Friday, March 29, AD 2024 6:07am

PopeWatch: MenBeGone

VATICAN-POPE-AUDIENCE

If you go further into the video, more dancing girls appear!  As I looked at this, I was thinking, what does this remind me of? Then I realized; it was a film on TV last weekend, The Ten Commandments. There were lots of scenes involving women dancing with tamborines. First in Pharaoh’s throne room, then at Mount Sinai (Edward G. Robinson-as-Dathan: “Where’s your Moses now, eh?”)  St. Patrick-of-Seattle Dancing Girls: “We’re ready for our closeup, Mr. DeMille!”

Father Martin Fox commenting on the video below

Whenever the Catholic Church is attacked as a patriarchal institution PopeWatch tends to guffaw.  The feminization of the Church has helped drive countless men away from the Mass.  Father Z gives an example:


I have to share this video from You Tube I was sent by email as reason #756 for Summorum Pontificum.
This is:

Easter Vigil Liturgy of St Patrick Catholic Church, Seattle, [NB] 2010. The seven readings from the old testament are presented in Word, Sign, Music and Dance. Here, the third reading from from the book of Exodus is sung and danced.

She gets the tambourine at about 1:00 and then the view pulls back so that you can see the whole thing, the combo with the bongos on the right, the person doing sign language on the left, the girl in the middle jumping around.


No wonder men don’t go to church.

That said, I saw this story at Catholic World Report:

The Case for a Mass Conversion of Men
Research shows that almost 9 out of 10 Catholic men don’t participate in a Catholic activity outside of attending Mass; if men aren’t being reached in the Mass, they aren’t being reached.

Despite the fact the New Evangelization has been an ongoing emphasis by the Catholic Church for over forty years, it has failed to stem the disastrous losses of the faithful in the U.S. Since 2000, 14 million Catholics have left the faith, parish religious education participation of children has dropped by 24%, Catholic school attendance has dropped by 19%, baptisms of infants has dropped by 28%, baptism of adults has dropped by 31% and sacramental Catholic marriages have dropped by 41%. Something is desperately wrong with the Church’s approach to the New Evangelization.

Of Mass and Men

One reason the New Evangelization is faltering is because it is missing men. The New Emangelization Project has documented the serious Catholic “man-crisis” in the United States. 1 in 3 baptized Catholic men have left the faith and of those who remain, 50-60% of them are “Casual Catholics”, men who don’t know and don’t practice the faith. Of those who practice the faith, many are lukewarm, not converted to the point of conviction, a conviction in which they are prepared to make disciples for Christ and His Catholic Church. The New Evangelization has largely ignored men, with no substantial or sustained efforts to directly confront the Catholic “man-crisis”.

The Catholic “man-crisis” matters. The souls of men matter and many are being lost; for example, two thirds of Christian men are looking at porn at least monthly and the numbers are much higher for younger men. The faith of the children matter and huge numbers of young people are leaving the faith because they have followed their fathers out of the Church. Without a New Emangelization in which millions of Catholic men become newly committed to Christ and His Church, there can be no New Evangelization.

While a complex set of forces have driven the Catholic “man-crisis”, including both massive cultural changes outside the Church and serious missteps within the Church, the lack of engagement of men in the Mass is a major contributing factor: men don’t understand the Mass and well-meaning, but misinformed priests in many parishes have de-sacralized the Mass causing many men to simply “drift away.”

Why is the Mass a key driver of the Catholic “man-crisis”? Research shows that almost 9 out of 10 Catholic men don’t participate in a Catholic activity outside of attending Mass; if men aren’t being reached in the Mass, they aren’t being reached. Only about 1/3 of Catholic men are attending Mass on a weekly basis. Only 1 in 50 Catholic men have a monthly practice of Confession, underscoring the fact that many are attending Mass without a proper preparation to receive the Eucharist. 48% of Catholic men are “bored” in the Mass and 55% of Catholic men don’t feel they “get anything out of the Mass.” These statistics confirm what dozens of the New Emangelization Project interviews with top Catholic men’s evangelists know: men don’t understand the Mass. No man can truly understand the Mass and be bored.

[…]

Read the rest there.

 

 

Go here to read the comments.  Among religions Catholicism used to have a real genius for harnessing the energy of men and turning it towards devotion to God.  Over the past half century, as with so many other things, Catholicism has lost this.  This is a true crisis in the Church, something that a Pope should have high on his agenda.  Under the current pontificate we seem to be concentrating on bad solutions to lesser problems, while major issues in the Church, are completely ignored.  Other major issues being ignored include homosexuals among the clergy, unthinking pacifism being given doctrinal status, an absolute unwillingness to preach against divorce and contraception and a lack of any semblance of episcopal spine among Cardinals and Bishops.  Hmmm.  Maybe all these issues are related?

 

 

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Father of seven
Father of seven
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 4:30am

Fear not. An Encyclical on the environment will get them back.

Paul W Primavera
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 6:01am

I hate this feminist nonsense. Jesus set his face like flint to go to His death in Jerusalem. And Jesus rose from the dead never to be conquered again. Now that’s a real man.
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And our Blessed Mother followed Him to the Cross and stood there while He died. And when He arose She was there to greet Him. And She stayed with the Apostles at Pentecost. Neither Her Son’s death nor the impending Roman persecution after His Ascension deterred Her. No weak-kneed, yellow-bellied, cowardly worthless feminist was She, but a real woman. A real woman!
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I hate feminism with all the fabric of my being. It destroys and denigrates all that is truly both masculine and feminine for a sickening pretense at humanity. And all this originates from liberalism, the root, branch and stem of all of today’s evil.
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Yes, dancing girls – they used to dance before Ashteroth poles.

Sandy O'Seay
Sandy O'Seay
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 6:25am

Here’s my view as a convert since 2008 — I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition which is the essence of evangelicalism. We were taught that in order to be a good Christian, you had to evangelize, which is to say that every Christian had the responsibility of telling others about Christ everywhere and at all times. While, at times, there may be a certain discomfort in the comprehensiveness of that teaching, there is little question that it is effective. What I have seen in the Catholic tradition — which I dearly love, am committed to, and would never leave — is an utter lack of evangelism. In fact, many Catholics give the impression that they don’t want to talk about their faith. My thought is that if we had an evangelism program where we actually reached out to non-Catholics and non-Christians, we would fill up the Mass every Sunday and beyond.

Don Lond
Don Lond
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 6:50am

“Father of seven”
You read my mind, word for word.
Perhaps if we could only reduce enough CO2 the men would come in droves and many lost male souls would be saved?

bill bannon
bill bannon
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 9:07am

. I object to the bongo player in the video from a different angle. He has no natural rythmn flow. I’m an excellent conga player with flow …as though I were black…and it’s given me fast hands in martial arts because….it’s in effect a horizontal boxer’s speed bag. But you have to play fast like the Santana congueroes. I’ve done decades of speed bag in effect. Never box a mugger who is a conga or real bongo player…tackle him and work from there to chokes or arm bars. If he practises boxing combinations to boot and can hook off the jab….all the more so.
The Massachusetts Bishops are exhorting their state to not execute Tsarnaev because he can’t pressure cooker bomb anyone in jail….Romans 13:4 and it’s servicing God’s wrath…ignore…the Boston bomber whose family we gave aslymn when he was 8….and welfare. The Magisterium grew pacifist as the US grew stronger than everyone….the way the papacy was physically strong in past centuries through connectedness. Maybe the Magisterium is jealous of US power which it didn’t mind when Reagan and the CIA were apprising John Paul II of troop movements near the Polish border.
Romans 13:4 is more about executing to assuage God’s wrath ( which Aquinas said was really His consequent willing not emotional wrath at all)….Rom.13:4 never mentions deterrence though that is best done by execution according to the US Supreme Court in 1976 after it compared deterrence studies. The new dp position of the magisterium will get thousands of murder victims killed annually and not ten a year like the Inquisition….5000 divided by 500 years. Oh no…we are about to kill many through kindness…a lot like the sex abuse security we demonstrated for fifty years…we were kind to the perpetrators only.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 9:33am

Here is a conga player whom I’m sure is very fast in the boxing department….give it 5 seconds for the sound to kick in. Compare with the Mass bongo player. Which guy do you want to spar with…..

http://youtu.be/2Wv89NBLinE

Paul W Primavera
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 11:54am

“Catholicism Lite is the New Coke of religions.”
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More like cocaine – gets you high, makes you feel good, then let’s you down with a bang.

Steve D.
Steve D.
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 1:26pm

“Fear not. An Encyclical on the environment will get them back.”

LOL

bill bannon
bill bannon
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 3:15pm

In Sirach 42:14, it is written…” the severity of a man is better than a woman’s indulgence.”

See the context about raising a daughter but remember the phrase. It explains tons. ” Unthinking pacifism being given doctrinal status”… google ” fifty most murderous cities statista.com”. Of the fifty most dangerous cities on earth, 43 are in Catholic cultures in Latin America with no death penalties. Why didn’t the two previous Popes check such data? Because they turned a penology issue into a quick theology essay which like any opinion in theology can get by most Catholics with no research…even of the Bible….let alone murder stats.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 3:59pm

I wasted eight minutes of my life watching that tripe. Since I am almost 3,000 miles from Seattle I’ll never darken the doorway of that “parish”.

That is an atrocity of a Mass. Nonsense like this drives men away from the Church in droves.

Easter Sunday Mass was wonderful. I was at Immaculate Conception Church on Superior Avenue in Cleveland for the 8AM Low Mass. The church was not full – there was to be a High Mass at 11AM, but there were many families, some with young children. The priest’s homily was about the importance of prayer – daily prayer. Mass took just 45 minutes (not that I was counting) – and it was indeed wonderful!

The Mass of the Ages and its adherents will survive this time of nonsense, trouble and peril. The remnant will clean up the mess, pick up the pieces and start anew.

Kyle Miller
Kyle Miller
Thursday, April 9, AD 2015 10:39pm

“Horse and chariot… he cast into the sea!” You know what else I would like to cast into the sea? That entire presentation! Did you watch the video all the way through? If one dancer w/tambourine wasn’t enough, the aisle has more. And they’re ready to strut their stuff in the sacred space! Pope Francis, you like to make impromptu phone calls. Place one to this parish and give them an earful. Oh yea. “Who am I to judge?”

robert
robert
Friday, April 10, AD 2015 6:09am

wuerl, dolan, omalley. a trifecta of cowards.

James
James
Friday, April 10, AD 2015 8:14am

“Men don’t understand the Mass and well meaning, but mis-informed priests have de-sacralized the Mass causing many men to simply ‘drift away’.” Why are assumptions made that priests, and higher clergy are “well meaning?” I truly suspect that many in the clergy have an agenda, and that agenda is the total obliteration of mortal sin and hell. They want to turn the Catholic Church into the ‘church of what’s happnin now’! A church where people believe that there will never be any consequences for any behavior, no matter how egregious.

Franco
Franco
Saturday, April 11, AD 2015 7:14pm

I’m waiting for the modern church to announce the Gay
Mass where gay men are Altar Servers, standing before
the altar in Rhinestone studded Speedos and white wrist
cuffs, with huge gold medallions with an equal sign stamped
on their centers adorning the servers’ bare chests.

Sydney O. Fernandes
Sydney O. Fernandes
Saturday, April 11, AD 2015 8:57pm

These are the invisible hordes through the ages that mock Christ dying on Calvary.

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