Crisis

A friend sent in the following table.  I don't know its source and therefore its accuracy, but the statistics seem reasonable.

Number of Seminarians in the United States:

Congregations, 1965, 2000,  %  Decline

Jesuits 3,559, 389, 89%

Franciscans 2,551, 60, 97%

Christian Brothers 912, 7, 99%

Benedictines 1,541, 109, 93%

Redemptorists  1,128, 24, 98%

Dominicans 343, 38, 89%

Maryknoll 919, 15, 98%

Oblates of Mary Immaculate 914, 13, 99%

Vincentians 700, 18, 97%

OFM Conventual 511,  49, 90%

Passionists 574, 5, 99%

Holy Cross Fathers 434, 132, 70%

Augustinians 483, 14, 97%

Capuchins 440, 39, 91%

Precious Blood Fathers 521, 27, 95%

La Salette Fathers 552, 1, 99%

Carmelites 545, 46, 92%

Holy Ghost Fathers 159, 9, 94%

In any organization in the world such declines in the key component of the organization would be the cause for heads to roll and for the most fundamental assessment of what the organization was doing.  Any organization except the Catholic Church that is.  The Catholic Church, faced with this disaster, just rolls bureaucratically along, seldom mentioning the problem, conducting business as usual.

Well, business as usual will result in the near-destruction of the Church, at least in the United States and Europe, and most likely within a decade.  I am very familiar with a monastery in my area.  They are now down to 12, and the average age is well past 60.  It is easy to see that within 10 years or so the monastery will be unable to continue.  And it is easy to generalize from this particular to the Church institutions as a whole.

Anyone of minimum intelligence and foresight can see where the crisis in the seminaries is leading.  So why is there such a lack in concern and corrective action among the Church hierarchy?

The inability of the Church to do anything meaningful about this crisis, leads one to look for a reason for such paralysis.  Many commentators point to accommodation to modernism initiated at Vatican II.  And certainly that factor is key.  But, the issue in recent years has become a lot more concrete that just generalized modern-ism. From the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI at least, the evolving central direction of the Church has been toward pleasing Judaism.  This stance disarms the Church completely and sets the stage for all the things the Rabbis would want from the Church  -- namely to become more "tolerant", to evolve toward a Catholicism that more reveres the Holocaust than the 2000-year-old teachings of the Church, and to become a Church that is in reality based on the Noahide principles promoted by the Rabbis.

A revival of the seminaries will probably take an act of God to completely shake up the existing bureaucratic inertia and fundamental disorientation.  Oh, that it would come soon.  In the meantime, one must fight to recreate the Church.  What we need is a modern-day Joan of Arc who can hear the word of God and act uncompromisingly on it against the Church's enemies to reorient the Church.  A Joan of Arc who can rally the forces who stand on the timeless teachings of Christ and the Church.

Michael Matt and his traditionalist current believe that the revival in the Latin Mass will lead to a revival of the Church, including the seminaries.  This belief is naive, to say the least.  Benedict himself knows that a re-institution of the Latin Mass will not stand in the way of his "reform of the reform", and his steady development of philo-Judaism in the Church, a trend to which Matt is evidently completely blind.