Editor’s note: we received this submission from an anonymous seminarian, and have chosen to run it as such. It is the cry — and the challenge — of a child to a neglectful father: “Why weren’t you there to protect me when that was your job?” It’s the cry — and the challenge — of a man who has given his life to a cause, only to discover that the guardians of that cause no longer believe in it.
It’s a cry of the heart and a challenge to our shepherds that many of us know all too well. It is a calling out that expects no answer, and to which none is likely to be given. We implore your prayers for the author, and for all of the faithful who find themselves where he is in these dark times.
I’m finishing up my theology studies and planning to leave the seminary. I know I shouldn’t go into public ministry. I’ve become disillusioned and resentful. I don’t believe in what the Catholic Church is teaching, and I don’t want to help perpetuate what it is doing. After almost 10 years of discerning a call and pursuing a vocation, it seems like I’ve wandered down a dead end road, and ended up stranded in the woods. I was naïve enough to assume that the Catholic faith was practiced in the Catholic Church, but experience has taught me that the faith is no longer welcome in the Church.
I would advise against pursuing a vocation in the Church today, and I wouldn’t even recommend the Church to anyone. What could anyone expect to find but spiritual abusers who refuse to enter the Kingdom of God and try to prevent others from doing so?
Honestly, not much of my faith has survived the seminary. I could not tell you one teaching of the Catholic faith that isn’t always changing. I don’t think we’ve even begun to acknowledge the extent to which modernism has undermined the foundations of the faith. The Church is crumbling into quicksand, and we are scolded ad nauseum that the Church still has to change more with the times. Jesus said, “let your yes mean yes and your no mean no”, and we respond, “not either yes or no, but both yes and no.” We call good evil, and evil good. We guard a false peace of compromise in contradiction, and cultivate diseases of corruption and decline. The Church is like a wet cardboard box, and the bottom is falling out.
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