Vocations

My church is beginning to show a growth in numbers of men who want to become priests, many of whom were born in this country.  Seems like a good thing, no?  Well maybe and maybe not.  There are two things that young people grow up with in their world.  One, there is little that seems permanent.  Technology changes.  Families move for jobs.  Divorce.  Different attitudes about God, church, belief and so on.  The second thing they grow up with is that they are not so important.  There may very well be no job for them in the secular world.  They don't count.  If there is a job it could be short term.  Profits trump personnel.  All this can bring a certain amount of anxiety and even fear.  Some seminaries give a solution.  Dress up in a lot of pomp and circumstance.  Always wear your clerical clothes, very upscale clerical clothes.  You are better than the laity.  This answers the fear of being unimportant.   The right clothes show importance, and that you are indeed different. They are taught that clothes will witness to their priesthood.   Then the seminaries teach a return to a church in which these men never grew up.  It is for the sake of tradition which means lots of focus on rules, how things are done, what is taught that mirrors a church before the 1960s, that decade of change and chaos.  These young men have a sense of self-importance and wisdom based upon neither experience or the gospel.  They like to live in the past and call it the present.  They encourage the pious to become more pious and the thinkers, innovators, to leave.  They endure Francis I.