p/c Caminante Wanderer. The three munera, or duties, of the priest are to teach, sanctify and govern. Since the 1990s, the "teach" aspect of the priesthood has been relegated to the laity. The "sanctify" aspect of the sacraments remains somehow with the priest, but is treated as shallow magic-tricks at most Nordo parishes. Finally, the "govern" aspect of the priesthood is relegated entirely to the bishop as an unchecked juggernaut CEO of positivistic-obedience in areas he is taken seriously. In places the bishop is not taken seriously, he's seen as just a cover for child-abuse and Democratic funding. I want to write about the most under-rated munera of the priesthood, [...]

p/c Remnant Magazine The leftists who hijacked the hierarchy since the 1960s (and especially since 2013) state that the main problem in the Catholic Church today is "clericalism." They condemn anything maintained by traditional Catholics that still delineates between the clerical state and the lay state. For example, they believe even something as innocent as the cassock must be deemed a sign of arrogance and "rigorism." Like Marxists have always done, their thrust is to blur the lines between Holy Orders and marriage... so as to destroy both sacraments. But it is precisely the leftists who believe they can replace God's own revelation of Himself in both dogma and liturgy. [...]

I went to a mainstream seminary that touted itself as conservative but not traditional.  There, we had a Monsignor from South America who taught us canon law, and he was admittedly quite traditional.  He told us one day in class that back in Peru, there were no vocation directors.  Msgr. explained that good priests spiritually inspired young men to become priests.  If a lazy parish priest did not get vocations from their parish, he got sent to the hinterlands.  I liked this plan, but even in seminary I recognized that this sounded like the opposite of North America, namely, where good priests get sent to the hinterlands. In any case, [...]

Jesus said, I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor Me.—John 16:1-3. What is interesting about Our Lord's above prediction for the coming persecution against His Apostles in Acts of the Apostles is that the Jewish leaders who would kick them out of "the synagogues" would do so because they would believe "they are offering service to God."  In other words, the religious leaders who [...]

My article earlier this week is called Are Young Priests More Orthodox? In it, I explained that young guys enter seminary pretty conservative, but slowly become more liberal after ordination. I asked a 58-year-old Catholic Priest friend in the South of the United States for feedback. (He belongs to a different Southern diocese than the one featured in the picture above.)  I half-expected him to tell me I was too cynical, so I was surprised that he texted back 21 points much more critical of the American bishops' interactions with their priests than anything written in my blog two days ago. I asked him if I could use it in [...]

Are young priests more orthodox than previous generations? The good news is the answer is "yes," as proven in the below study.  But this means only one of two things:  Either younger priests are truly more conservative than older priests -or- the diocesan priesthood in America liberalizes many or most. The above is a picture of the Theological College, the Catholic seminary producing priests across the street from Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington DC.  One of the research groups at CUA is called The Catholic Project which recently published a study on how American Catholic priests self-identify as either orthodox or progressive.  The title of the study is [...]

The top left is the late Fr. Enrique Tomas Rueda and the top right is the late Bishop Bonaventure Broderick.  Both are, in some sense, among the original "canceled priests."  I re-publish this tragic but inspiring account of Fr. Rueda written with the permission of Remnant Newspaper. Tu Es Sacerdos in Aeternum—by Thomas Ryan I hadn’t heard from Fr. Rueda in at least two months when an email message, forwarded multiple times, showed up in my inbox last month indicating he’d died. In time, I would learn there was some rather bizarre news associated with that of Father’s passing. Fr. Enrique Tomas Rueda was a native of Havana, Cuba. In fact, he’d [...]