The fight against Futurechurch: seminarians Posted By:
Damian Thompson at Oct 10, 2008 at 14:38:45
Do you know what makes liberal Catholic clergy wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night? It’s not the return of the Tridentine Mass. It’s not the fact that Ratzinger is Pope. It’s not their rapidly dwindling congregations.
Seminarians are taking over the world
What terrifies the old trendies is a new generation of conservative seminarians, who are gradually turning into a new generation of conservative priests - just as the supply of liberals is drying up. [This is certainly the case in the USA as well. The seminary I was in the US was a hell-hole of heresy and sheer dopiness. But then the student body began to shift. The faculty simply couldn’t throw that many guys out, and word was getting back to bishops about how bad things were there. Slowly but surely the student body changed the seminary, and eventually the bishop made some changes as well, good ones. Now that seminary is for the most part sound. The aging hippies now openly lament the loss of their 60’s dreams and mutter gloomy warnings about how "conserrrrrvativvvve" the seminarians now are.]
Until very recently, seminaries managed to screen out the more orthodox candidates. "Psychologically immature" was the code for "obedient to the Magisterium", and so effective was the process that dozens of vocations were successfully squashed. In the 1980s and 90s, English seminaries were run by a grey-shirted Magic Circle politburo, assisted (not to say bullied) by frightful middle-aged women whose liturgical preferences were only just the right side of Wicca. [LOL! Well put. But I must say that they weren’t to the right of Wicca where I was. At our place there were invocations of the "earth mother goddess", "Sophia", and the "Bringer of Light" – all blended with tacky silliness.]
One or two conservatives slipped through the net, by hiding copies of Fortescue under their beds and slipping each other photographs of fiddleback chasubles that they could admire in private. In public, however, they were careful to wear the seminary uniform of jeans and CND T-shirt, and even to swallow the Bitter Pill without gagging. [The "Bitter Pill" is the lefty UK weekly "The Tablet".]
But times are changing. Dreary Leftist seminary rectors have retired or became Magic Circle bishops, the Wiccan "pastoral advisers" have fallen out of favour, and conservative candidates for the seminary have started presenting themselves faster than they can be turned down. "It’s a bit like the Somme - no sooner have you wiped out one wave of infantry than another appears," says my source. [LOL!]
Futurechurch is losing this battle. Some Magic Circle rectors are ready to run up the white flag. I could mention a couple of English seminaries where orthodox doctrine is taught pretty rigorously. That’s in sharp contrast to the situation 20 years ago. (As one London priest told me this week, "I came away from seminary knowing only two things - that St Augustine of Hippo and St Augustine of Canterbury were different people, and that Julian of Norwich was a woman.")
The other day, I saw a photograph of seminarians and staff at Allen Hall, Westminster. I reckon you could tell just by looking at them that the students were more conservative than their teachers. [YES] The same is true of the Venerable English College in Rome, where – perhaps because it is a breeding ground for bishops – the Magic Circle is clinging on to power. "Students still have to don a false beard if they slip out to attend a Tridentine Mass," I’m told. [I think rubber nose and glasses might work better.]
Some of the really Left-wing dioceses have adopted a disgraceful tactic: rather than put forward conservative candidates for ordination, they’ve stopped looking for future priests completely. Hence all this guff about "lay empowerment": the lay people being empowered are all "made men" (if I can use such a sexist term) in the mafia of the mediocre.
But don’t despair. Conservative seminarians are getting ordained, and in a few years’ time the dioceses will run out of goody-goody Tabletistas on whom to bestow plum parishes. And then, who knows? A conservative bishop? Stranger things have happened.
being named the next Archbishop of Westminster? Are odds still being offered?"
OK, here is the deal. About one mile south of my church of St. James the Just, there is a little white church. I am told that it was a Southern Baptist church at one time. When I came to Ogden nine years ago, it was Glory to God Community Church. I found out later that it was a Metropolitan Community Church. Yup, the gay denomination. Not just gay friendly, but of, by, and for gays. Even the World Council of Churches won’t let them in as even that liberal organization doesn’t think that sexual orientation should be the foundation of a denomination. Later I heard that the pastor was an ex-Catholic and failed Franciscan seminarian. Well, I had heard more than I wish I had about that happening. All of a sudden a few years ago, the sign was changed and it had morphed into Glory to God American Catholic Church. That denomination evidently went under and now they have joined a North American Old Catholic Church out of the North East (headed by an ‘archbishop’ who received his formation via mail) and the pastor has been consecrated a bishop.
