The Wall Street Journal ran a headline that is just plain confusing. I don’t know if it’s intended to be confusing or not but it is. They wrote:
“U.S. Catholic Priest Are Increasingly Conservative as Faithful Grow More Liberal.”
Are the “faithful” really growing more liberal? Or is that just a colloquialism for Catholics in general? You could possibly say that “self-identified” Catholics become increasingly liberal but the “faithful?” No. Probably not.
Also, they don’t actually mean that priests are becoming “increasingly conservative.” They mean they are more “faithful.”
You see the confusion?
Conservative or liberal is such an odd thing to argue within the Church. Those are political designations and what the article speaks about isn’t politics, it’s about Church teaching.
I get it. These people marinate in politics. It’s everything to them. They’re on Twitter all day every day. Any issue that comes up, they view it through the prism of politics.
They’d probably be right to think that those who are pro-life and follow Church teaching are also conservative politically. They likely will be but it’s not what they’re actually talking about in the article.
I know as a former journalist, many times the people who write the article don’t write the headline. But the WSJ needs to do better.
The piece is rather interesting however in that is shows that young priests tend to be more faithful to Church teaching than older priests, bishops, and cardinals. This could be a very good thing for the Church. But first we have to survive these darn boomers.
WSJ:
U.S. Catholic bishops elected conservative leaders last month, continuing to resist a push from Pope Francis to put social issues such as climate change and poverty on par with the bishops’ declared priority of opposing abortion.
The U.S. hierarchy’s orientation reflects the wider trend of an American clergy with values at odds with those of an increasingly liberal laity and a pope who has encouraged the questioning of once-taboo subjects and leniency on some teachings of sexual morality.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declined to comment.
Research on Catholic clergy by the Austin Institute has found that younger Catholic priests and priests ordained in more recent years tend to be noticeably more conservative than older priests on a host of issues, including politics, theology and moral teaching. The Survey of American Catholic Priests has found that since the 1980s, successive cohorts of priests have grown more conservative, according to a 2021 summary report.
Regarding the church’s prohibitions of contraception, masturbation, homosexual behavior and suicide, the impossibility of women’s ordination to the priesthood, and the necessity for salvation of faith in Jesus, each successive 10-year cohort of priests supports church teaching more strongly than the one before it. Those ordained in 2010 or later are the most conservative of all—and the least happy with Pope Francis, with roughly half disapproving of him, according to the Austin Institute survey. The Vatican didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“People are looking for answers and stability,” said the Rev. Daniel Hess, who was ordained in 2011 and is dean of students at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and School of Theology in Cincinnati. “There actually is a treasury of teachings and of truths and of deeply Catholic content that is part of our inheritance that was not even shown to us or known, and it’s sort of being rediscovered. So I think in some ways that leads to a certain traditionalism or conservative approach.”
While young priests hold on to tradition, Catholic laity have been moving in a more liberal direction. A 2021 survey for America magazine by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University found that more than 52% supported the ordination of women as priests, 62% said priests should be allowed to bless same-sex relationships and only 38% were very or somewhat opposed to euthanasia or assisted suicide.
Pope Francis has opened up discussion on topics previously deemed closed, including contraception, homosexuality and priestly celibacy.
The contrast is even sharper between young priests and their lay contemporaries. Thirty-five percent of millennial Catholics have considered leaving the church because of its teaching on LGBT issues, the CARA survey found…
The Rev. Peter Hannah, a member of the Dominican order from California who was ordained in 2014, said that for many young clergy “John Paul II was a prophetic voice in the wilderness of modern secularism…an incredible inspiration and saint.”
Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego, a leading liberal among U.S. bishops, said Pope Benedict XVI’s warnings against what he called the “dictatorship of relativism” in modern culture inspired many priests ordained in the past decade and a half to preach a faith based on definitive truths.
The Rev. Benjamin Petty, who was ordained in 2019 and serves as campus chaplain at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., said, “Today’s society has this aggressive sense of nothing’s really true unless you make it up yourself.” He added, “So the church and her teaching and her consistency and moral voice is this place of stability, place of security, place of safety to receive something good and old.”
According to the Rev. Ezra Sullivan, an American who was ordained in 2011 and teaches at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome, the youngest U.S. priests are a postmodern generation disillusioned with the ideas of progress and religious pluralism that found favor at Vatican II. Instead of focusing on interfaith dialogue for the sake of social justice, these priests are more likely to stress the reinforcement of Catholic identity and the winning of converts, said Father Sullivan, author of “Alter Christus,” a new book about the priesthood.
Such attitudes distinguish those priests from Pope Francis, views of whom vary sharply by age. Almost 80% of priests ordained before 1980 “approve strongly” of the current pontiff, compared with 20% of those ordained in 2010 or later, according to the 2021 survey. Nearly half of the younger priests disapprove of the pope, either “strongly” or “somewhat.”
“What is remarkable is that these men, who were indoctrinated into total loyalty to the pope, so easily dropped this loyalty when a new pope was elected,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, author of “Inside the Vatican,” who was ordained in 1974. “Now they are only loyal to the pope if he agrees with them.”
Strawman alert.
Fr. Thomas Reese says these young priests aren’t “loyal” to the pope because they disagree with him. For decades, Fr. Reese sought to undermine the papacy in every way possible. But now these young disloyal priests won’t get off his lawn and just do what he says.
This trend of young priests being increasingly faithful scares the hell out of these older priests, bishops, and cardinals. Sure, a certain number of them will be corrupted along the way and these older clerics are counting on that. But the sheer numbers frightens them and reminds them that their time is short. This is why we’re seeing this insane push, this mad dash toward insanity from the Vatican and the German bishops.
