How is your attendance at TLM?
  • ServiamScores
    Posts: 2,912
    Dad29, while I agree with your sentiment (of course Salvation is THE reason), Charles is right. I am aware of a parish in my diocese where the RE coordinator was expressly told by the pastor not to teach the faith to the kids. She was preparing a curriculum and he told her not to teach any of it; "only teach them basic prayers. Anything more and they will just walk away because they won't believe it." This same priest, however, has admitted recently "well, that was the first time I lost my faith..." I suspect he shouldn't be given charge over any soul but his own, and even then it sounds like he needs help.

    It's precisely this lack of formation that enables them to walk away. There's nothing compelling in milquetoast catholicism. Milquetoast anything else is at least marginally more palatable. No youth is given a compelling reason to stay. No one is challenged to heroic virtue. These kids aren't taught the lives of the saints. They aren't exposed to true eucharistic piety where grown men are bowed down with their faces literally on the floor. They don't see other people acting like it's real. They see nothing but hypocrisy (they aren't wrong, usually) and are naturally repulsed by it, and who can blame them?

    To make matters worse, the world tells them what we believe. Or rather, the world tells these kids what they think we believe. These messages are quite obviously very wrong, but the kids aren't taught any different, so they can't discern that for themselves. All they hear is that we are a bunch of homophobic bigots who keep women oppressed and believe in anti-science. No one deconstructs all of these things to open their eyes. Like a moth to the fire, they fly, and die.

    So it's fine to speak in lofty platitudes, but the reality is much more in your face, I'm afraid.
    Thanked by 3CharlesW CHGiffen irishtenor
  • a_f_hawkins
    Posts: 3,478
    The West (Western Europe, North America, and colonies) has been mission territory for many decades. Probably well over a century.
    “The appearance of the church in the modern era shows that in a completely new way it has become a church of heathens, and increasingly so: no longer, as it once was, a Church made up of heathens who have become Christians, but a Church of heathens, who will call themselves Christians, but have really become heathens. Heathenism is entrenched today in the church itself. That is the mark of the Church of our time and also of the new heathenism. This heathenism is actually in the church and a church in whose heart heathenism lives”
    (Joseph Ratzinger, Hochland, October 1958)

    https://www.hprweb.com/2017/01/the-new-pagans-and-the-church/
    All Vatican II did was to lift the lid off of the ecclesiastical libido and to thereby allow for the first time a full public expression of the unbelief, brewing for centuries, of the laity and the clerics alike.

    Thanked by 2CharlesW CHGiffen
  • Jeffrey Quick
    Posts: 2,092
    the RE coordinator was expressly told by the pastor not to teach the faith to the kids.

    Did she do it anyway, or did she walk?
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,232
    Serviam...........did those children have "parents"?

    Did those "parents" NEVER discuss Catholicism with the children?

    If that's the case, then Charles is correct.
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • Chris Garton-Zavesky
    Posts: 6,902
    The church has been turned into a touchy-feely circus and is more of a social club than a place to worship.


    You're describing an AFFECTive Church. What's the cause?
  • Elmar
    Posts: 506
    Eternal salvation IS the first, best, and only reason for staying. But some don't care, or somehow believe that they'll be saved no matter what.
    I believe that lack of good catechesis is at the heart of this problem - including my own omissions as a father...
    Very rare are the priests in my experience who don't combine orthodox catholic catechesis with an off-putting attitude of pretending to be the last upright christians in an ever more rotten society. (We had one in our parish the first years after his ordination, he moved to Rome recently and I pray that he will become bishop in our country some day).
    Thanked by 2CharlesW Chrism
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