Hey Father Frank, "Don't you read the newspaper?"

As I wrote a decade ago,

Like many young Catholic males of the 1970s and early 1980s, I was attracted by the heroism of clerical and religious life and wondered whether I might be called to serve God as a priest or religious. It that same era, I was blessed to know a young priest, who was about 10 years my senior. Father Frank was extremely bright and a New Yorker, through and through. He liked me, because I was comfortable with his banter: The man loved to argue!....

Father Frank was not above punctuating his points with the rhetorical question, "Don't you read the newspaper?"

While I was ill equipped in the late 1970s and early 1980s to put it in clear language, I once suggested to Father Frank that there was an undervaluing in the Church of the Sacrament of Marriage....Father Frank returned my volley with a not so gentle reminder of how wrong he thought me to be....he was absolutely right theologically, [but] he was missing an historical/sociological phenomenon, called "clericalism":...

this clericalist way of thinking overlooks the reality and relevance of unique personal vocation – the particular, essentially unrepeatable role in the carrying-out of his redemptive plan to which God calls each baptized person (Russell Shaw, On Clericalism, 5/6/08).

[In addition to clericalism, that era saw failures to proclaim the truth about human sexuality!] At least since the late 1970s / early 1980s, numerous Catholics (clergy, religious, and laity) have been acting as though

sexual acts were NOT reserved for married couples,
sexual acts need NOT always be open to life, and that
marriage itself was NOT indissolubile.

When bishops, priests, deacons, religious, and lay people have difficulty understanding the exalted calling to marriage - the call to cooperate in God's very work of creation in bringing forth new human lives - we must sadly realize that "clericalism" is alive and well.

Treating marriage as less than the exalted calling it is has done none of us any good (blog, 10/25/15)

What's Going On Here?

I visited the novitiate for Father Frank's order one weekend in the early 1980s. Though I had a master's from a school thought to be very progressive, something left me uncomfortable. Looking back, I think it was the disproportionate amount of effeminate behavior I saw from the supposed future priests.

Fast Forward

As I noted previously, the Mother church of Father Frank's order has been at the forefront of efforts to undermine what the Church proclaims about human sexuality - most recently with James Martin, SJ.