July 11, https://tribtimes.com
3 views
Skip to first unread message
William Zambrano MD
Jul 10, 2025, 3:21:13 PM7/10/25
to Tribulation Times
Tribulation Times
(Jer 1:17-19) Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them. For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the LORD, to deliver thee.
FR. JOHN HARDON, S.J.: We are living in the most critical age of human history. Too many Catholics are passive, silent, indifferent while the enemies of Christ are active, vocal, and militant. Where is our faith? Where is our zeal?”
CRISIS MAGAZINE: Take Courage and Show Thyself a Man
CATHOLIC ANSWERS: The Real Story of Christ’s Warrior-Monks
TRADITION AND SANITY SUBSTACK: Preventing a Priestless Future; How the Church must reclaim the sacred masculinity it abandoned
The Catholic Church on earth has a priest problem. A big one. Not the kind you read about in headlines. The kind you see in empty seminaries. The kind that shows up in statistics and makes Vatican officials sweat through their vestments.
Over the last five decades, America has lost 40% of its priests. France ordains fewer men each year than most suburbs produce high school graduates. German seminaries remain largely empty. Ireland struggles to fill even a single seminary class. The same institution that survived Roman persecution, barbarian invasions, and two world wars can’t convince young men to become priests. Something fundamental has broken.
The spiritual entropy isn’t just outside the Church—it’s inside the rectory. Modern priests spend more time in committee meetings than in prayer. They spend more time worrying about parish budgets than souls. They trade the language of sin and salvation for soft talk about “journeys” and “lived experiences.” The priesthood was stripped of everything that made it attractive to brave men. Early Church priests faced lions—literally. They were stoned, beheaded, and burned alive. They knew the job might kill them. They took it anyway. Today’s priests face parish council meetings and liturgy planning committees. Far from being warriors, they are middle managers. Administrators, not heroes.
No young man dreams of presiding over bingo night. He dreams of slaying dragons. When that dream dies, so does the calling. If that sounds harsh, good. It should. Because if the Church were thriving, I wouldn’t need to write this.
One of the deepest, least acknowledged reasons young men are fleeing the priesthood is this: it’s been feminized in all the wrong ways and stayed masculine in all the wrong ways. Let me explain. We’ve turned a calling that once demanded foresight and fortitude into something soft, bureaucratic, and vaguely apologetic. Every homily must now be a gentle conversation. Every statement, a balancing act. Dialogue replaces declaration. Offense is treated as heresy. The Gospel gets strained through the filter of therapy-speak and HR lingo until it has the moral clarity of twice-brewed lukewarm tea.
But while the message gets softer, the structure stays hard. Celibacy? Still required. Marriage? Off the table. You’ve got the bones of ancient sacrifice—but none of the spirit that once made it noble. The worst of both worlds. All the cost of traditional masculinity with none of the glory.
Young men see it. They feel the contradiction deep in their gut. They’re told to renounce sex, fatherhood, and the comfort of a partner — not for the thrill of spiritual warfare, not to offer the mighty sacrifice of heaven and earth, not to baptize new nations or stare down tyrants — but to attend diocesan diversity seminars and send reminder emails about parish bake sales. They’re expected to become celibate shepherds of a flock that would rather they just smiled more and stayed quiet. It’s like training to be a Navy SEAL and getting assigned to customer service. “Congratulations, you’ve completed Hell Week. Here’s your headset — you’ll be taking complaints about the communion wafers being too bland.” Meanwhile, the Church keeps wondering where all the warriors went.
The masculine spirit hasn’t died. Not really. It’s just been insulted.
If you’re going to ask a man to sacrifice everything — his body, his future, his legacy — then you had better provide him with a mission that justifies that sacrifice. The early Church understood this, indeed the Church of every age before our own. It didn’t just tolerate masculine energy. It demanded it. The saints didn’t avoid danger. They sprinted towards it. The priesthood wasn’t a role. It was a war post.
Real men don’t mind rules and don’t fear sacrifice. What they can’t stand is hypocrisy. What repels them is a structure that demands heroic restraint while rewarding cowardly conformity. They need clarity. They need ranks to climb, missions to complete, a brotherhood to belong to. The tragedy is that the Church already has all of this. It just forgot how to present it (and some of its leaders stopped believing in it). And men—especially the kind who once would’ve walked barefoot into martyrdom—have taken the hint. They’re walking away.
.........
A real priest doesn’t look like someone you’d “follow” on your screen. He looks like someone who’s seen something you haven’t. He moves through the world marked. Set apart. Other. He’s supposed to be strange — in a good way. He’s supposed to unsettle the room just by entering it. In my opinion, this is what we’ve lost completely. The sense that priests are different. Not better than laypeople, but different. Called to something that requires a fundamental reordering of priorities, desires, and daily life.
Instead, we’ve made them accessible. Relatable. “Just like us, but with a collar.” We’ve stripped away the mystery and wonder why the mystique is gone. We’ve made them friendly and approachable and then act shocked when young men don’t see anything worth sacrificing for.
The problem runs deeper than recruitment strategies or seminary reforms. It runs to the heart of what we think the priesthood is for. If priests are just therapeutic facilitators with sacramental authority, then frankly, we don’t need that many of them. A few social workers with the power to consecrate bread will suffice. But if priests are bridges between heaven and earth, if they’re meant to be walking reminders that another world exists, if they’re supposed to smell like eternity and move like men who’ve touched the divine — then we need to start acting like it.
We need to stop apologizing for the strangeness of the calling and start celebrating it. We need to stop making excuses for celibacy and start presenting it as what it is: a radical witness to the primacy of the eternal over the temporal. Most importantly, we need to stop trying to make the priesthood appeal to everyone and start making it appeal to the right men. The men who don’t want a job — they want a mission. The men who don’t want comfort — they want conquest. The men who don’t want to fit in — they want to stand out for something that matters.
These men still exist. They’re not scrolling through seminary websites looking for career counseling. They’re not impressed by digital outreach campaigns or diversity initiatives. They’re looking for something real. Something dangerous. Something worth dying for. And when they find it — when they encounter a Church that believes in its own message enough to demand sacrifice, that values beauty enough to surround itself with it, that takes the priesthood seriously enough to make it both terrifying and irresistible — they won’t need to be recruited. They’ll come running.
So yes, let’s make priesthood great again. To achieve this, however, we must make priests radiate with something the world doesn’t fully understand. When that happens, you won’t need a digital campaign. Because men won’t be scrolling. They’ll be going unto the altar of God, the God who gives joy to their youth.
VIA: Sam Guzman’s book, The Catholic Gentleman: Living Authentic Manhood Today (2019): “Holiness: The word is haloed by mystique. For some, it is an appealing and enthralling word, inspiring struggle toward a goal. For others, it is an intimidating word, signaling an impossibly remote and unattainable ideal…The simple fact, though, is that holiness isn’t for a select few; it is for every everyone. Holiness consists in one thing only: obedience to the will of God at every moment. That’s it. Seek God’s will and do it, and you will be holy; you will be a saint. Being holy is not always easy. For Jesus, it was “horrifically painful” but it saved us for our sins. Being holy is not just a matter of showing up at church occasionally. It starts there. We grow by showing up, day after day. We mature by never quitting, despite frequent falls, discouragement, and darkness”.
Ladder of Divine Ascent excerpt: Step 1- "On Renunciation of the World"
4. The irreligious man is a mortal being with a rational nature, who of his own free will turns his back on life and thinks of his own Maker, the ever-existent, as non-existent. The transgressor is one who holds the law of God after his own depraved fashion, and thinks to combine faith in God with heresy that is directly opposed to Him. The Christian is one who imitates Christ in thought, word and deed, as far as is possible for human beings, believing rightly and blamelessly in the Holy Trinity.
"Have ANY Catholic Question? Just ask Ron Smith at: hfmin...@roadrunner.com
Subscribe Unsubscribe View Archives
READ THE BIBLE IN ONE YEAR: https://bibleinayearonline.com/july-oyb/?version=63&startmmdd=0101
July 11, 2025(Jer 1:17-19) Thou therefore gird up thy loins, and arise, and speak unto them all that I command thee: be not dismayed at their faces, lest I confound thee before them. For, behold, I have made thee this day a defenced city, and an iron pillar, and brasen walls against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee, saith the LORD, to deliver thee.
FR. JOHN HARDON, S.J.: We are living in the most critical age of human history. Too many Catholics are passive, silent, indifferent while the enemies of Christ are active, vocal, and militant. Where is our faith? Where is our zeal?”
CRISIS MAGAZINE: Take Courage and Show Thyself a Man
CATHOLIC ANSWERS: The Real Story of Christ’s Warrior-Monks
TRADITION AND SANITY SUBSTACK: Preventing a Priestless Future; How the Church must reclaim the sacred masculinity it abandoned
The Catholic Church on earth has a priest problem. A big one. Not the kind you read about in headlines. The kind you see in empty seminaries. The kind that shows up in statistics and makes Vatican officials sweat through their vestments.
Over the last five decades, America has lost 40% of its priests. France ordains fewer men each year than most suburbs produce high school graduates. German seminaries remain largely empty. Ireland struggles to fill even a single seminary class. The same institution that survived Roman persecution, barbarian invasions, and two world wars can’t convince young men to become priests. Something fundamental has broken.
The spiritual entropy isn’t just outside the Church—it’s inside the rectory. Modern priests spend more time in committee meetings than in prayer. They spend more time worrying about parish budgets than souls. They trade the language of sin and salvation for soft talk about “journeys” and “lived experiences.” The priesthood was stripped of everything that made it attractive to brave men. Early Church priests faced lions—literally. They were stoned, beheaded, and burned alive. They knew the job might kill them. They took it anyway. Today’s priests face parish council meetings and liturgy planning committees. Far from being warriors, they are middle managers. Administrators, not heroes.
No young man dreams of presiding over bingo night. He dreams of slaying dragons. When that dream dies, so does the calling. If that sounds harsh, good. It should. Because if the Church were thriving, I wouldn’t need to write this.
One of the deepest, least acknowledged reasons young men are fleeing the priesthood is this: it’s been feminized in all the wrong ways and stayed masculine in all the wrong ways. Let me explain. We’ve turned a calling that once demanded foresight and fortitude into something soft, bureaucratic, and vaguely apologetic. Every homily must now be a gentle conversation. Every statement, a balancing act. Dialogue replaces declaration. Offense is treated as heresy. The Gospel gets strained through the filter of therapy-speak and HR lingo until it has the moral clarity of twice-brewed lukewarm tea.
But while the message gets softer, the structure stays hard. Celibacy? Still required. Marriage? Off the table. You’ve got the bones of ancient sacrifice—but none of the spirit that once made it noble. The worst of both worlds. All the cost of traditional masculinity with none of the glory.
Young men see it. They feel the contradiction deep in their gut. They’re told to renounce sex, fatherhood, and the comfort of a partner — not for the thrill of spiritual warfare, not to offer the mighty sacrifice of heaven and earth, not to baptize new nations or stare down tyrants — but to attend diocesan diversity seminars and send reminder emails about parish bake sales. They’re expected to become celibate shepherds of a flock that would rather they just smiled more and stayed quiet. It’s like training to be a Navy SEAL and getting assigned to customer service. “Congratulations, you’ve completed Hell Week. Here’s your headset — you’ll be taking complaints about the communion wafers being too bland.” Meanwhile, the Church keeps wondering where all the warriors went.
The masculine spirit hasn’t died. Not really. It’s just been insulted.
If you’re going to ask a man to sacrifice everything — his body, his future, his legacy — then you had better provide him with a mission that justifies that sacrifice. The early Church understood this, indeed the Church of every age before our own. It didn’t just tolerate masculine energy. It demanded it. The saints didn’t avoid danger. They sprinted towards it. The priesthood wasn’t a role. It was a war post.
Real men don’t mind rules and don’t fear sacrifice. What they can’t stand is hypocrisy. What repels them is a structure that demands heroic restraint while rewarding cowardly conformity. They need clarity. They need ranks to climb, missions to complete, a brotherhood to belong to. The tragedy is that the Church already has all of this. It just forgot how to present it (and some of its leaders stopped believing in it). And men—especially the kind who once would’ve walked barefoot into martyrdom—have taken the hint. They’re walking away.
.........
A real priest doesn’t look like someone you’d “follow” on your screen. He looks like someone who’s seen something you haven’t. He moves through the world marked. Set apart. Other. He’s supposed to be strange — in a good way. He’s supposed to unsettle the room just by entering it. In my opinion, this is what we’ve lost completely. The sense that priests are different. Not better than laypeople, but different. Called to something that requires a fundamental reordering of priorities, desires, and daily life.
Instead, we’ve made them accessible. Relatable. “Just like us, but with a collar.” We’ve stripped away the mystery and wonder why the mystique is gone. We’ve made them friendly and approachable and then act shocked when young men don’t see anything worth sacrificing for.
The problem runs deeper than recruitment strategies or seminary reforms. It runs to the heart of what we think the priesthood is for. If priests are just therapeutic facilitators with sacramental authority, then frankly, we don’t need that many of them. A few social workers with the power to consecrate bread will suffice. But if priests are bridges between heaven and earth, if they’re meant to be walking reminders that another world exists, if they’re supposed to smell like eternity and move like men who’ve touched the divine — then we need to start acting like it.
We need to stop apologizing for the strangeness of the calling and start celebrating it. We need to stop making excuses for celibacy and start presenting it as what it is: a radical witness to the primacy of the eternal over the temporal. Most importantly, we need to stop trying to make the priesthood appeal to everyone and start making it appeal to the right men. The men who don’t want a job — they want a mission. The men who don’t want comfort — they want conquest. The men who don’t want to fit in — they want to stand out for something that matters.
These men still exist. They’re not scrolling through seminary websites looking for career counseling. They’re not impressed by digital outreach campaigns or diversity initiatives. They’re looking for something real. Something dangerous. Something worth dying for. And when they find it — when they encounter a Church that believes in its own message enough to demand sacrifice, that values beauty enough to surround itself with it, that takes the priesthood seriously enough to make it both terrifying and irresistible — they won’t need to be recruited. They’ll come running.
So yes, let’s make priesthood great again. To achieve this, however, we must make priests radiate with something the world doesn’t fully understand. When that happens, you won’t need a digital campaign. Because men won’t be scrolling. They’ll be going unto the altar of God, the God who gives joy to their youth.
VIA: Sam Guzman’s book, The Catholic Gentleman: Living Authentic Manhood Today (2019): “Holiness: The word is haloed by mystique. For some, it is an appealing and enthralling word, inspiring struggle toward a goal. For others, it is an intimidating word, signaling an impossibly remote and unattainable ideal…The simple fact, though, is that holiness isn’t for a select few; it is for every everyone. Holiness consists in one thing only: obedience to the will of God at every moment. That’s it. Seek God’s will and do it, and you will be holy; you will be a saint. Being holy is not always easy. For Jesus, it was “horrifically painful” but it saved us for our sins. Being holy is not just a matter of showing up at church occasionally. It starts there. We grow by showing up, day after day. We mature by never quitting, despite frequent falls, discouragement, and darkness”.
Ladder of Divine Ascent excerpt: Step 1- "On Renunciation of the World"
4. The irreligious man is a mortal being with a rational nature, who of his own free will turns his back on life and thinks of his own Maker, the ever-existent, as non-existent. The transgressor is one who holds the law of God after his own depraved fashion, and thinks to combine faith in God with heresy that is directly opposed to Him. The Christian is one who imitates Christ in thought, word and deed, as far as is possible for human beings, believing rightly and blamelessly in the Holy Trinity.
Prayer request? Send an email to: PrayerR...@aol.com
"Have ANY Catholic Question? Just ask Ron Smith at: hfmin...@roadrunner.com
This month's archive can be found at: http://www.catholicprophecy.info/news2.html.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages