Some people are waking up in America. Yesterday, after the TLM, some of the young men, all under thirty, were talking about the hard times to come and the purging of the Church-their words.
They see that the crisis of leadership and the lack of vocations are two streams of liberalism merging to form a flood coming soon.
That they are young fathers is significant. That their wives tend to be home schoolers is also significant.
The move to realizing that the Church in the near future will not be the Church of the past becomes more clear daily.
My diocese will have 42 active priests for 100,000 Catholics next year.
Some dioceses must close churches. How bishops will decide this may be determined by two things. The first would be financial stability or viability. In this diocese, all the parishes, amazingly, as in the black. So a secondary manner of determining closing would be a count of how many baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and so on would be coming out of a parish. Parishes which are not growing would be considered not sacramentally viable.
Of course, the mega-churches would get more attention than the small country churches, and this diocese has many, many small country churches.
You should be paying attention to your own dioceses. In addition, one local diocese, not this one, lost twenty-two seminarians recently.
One may ask whether the screening of the seminarians is faulty; whether the seminary is faulty, as in are there still lavender mafias, or is the selection commitee faulty?
Another problem is that many young men have no idea of what it really means to be a priest. They have never had to sacrifice, coming from small families where they did not have to share or meet any expectations.
The truth is that many Catholics in a few years will not have access to daily Mass or regular sacraments.
The laity is heavily to blame, for not encouraging vocations in the family.
The purgation of the Church will include many people waking up and regretting that they did not support vocations, not merely by money, but with the offering of their own children to God.
I think that a bishop should ask this question of his parishes. Which parishes have produced vocations to the priesthood and the religious life in this diocese, and which have not? Close those which have not...........