Saint Alphonsus Liguori speaks to the Synod

The below comes from Volume III of the great Moral Doctor’s Ascetical Works, The Great Means of Salvation and Perfection.  The comments below are directed at priests without valid vocations (that is, they became priests with no real call from God, and/or from improper motives), but of course apply to those careerists, as our Pope likes to say, who have climbed into the episcopate.  Saint Alphonsus closes by noting that it is very, very much better to have a very few fully orthodox priests with valid vocations than large numbers of unfaithful priests.  I think the history of the Church more than adequately bears that dictum out.

Saint Alphonsus:

[P]riests whom God has not sent to work in His Church He shall abandon to eternal ignominy and destruction………

In order to be raised to the sublimity of the priesthood, it is necessary, says Saint Thomas, for a man “to be exalted and elevated by divine power above the natural order of things,” because he is appointed the sanctifier of the people, and the vicar of Jesus Christ.   But in him who raises himself to so great a dignity [of the priesthood, without a calling from God] shall be verified the words of the Wise Man: “There is that hath appeared a fool after he was lifted up on high” (Prov XXX:32).  Had he remained in the world, he should perhaps have been a virtuous layman; but having become a priest without a vocation, he will be a bad priest, and instead of promoting the interest of religion, he will do great injury to the Church.  Of such priests the Roman Catechism [Catechism of the Council of Trent] says “Such ministers are for the Church of God the gravest embarrassment and the most terrible scourge.”  And what good can be expected from the priest who has entered the sanctuary without vocation?  “It is impossible,” says Saint Leo, “that a work so badly begun should finish well.”  Saint Laurence Justinian has written: “What fruit, I ask, can come from a corrupted root?”  Our Savior has said, “Every plant which my heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up” (Matt XV:13).  Hence Peter de Blois writes that when God permits a person to be ordained without a vocation, the permission is not a grace but a chastisement.  For a tree which has not taken deep root, when exposed to the tempest, shall soon fall and be cast into the fire.  And St. Bernard says that he who has not lawfully entered the sanctuary shall continue to be unfaithful; and instead of procuring salvation of souls, he shall be the cause of their death and perdition.  This is conformable to the doctrine of Jesus Christ: “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold…..the same is a thief and a robber” (Jn X:10).

Some may say, if they only were admitted to orders who have the marks of vocation which have been laid down as indispensable, there should be but few priests in the Church, and the people should be left without the necessary helps.  But to this the Fourth Lateran Council has answered: “It is much better to confer the priesthood on a small number of virtuous clerics, than to have a large number of bad priests.”  And Saint Thomas says that God never abandons his Church so as to leave Her in want of fit ministers to provide for the necessity of the people.  St. Leo says that to provide for the wants of the people by bad priests would be not to save but to destroy them.

So what are some of the most fundamental marks of a true vocation?  St. Alphonsus answers:

1. A good intention: that is, the intention to embrace such a state only to please God, and to arrive more surely at the haven of salvation.

2. The inclination and the aptitude to exercise the duties proper to this state.  

3. The knowledge of the duties that this state imposes, and the firm will to fulfill them till the end.

4. That there is no grave impediment, such as the great poverty in which one might leave one’s parents [or a tendency towards incontinence and/or profound perversion]

5. The favorable advice of a wise director.

—————End Quote————–

The Church has always been afflicted with bad, unworthy priests and prelates.  Such is the nature of fallen man.  But rare has been the time where there have been deliberate, coordinated efforts not just to permit unworthy men to the priesthood, but to deliberately frustrate the true callings of many good and faithful men and to prefer the fallen, the heretical, and the perverse to them.

There is no surer means to undermine the Faith and cause souls to fall away than to admit men without true vocations to the priesthood, and to simultaneous block those who do have valid calls.  The effort to distort and ultimately, in some hearts, to destroy the priesthood has been around for at least a century or more, but it exploded into full flower in the second half of the twentieth century.  Whether this was due to communist conspiracy a la AA-1025, the gradual emergence of modernists from the shadows of Pope Saint Pius X’s great efforts to suppress them, or some other factors does not, in the end, truly matter.  What matters is that the Church, as has been clearly shown in lawsuit after lawsuit, scandal after scandal, admitted huge numbers of utterly unworthy men to the priesthood, and probably continues to do so today (we pray, at least at a far, far lesser level than a few decades ago).

And, there is great evidence that sexular left-wing modernists in places of great influence in the Church have conducted this mass deformation and debilitation of the priesthood deliberately and systematically.  One only has to read books like Goodbye, Good Men to see ample evidence of this great plot against the Church.  The Arians and some other heretics have, of course, done the same, but I don’t know if it was at the same scale, or as devastatingly effective in the very low sorts who were brought into the priesthood.

How many millions of souls have fallen away due to scandals associated with the priesthood and episcopate?  How many more will do so?  The reality of the loss of so many souls already only adds still more emphasis to Saint Alphonsus’ words above.   “But woe to those who bring scandal, it would be better that a millstone should be hung around their neck and they should be cast into the sea, than that they should scandalize one of these little ones”  (Lk XVII:1-2).

That verse alone stands as an eternal rebuke to those who would scandalize souls through “pastoral” approaches of unprecedented novelty and disconnect from the eternal practice of the Faith.