Synod 2020. Number 16. Abolishing the Priesthood

There is an article in this week's Catholic Herald by Sohrab Ahmari which resonated with me as giving a clue to the dark and hidden message behind much of the "updating" / archeologicalism / Modernism seen in the Church today. That those driving the agenda have a radical fanaticism behind much of the seemingly liberal and popular "reforms" that is unseen by the well-meaning folk in in the pew - to whom this frightening anarchy of revolution is presented as a few nice ideas to help us get along with the world and modernise a bit. 

The article is entitled "Abolishing the priesthood would tear the heart out of the Church." Indeed it would. 

In some of our own Archdiocesan Synod meeting I've heard the potshots taken against clericalism. The reasoning seems to go: 

clericalism is bad

Priests are clerics

Therefore priests are bad... 

...let's get rid of them.

Or at least, get rid of them insofar as we've understood the term cleric by this distorted logic. 

Let's be clear "clericalism" thus understood as domineering privilege, has nothing to do with wearing a collar or vestments. The same looking down your nose at others attitude exists in any walk of life and may exist most fiercely in a lay person as much as an ordained person. Ahmari draws attention to this and other false arguments in this brief but insightful article. 

What I see in many of the arguments lauded as sensible and in keeping with the modern world to bring us up to date a bit by which so many are taken in, is precisely this anarchist agenda which can only lead to the abolition of the Priesthood and therefore, ultimately, as the abolition of the Church. Some of the suggestions that pop up as a result of this show an absolute lack of any understanding of the theology of the Church  as She has understood Herself for 2,000 years. With no theology or philosophy behind them other than a worldly reaction to the world's criticisms of the Faith.

Strangely enough, it means that those proposing these allegedly "new" ideas are in fact the true reactionaries because they are really (sometimes unbeknownst to themselves) putting forth arguments that are the bread and butter of the secular world around us. They want to be very conventional - drawing no criticism from our godless society. 

True progress for the human person, as ever, lies not in following the fashions of the world but in the radical following of the teaching of Our Lord and it is those teachings that have been enshrined in the Church since day one and remain so. The fallacy that if we abolish the Church we can live the Gospel can only be the work of the Devil.