What’s difficult to explain to young people ? Not much, thanks to the internet.
What’s difficult to explain to young people who want nothing to do with the priesthood , even if they don’t want an excuse to join in the lifestyle of their non-Catholic peers?
Above all, surely, there is the horrifically blood-curdling and nauseating assurance from failed priests that they can be assured of their prayers.
Go to a First Communion service, and watch all those lovely wee persons go to accept the Body and Blood of Christ, their love and trust shining in their faces. Imagine how they must feel years later as they discover that the priest who gave them the Host is revealed as a mere paedophile, the one type of criminal considered beneath all others in prison, by even the worst of prisoners. Then to have their idealism flung in their faces by the assurance that they are “remembered in their prayers” by these deviants.
Why do the deviant clergymen do this? Is it simply cynical derision ? Or is it the bitterness and despair of a failed, aberrant existence ,and by poisoning the concept of prayer, a final rejection of Christ ?
Who knows? To be charitable, are not these “prayers” an inevitable symptom of a defective vision of the priesthood, an enduring , invincible vision of the priesthood as a special mark , not to be removed even by the sordid details of paedophily, apparently a mere blip in the passage of a Tridentine priest through life ?
This is the real problem, and in its way even more terrifying than the sordid betrayal of the idealism of our young people by individual priests.
The Tridentine priesthood in particular has built an ethos about itself as part of the very fibre of the Church over the last thousand years .
How can we bring it home to our Tridentine bishops and to our Tridentine priests that their time has come – and has gone. The celibate priest can obviously find a home in the religious orders, on whom the Church must depend yet again.
It is time for them all to realise that valid ordination must be extended beyond the celibate clergyman supported by a parish to the parishioners themselves if the Flock all over the world are to be energised and invigorated by a new method of bringing the Body and Blood of Christ to them as He asked.
We ask, as we continue to do – what is the problem in doing this ?
Why are people having to live without the Eucharist ?