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Ok so I am at a Notre Dame wedding where I went. I’ve fallen away from the news of the place the last few years. A few people did the student to administrator route so I got some news on how the place is doing. The school no longer has priest in the dorms. From what I can guess it’s because people aren’t entering religious life so they lack the numbers. Notre Dame isn’t the church but I do think it had a special place in American Catholicism.
I feel like this has a culture war point. The right is no longer reproducing itself. The right perhaps is a larp from people who remember the old days but aren’t living that life. Which would explain how someone like Trump could be the chosen leader.
When I went there we would all do our things during the week and live together then our rector a Priest would give mass. And if you wanted to you could go to daily mass and walk down the hall.
I feel like this is anecdotal but there is something here when an institution is failing to reproduce itself.
A couple of years ago, I was driving up to Chimayo, New Mexico, and there were signs all along the road forbidding people from just walking outside for their annual pilgrimage "because of Covid." There did not seem to be any conscientious objectors. This did not look like the actions of believers who thought that their traditions had a meaningful impact on reality. I've tried going to Catholic churches sometimes, but at least around here they seem even more ethnic than the Greek churches.
At the same time, why equate Catholic culture with "the right?" It seems like it agrees with other rightists on some things (traditional family structure), and has a lot of room for disagreement on others (how best to help the poor, economic matters).
Religious colleges and seminaries more generally seem to have been doing poorly lately, and I'm not certain what's going on. Young men attend American Orthodox seminaries hoping to become priests, and drop out to wander the world in sorrow instead. They are allowed to marry, so that's not an impediment there. The ones who stay seem to learn a decent amount of liturgical ability, but struggle with even extremely kind, vibrant, theologically conservative parishes. I'm not sure what's going on. A while back I almost studied at St Vladimir's, but withdrew my application after some consideration of "what are you going to do afterwards? [edit]Marry a priest?" and when to an equally useless but charming Great Books college instead. I've had friends try to attend Evangelical colleges as well (e.g. Moody), and didn't seem to have gotten much out of it. The only part one talked about was how he'd signed a covenant not to drink alcohol on breaks -- nothing about his studies or anything. I feel concerned, but in a distant kind of way, without any particular ideas about how to shore things up.
I think this has to do with @To_Mandaley's thread from a few days ago. From my personal experience, if you're raised in a secular environment where it's taken for granted that everything has a scientific explanation and religion is fundamentally woo, you can find faith but not rock-solid belief.* You can become a Christian like this but I think it's hard to become a priest. I would feel like a fraud trying it myself.
*Arbitrary definitions:
Faith = the decision to act as if God exists, to hope and pray for him
Belief = the conviction that God exists, to the extent that if someone somehow threatened to torture your family to death if you are wrong, you'd still say he exists.
Maybe that is it. There was an older priest who retired a few years ago, who I would go sit and listen to for hours every week. He would quote poets and monks about things like "to truly become a Christian, it is necessary to first become a poet." But, really, I think everyone loves him because he seems to really believes in God. He talked a lot about God, and not so much about proper behavior. Not that there's anything wrong with talking about proper behavior, but it isn't really different from what everyone everywhere is talking about all the time.
There's a new priest now, and I think he's probably trying his best. He and his wife are putting energy into curriculum and organization and small group leadership and whatnot. When I asked to baptize my children, he gave probably an officially approved answer about how I have to come more consistently even though that's really difficult with small children, and suggested a four hour long liturgical event. He suggested that it didn't really matter if the children are upset about that. I did not get the impression he thinks baptism does anything or that it's important (previously he put it off because I needed to find godparents, and am not great at social stuff and he had no suggestions to offer), so we still go once a month or so, and they still aren't baptized. He mentioned praying at home being the best way to get children to be respectful at church. I don't know if he also thinks praying at home is a way to communicate with God or not, that never seems to come up. I'm pretty sure the other priest does think that communion with God is an important part of prayer, and this seems special about him.
The first priest mentioned a couple of times almost losing his faith in seminary, and wondering if he should become a Jungian counselor or something instead. Maybe having to officially codify what amount to intuitions and feelings and hopes is probably pretty rough on people's faith. I wonder if there's a way not to ruin the faith of people who want to serve the church so much?
It seems like this is more or less exactly what you’d expect a true-believer clergyman from an apostolic denomination to say.
Yeah, he’s probably not a bad priest, at least not going off on wild zeitgeist chases like some churches.
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