Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests (Ascension)

GOFP 56

Guide to Ongoing Formation for Priests

intensity. Racism and old nativist bigotries continue to foster injustice and fray the solidarity of our society. New prejudices against people of faith or moral conviction have added to this disorder. Political ideologies are intensifying, and their core constituencies are drifting further and further apart. The worldviews of opposing camps are increasingly at odds, even incompatible. Moral bonds once forged by a common outlook seem to be disintegrating. Tensions are rising, and few in our country seem able to have sober discussions. This atmosphere of bitter antagonism has seeped into the Church and even into the priesthood. It does not make the pursuit of holiness any easier for our priests, who themselves are sometimes swept into a highly emotivist approach to resolving conflict. 56 A final, but by no means inconsequential, source of pressure on priests comes from our highly secularized society. We can easily identify bright lines of disagreement between the Church’s doctrine and the increasingly intolerant doctrines of secular ideals, starting with the strident rejection of the right to life of the unborn. This core tenet of the secularist creed will inevitably start to include—indeed has already started to do so—other vulnerable populations such as the elderly and the terminally ill. Other elements of our society just as strongly oppose any openness to migrants and refugees. Priests and faithful Catholics will continue, at great personal cost, to work at the forefront of the campaign to protect the rights of those who otherwise have no voice in society. 57 This secularist outlook has also championed a view of the human person and human sexuality that directly opposes the Christian point of view. In the 1960s the sexual revolution detached sexual behavior from traditional social and religious norms. It then evolved into the acceptance, even celebration, of ever more deviant sexual behavior.

26