Catholic and Loving it!

Fr Longenecker has an interesting article up today about the relationship between our contracepting culture and the vocations crisis.

His thoughts on this are very close to mine...

We have experienced a radical change in the deeper understanding and expectations of marriage. Before the sexual revolution, a young Catholic boy or girl experienced a family context in which being a husband or wife, father or mother, would have demanded a natural kind of self sacrifice.

...

It was within this context of self-sacrificial family life that a young man or woman's vocation to the priesthood or religious life would have been formed. The young person therefore did not question the demand for a life of self-sacrifice; it was assumed that this was the foundation of a good life. The question, then, was which manner of sacrifice is best for the individual: Dying to self through marriage and family, or dying to self through a religious vocation?

Now, because of artificial contraception, the whole underlying assumptions and expectations about marriage have shifted. Marriage is no longer a way to give all, but a way to have it all. Therefore, when a young person today considers a religious vocation, they are not choosing between different paths of self-sacrifice; they are choosing between a life that seems to have it all and a life that seems to have nothing. They must choose between a home in the suburbs, 2.5 nice children, and a double income or total self denial. The choice is between a familiar form of hedonism or an inexplicable form of heroism.

[link]

The priestly vocation crisis is a natural consequence of the marriage crisis because like it or not, the priesthood depends on marriage. Priests come from families.

It is difficult to think of anything that could more seriously undermine the sacrament of marriage than contraception. In marriage two people give themselves physically and spiritually to one another, the physical act of having sex is a sacramental. It is a sign and a symbol of this union.

Contraception physically breaks the sign and symbol of the sacrament. This is the equivalent of baptism without the water, or spitting out the communion host. I am fairly sure that if you spat out the body of Christ your priest would have something to say about it, yet if you treat the body of your spouse in a similar way he will probably have nothing to say about it.

Bishop Drainey has spoken extensively about the way everybody seems to think that priests are going to come from other families in other parishes.

Perhaps the time has come for him to start speaking about the way that everybody seems to think that people are going to come from other families.