Spanish Bishops Sound the Alarm about Dwindling Vocations in their Country

At the end of their plenary assembly, the president of the Episcopal Conference and archbishop of Valladolid, Cardinal Ricardo Blasquez, gave a remarkably pessimistic speech:

Young people seem to be absent from the Church, that has been as it were affected by a cooling of the Faith. The Church does not matter to them, it does not interest them.

The archbishop voiced his “worry” at the “shortage of priests” in the country. In 2017, 397 priests passed away and only 109 were ordained.

The assessment is severe, but it is easily explained by the context of a society that has been freed from any moral constraint: young people are given over to themselves, and the spirit of sacrifice has disappeared.

The president of the Episcopal Conference lamented that young people opt for a life “outside of the ecclesial sphere, see no interest or consistence in the religious environment, and thus live in a certain form of indifference.”

Religious indifference, cooling of the Faith, lack of a spirit of sacrifice, crisis of the priesthood. We cannot but confirm this analysis, but also point out that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre expressed it word for word a long time ago and resolved the problem by founding seminaries to form truly Catholic priests, with the true sacraments that give divine grace and the true Sacrifice of the Mass in its unchanged rite.

And we can complete this clear-sighted analysis by adding the loss of the sense of God’s greatness in the heart of so many Catholics and priests, as Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the SSPX, pointed out in his sermon at the Chrism Mass in Econe on March 29, 2018:

When we see what is happening in the Church today, we truly have the impression that, shall we say, the sense of God, the sense of God’s greatness, of the truth of God, Our Lord, has been lost. And that this new liturgy causes men to lose this sense.