Is it possible that the many blogs like ours are getting through ? Well yes, but just perceptibly , judging by two letters in this week’s ‘Tablet’.
One, from the Movement for Married Clergy, refers to ‘the diminishing diocesan clergy’. But it then advocates ‘admitting mature married men to the priesthood’, ‘mature’ here being coy code for ‘elderly’, we feel. Another letter on the same theme suggests adds ‘perhaps retired’ where ordination has been extended, but rightly wonders if ‘years of study and extended training’ are really necessary?
What is it with this confining the provision of the Eucharist to a few, this time the old ? We defy them to find any kind of restriction in Christ’s Eucharistic imperative. But above all- what age?
It must be remembered that the Church has lost two generations at least. So they should be talking to twenty-somethings. Twenty somethings, human experience tells us, are not normally particularly interested in old men. This probably applies particularly to Catholic twenty- somethings, with their burden of clerical dirty old men, selfish old men who covered up, and silent old men in episcopates who refuse to listen to Pope Francis’s invitation to consider extending ordination , and therefore prevent so many from receiving the Eucharist. We chose the word ’burden’ carefully, because the pederast priests will always be a cancer in their spiritual lives, a barrier to creating a sense of spirituality within their adolescent families, and a barrier, sometimes of bafflement and sometimes of spite, between them and neighbours and those in the workplace.
And ‘mature’ doesn’t make sense given the usual ‘Ah, but’ of those who try to use so-called ‘tradition’ as a weapon. Some look back- and ‘nostalgia’ doesn’t do it justice for intensity – to the good old days when umpteen priests were ordained every June . And they were all about 25 years old ! Were they all stored away like wine to mature? As we say in the West of Scotland, that will be right ! In many a parish, one could easily be crushed underfoot in the rush to receive the young priest’s blessing, accepted by many as primus inter pares.
(I halt to remind you that nobody in To Feed The Flock is under 80 years of age)
Why should those who provide the Eucharist have to be old, or celibate, or well-educated in theology, or have to be anything else ? Why should anyone deliberately, for any human reason, create a barrier of any kind between the blazing incandescent gift of the Eucharist through the Incarnation and the rest of the human race ? How do those that do sleep at night?
But it is Christmas, and we do try show that we have accepted its message, and are above all charitable. . To Feed The Flock humbly asks you to share our prayers that those who through whatever fault-line in human frailty , be it some pathetic distortion of the importance of professional solidarity, be it through some even more pathetic loyalty to an institution, be it a sense of personal insecurity in a rapidly changing world, be it incipient senility, or simply stupidity, may accept the validity of ordination through the Apostolic Succession and let parishioners provide the Eucharist for the Flock.

A Merry Christmas to all our readers.