give the preist’s mother’s engagement ring to the priest to be attached to his chalice, as a symbol of that. I thought that was beautiful and changed how I look at the vessels of the Mass.
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Yes, there are so many parallels between marriage and the priesthood. Holy Orders configures the recipient to Christ’s *humanity*, and the Church is Christ’s bride. IMO the catechesis has generally been horrible on this stuff. I take pity on those who advocate for women’s priesthood, not understanding that the priesthood is not merely a *functional* role.
Also, darn WordPress didn’t show me your first comment on war/sacrifice/etc. I don’t really have a dog in the fight in the Ukraine/Russia war, just that God’s will be done, but this whole idea of Russia as a great savior because they are anti-gay propaganda is nutso. I’d rather die a martyr in this liberal dystopia than have Russian Orthodox mobsters of all people running the show. (Still, God’s will be done!)
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I took a perverse satisfaction in Russia waging war in Ukraine because it put egg on the face of western politicians who have nothing but words to show for all their rhetoric about how bad Russia is.
But Russia’s war is unjust, just as the American Empire’s expansion of NATO is unjust. The whole thing is a disaster, and I get the contrarians cheering that the West is being made the fool, but they need to remember that they are also cheering the death of innocents. None of this is good.
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Same here, I am also guilty of that perverse satisfaction the outset. Especially because I had studied Ukrain-Russia relations under a Pro-Russian former Soviet Diplomat whilst in university. He had been warning since I first took his class in 2019 that Ukraine was asking for war, and I was so happy to say, “Told you So!” to all of my friends when this thing broke out. But yeah, this is an unjust war, and the enemy of the enemy is not necessarily my friend.
And war makes everyone dumber. It’s like the mass marketing of hell. “Hey kids, wanna formally cooperate with evil via advocacy for murder of the innocent, even though you live 4,000 miles away?”
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