By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Marine Corps generals understand more about Jesus, sacrifice, and the Cross than some priests and bishops.
It was a generally acknowledged fact, and confirmed by my experience serving across several Marine Corps commands, that generals, and other officers at lower levels, would request priests when the subject of chaplains came up. As confirmed by their experience coming up as officers through the ranks, priests could be packed up and ready to go without any strings attached, such as family crises, when it came time to shove off for deployments or field exercises. Because priests were married to the Church only, they could be prepared at a moment’s notice to be ready to move out, a basic expectation of every Marine and Sailor.
The priest was more quickly prepared than some poor PFC Shmuckatelli, whose wife wasn’t coping with his absence well and beseeching him to call in sick or otherwise get permission to stay back while the unit moved out. Often it was the chaplain called in by a frustrated command to work with the family to get the Marine back into deployable status. Undeployable Marines eventually wash out and are sent home.
I first served as an officer in combat arms Armor branch in a tank battalion. There is no more pressured position in the Army as a whole at “the tip of the spear,” where “everyone else is support.” There I witnessed up close and personally the issues that affect families and that sometimes rightly pull the soldier or military member away from active service in order to properly care for his or her loved ones. It is a delicate balance between two worlds. The mantra “the mission comes first” must at times yield to the needs of those closest in the bonds of affection and duty under God.
Thus, the attraction for commanders of all kinds to know that, when “the balloon goes up,” the chaplain will be ready to go and support all of the command personnel assets as part of the general effort to keep the troops fit for duty.
The Church has given, through the synods, a microphone to some priests, bishops, and cardinals who seem to no longer grasp the nature of the Lord’s Cross, as the essence of our faith and fight against evil. They have given into the delusion that the Church must now change her mission to serve some this-worldly agenda rather than salvation.
Take Fr. Brendan Hoban, for example, who is now deceased, but was given a platform through the Irish Synod to spout nonsense. He seemed bitter that the the pendulum is swinging back toward the Church’s tradition and away from excesses and abuses perpetrated in the “spirit” of Vatican II.
“They are traditional, they wear black, soutanes, they want to talk about sin, they want the Latin Mass! I despair of young priests.”
Wearing black is now a problem? Absolutely every kooky theory and ecclesial mutilation is proposed.
Here is Fr. Hoban again: “The first thing that’s going to happen is ordaining married men. The second thing is optional celibacy. The third thing is eventually they will ordain women. It has to go that direction.”
Why does it have “to go in that direction”? Why try everything in the Catholic Church but Catholic faith? Everyone outside the Church is already doing these things. The Church doesn’t have to provide them and the tradition works where it’s not given back piecemeal to the people in bite-size portions. In my parish, over a period of under twelve years, we gave the families full access to the Tradition, through the Traditional Mass, the sacraments, devotions, liturgical art (provided by the parishioners themselves), and the Holy Spirit gave the growth. We blossomed from a TLM of about 30 souls on Sunday to a church packed with up to 140. And that was at only one of two Traditional Masses available on Sundays. We continued to offer the Novus Ordo on Sundays, of course, but that has remained flat at around 40 persons.
Here is a proven method that would be adopted by any worldly entity as a recipe for success. But, in the Church, we refuse it?
The Church in Ireland is in massive and rapid free fall. Doing the same thing over and over again will not bring back the faithful. The bleak stats are shared on post at Catholic Arena blog. This is from the Irish “Synod Synthesis” report:
COVID is a factor in the Church everywhere. It was the reaction to COVID restrictions that told the real story of faith. The blogger goes on to report on the church implosion, which was in place before COVID although certainly may have been exacerbated by it: “41 percent of Catholics who regularly attended Mass before COVID are no longer doing so.”
Pope Francis is an additional element to be considered. “A paltry 32 percent of men and an even smaller 25 percent of women said they were satisfied with the way that Pope Francis is leading the Church: 44 percent of men and 35 percent of women said that Ireland has ‘lost her soul’….
“There are currently 56 men studying for the priesthood in Ireland. With the numbers of priests and nuns collapsing in dramatic numbers during COVID: for example, 34 priests died in the Dublin Archdiocese during the pandemic while only one was ordained.
“The Synod in 2021…has so far been universally detested by clergy and parishioners alike” as those who attended the initial consultations in parishes found that their comments and ideas were completely ignored by a Synod Synthesis report that was eerily close to the rhetoric of certain liberal Catholic lobby groups in the Irish church.
“With all of these statistics in mind, we leave these words from the Synod Synthesis report, which chose to attack not the priests who have driven people away, but the younger priests trying to clean up their mess. Some participants were concerned that some younger priests are very traditional and rigid in their thinking and may not have the requisite skills for co-responsible leadership.”
So, yes, some people do want to be fully Catholic, and respond well to a robust offering of Catholic life. Some do not. But that has been always the case. The answer is to give everyone truth by making it consistently available. Sadly, yes, the consequences are their own if they refuse salvation.
What the synods propose is to lie to those who refuse the faith, as with the German synod perverting the idea of blessings by conferring such on the sin of same-sex marital simulation. This is a crisis of previously unimagined proportions and is taking the Church to the brink of schism.
What is responsible for this? We can blame the Internet, which gives a platform to anyone with access to it. But ultimately, we must see this struggle through the lens of faith if we hope to find a real solution. The Internet may be more of a symptom than a cause. A real solution must be sought through faith to restore faith.
Hatred of the cross and of Christ is at the heart of these heresies and of apostasy in general. To reject the cross is to reject the Catholic faith. We are many who know and love our faith! We will obey.
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