A good (no pun here) number of local priests go wayward in their Sunday homilies. In their attempt to pep up listeners, they do stand-up comedies that leave people laughing but never strengthened as a Christian. At home from
church, people remember the joke and not much else and thus live on as if the Mass was just another Sunday staple served like pochero on the dining table for family weekend gettogethers.
And yes, many local priests seem to have built-in allergies towards confessionals. Rather, the Sacrament of Reconciliation. They can make it to ribbon-cutting ceremonies and even musicals, but living most of their hours in the confessional as Padre Pio did? I’ve heard a few of them explicitly declaring in their homilies that going to Confession was no longer necessary, the result being that he ran out of consecrated (?) hosts during communion.
I am not advocating rebellion against wayward priests. Every priest was ordained as Jesus Christ’s representative on earth.
On this ground, they should be respected.
But priests who have lost the spirit of their vocation should be whipped to senses by telling to their faces they have been drowned, perhaps by overconfidence nurtured by the near-fanaticism of Filipino Catholics who would go to Sunday Masses, have their babies baptized, have their dead blessed and offered Masses for, have themselves married as a matter of, well, religious addiction before men of cassocks, including those who feel their following will ever be a given in this Catholic country.
Sister Lucia, the visionary of Fatima, had something to say about fallen priests. In an interview with Fr. Fuentes, she said: “Father, the devil is in the mood for engaging in a decisive battle against the Blessed Virgin. And the devil knows what it is that offends God the most, and which in a short space of time will gain for him the greatest number of souls. Thus the devil does everything to overcome souls consecrated to God, because in this way the devil will succeed in leaving the souls of the faithful abandoned by their leaders, thereby the more easily will he seize them.”
“That which afflicts the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Heart of Jesus is the fall of religious and priestly souls. The devil knows that religious and priests who fall away from their beautiful vocation drag numerous souls to hell. The devil wishes to take possession of consecrated souls. He tries to corrupt them in order to lull to sleep the souls of laypeople and thereby lead them to final impenitence.
He employs all tricks, even going so far as to suggest the delay of entrance into religious life. Resulting from this is the sterility of the interior life, and among the laypeople, coldness (lack of enthusiasm) regarding the subject of renouncing pleasures and the total dedication of themselves to God,” she said.
During his visit to Fatima in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI also touched on the same issue when he said:
“As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice.”
Priests have to be prayed for. Especially in our days.
