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One fact that is as true of spiritual maladies as physical ones is that infections produce antibodies.
And the spiritual disease of Modernism that has afflicted the Mystical Body of Christ is no exception.
The new analysis of a study that claims to be the largest national survey of Catholic priests conducted in more than 50 years has found, among other things, that priests describing themselves as “progressive” are practically going “extinct” among U.S. seminary graduates, with the vast majority of young ordinands describing themselves as conservative and orthodox.
An important reminder that every branch cut off from the True Vine must wither.
Of note, the researchers assert that self-described “liberal” or “progressive” priests have all but disappeared from the youngest cohorts of priests and that priests describing themselves as “conservative/orthodox” reached more than 80% among those ordained after 2020.
Anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty who’s been paying attention to the situation inside the Church for the past several years foresaw this sea change. As others have noted, you never see Leftist Catholics grow closer to Christ. Instead the trajectory always goes LeftCath -> Episcopalian -> Unitarian -> Witch.
The report says it shows a “significant divide” between the political and theological self-identification of older priests vs. younger priests.
“Simply put, the portion of new priests who see themselves as politically ‘liberal’ or theologically ‘progressive’ has been steadily declining since the Second Vatican Council and has now all but vanished,” the report asserts.
So much for glib claims of Vatican II having been a “Modernist Council.”
By their fruits you shall know them.
“More than half of the priests who were ordained since 2010 see themselves on the conservative side of the scale. No surveyed priests who were ordained after 2020 described themselves as ‘very progressive.’”
The researchers said a full 85% of the youngest cohort describes itself as “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox” theologically, with only 14% describing themselves as “middle-of-the-road.”
The report also says that nearly 70% of priests ordained in the mid- to late 1960s describe themselves as somewhat or very “progressive.” By 2020, fewer than 5% of priests describe themselves that way.
It’s no big mystery why the new generation of priests are hewing closer to traditionalism.
After all, priests are men, and all men are products of their time and place to some degree.
Priest ordained in the mid-late 1960s were Silents and Boomers brought up on End-of-History Neoliberal triumphalism. The prevailing wisdom held that Liberalism was here to stay, so the Church’s best move was to come to terms with the dominant social paradigm through open dialogue.
Now that Liberalism has metastasized into an apocalyptic Death Cult, and three generations have come of age in the wreckage wrought by attempts to negotiate with these Cultists, the spell of Modernism has been broken.
But declining neuroplasticity is a hell of a drug, so everybody knew we’d have to wait for the Boomers to age out before the required course correction could take place.
Father Carter Griffin, rector of St. John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C., said most of the young men coming to his seminary are looking to be “part of the solution … they want to make themselves available for the needs of the Church.”
He also cautioned that young men describing themselves as “orthodox” do not necessarily have a preference for “traditionalist” practices. Rather, he said, young men entering the seminary today are looking to become a part of something bigger than themselves, he said, preaching the Gospel and serving the poor in the context of total fidelity to the Church.
“Nobody wants to give their life for a question mark … I think the ones who are going to come forward who are open to the idea of entering the priesthood are going to be the ones who are most intent on ensuring that they are Catholic and that they’re on board with everything,” Griffin said in an interview with CNA.
“[T]he men coming forward for the priesthood now are men who really love the Lord and love the Church. They believe in her. They believe that he founded her. And so there’s not an instinct at all to believe anything other than what the Church believes, to teach what the Church believes,” Griffin continued.
“I think many of them are reacting to the wreckage of secular materialism, and many of them have seen the effect of that materialism, that secularism, on their peers. They’ve seen people trapped in sin, and they want to make a difference in the world. They want to be people who are helping to bring light and joy and hope back into a world that seems to have lost them.”
The fedora-tipping Redditors forecasting the death of the Church since 2007 were wrong after all. The Modernist virus wasn’t terminal. Instead, it made living the basics of the Christian faith require heroic virtue. So the lukewarm are boiling off, leaving only those who want to be in the Church and who believe everything she teaches.
Today’s young priests didn’t grow up in the victorious West of the post-WWII boom. They saw their childhood friends ground up in the meat machine of the Global War on Terror and OD on fentanyl while those who survived eked out a living under crushing debt, unable to form healthy relationships.
It’s not hard to see that these travesties result from the former Christendom turning its back on Jesus Christ. And when they understand the problem, men of integrity grasp the solution.
So make sure to pray for priests. The new crop know the crisis we’re facing and want to help. Thank God!
We’re gonna sail through this storm. Many of us won’t live to see clear skies and smooth seas, but the Church will remember herself again.
And once again, she will undertake the slow labor of rebuilding civilization.
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The Protestant side has a similar, but not identical trend, owing to its lack of a monolithic leadership structure. Mainline denominations have mostly suffered institutional capture and are hemorrhaging members who either leave for a more Biblical denomination or just admit they were never serious about it and sleep in Sunday while finding a different social club.
The more Biblical denominations are going farther right and have cast off their predecessors’ skittishness at being seen as “too political.” Starting with Gen X, each successive generation of pastors sees more people willing to come as close to the line as possible without losing tax exempt status.
The conflict can be seen in full force in the UMC and SBC. The UMC suffered top down institutional capture, and now that it’s metastasized, younger congregations and clergy are excising the denomination itself, calling themselves “Global Methodists,” and the reaction caught the leadership so off-guard they have engaged in the grave sin of taking fellow believers to court in order to keep properties that they have no way to use, given the exodus of their congregants, often in violation of the rules they wrote.
The SBC, in the meantime, is finding that they are not as in control as they think they are, and the leadership is figuring out that their successors will not carry on their work and that they’ll get hit far harder than the Methodists if they push forward.
The major difference in Protestant, especially Evangelical circles is a massive age gap. Gen X and Y were sold the value of “marketplace ministry,” a reaction to prior generations’ attitudes that kept the church confined to the building, but as a side effect, many denominations have a clergy shortage, soon to be fixed by an influx of Zoomers who have fire under them and know how to operate in a hostile culture.
Providence is also showing that, in the digital age, a shocking number of missionaries to closed countries are getting caught and expelled, as leadership is slow to adjust to digital security, and this is plugging clergy holes with people who know what they’re about and have a passion for the work.
We’re in for a rough few decades, but God has already put things in place in ways we could never have planned for.
I can speak to the situation in the UMC. It’s not as simple as old clergy and congregants staying and younger clergy and congregants leaving. The schism cuts across most, if not all, demographic lines. I was at the ordination service for the Convening Conference of the East Texas Annual Conference of the GMC in College Station, Texas back in February. They had 90 ordinands, ranging from seminarians in their 20s or 30s to folks who had been in Methodist ministry for decades and were being (re-)ordained into the new denomination. Some ordination classes in other new annual conferences have been larger still. I think one in Western New York recently had 144 ordinands.
I do agree institutional capture is an primary factor. We caught the Modernism bug, to be sure. The folks hitting the exit ramp now and leaving for the Global Methodists, the Free Methodists, or simply remaining independent have largely done so because they felt the UMC had left them behind in its lean to the left theologically, or by its refusal to hold to the center by enforcing our doctrinal standards. That’s a broad generalization, I grant, covering several decades of strife since 1970’s, but roughly accurate. Sometimes I think we’re dealing with long tail repercussions of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.
I have remained in the UMC, theologically conservative though I am, because I hope and pray God is not done with her yet. I want to believe it so, and hope I’m not kidding myself. I take Brian’s warning very much to heart: “Every branch cut off from the True Vine must wither.” I fear for the future of my church.
I grew up in the SBC, and watching the leadership go from fairly conservative and orthodox to working with George Soros and talking about “no human can be illegal” in a decade or so was disheartening. A lot of the younger Baptists I know have either stopped participating in their local churches (shifting to online churches or house churches), or have gone to other denominations, or become Catholics or Orthodox.
I am reminded of Mark Steyn who said of European demographic winter but applies here I think: When it’s a fight between 200 teenagers and 600 octogenarians, bet on the teenagers.
The future belongs to those who show up for it.