Dear Father Angelo,
I’m a 25 year-old Law student at … University. My journey of Faith has been unusual: I distanced myself from the Church at age 19, when I started University, but I came back to faith in Christ during the Covid pandemic. From that moment, my faith in God started growing and I currently attend Mass regularly and often go to Confession. I also developed an intense interest for spiritual reading and recently read The Glories of Mary by St. Alphonsus Maria de Liguori and I’m currently reading Divine Intimacy by Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene. I can’t deny that a vocation to the priesthood may be rising in me, even though I have yet to analyse it in depth.
I would like to confide you that I’m increasingly worried about the future of the Church: … All of this is deeply disheartening, because I get the impression that the Church is losing faith and bending Herself to the world’s ideologies.
I would like to ask you: how can I keep having faith in the Church, even with the spreading of such degeneracy? Furthermore, should my vocation prove to be authentic, how could I become a priest in a Church led by characters with questionable ideas?
I remember you in my prayers, thank you and greet you.  

Priest’s answer

Dear friend,
1. I thank the Lord for what He has done, is doing and will do in your life.
When you distanced yourself from the Church, you would have never guessed that, not many years later, you would have found yourself reading The Glories of Mary by St. Alphonsus de Liguori, a text full of sweetness and that imparts so much hope. Or “Divine Intimacy”, which introduces us to life with and for the Lord. It was my meditation text during the year of novitiate. 

2. I’m not surprised then, that you’re starting to feel called to the priesthood.
I also thank the Lord from the bottom of my heart for this: He never stops creating new hearts and giving new saints to His Church. 

3. There’s another aspect for which I thank the Lord: the fact that, at this moment, you are suffering for the Church.
I edited from your email the near reasons for your suffering. However, I left the general reason: “the impression that the Church is losing faith and bending Herself to the world’s ideologies”. And, should you become a priest, how could you serve a Church that presents a faith that differs from the faith of the ages and from yours? 

4. Well, your discomfort is understandable, but it is too human.
When Jesus was sleeping in the boat ravaged by the waves, the apostles woke Him up screaming: Don’t you care that we are dying?
But here’s the full text: “A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up. Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. They woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Quiet! Be still!”* The wind ceased and there was great calm. Then he asked them, “Why are you terrified? Do you not yet have faith?” (Mark 4:37-40).
Saint Thomas, commenting on the parallel text in the Gospel of Matthew, writes: “There follows how he rescued them: why are you fearful, O you of little faith? It seems that they were not of little faith, because they had said, save us; but indeed they were of little faith, because they did not believe that he could save them even while sleeping. Or of little faith, because if they had had great faith, they themselves could have commanded the sea.” (Commentary on Matthew 8:26)

5. Last Sunday, at the beginning of the second reading, we heard these words: “We know that all things work for good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28).
If the Lord permits a situation that causes deep sorrow in yourself and many others, there must be well more than just one reason.
In this moment, the Lord asks us to have a deeper faith.
It is Him who is driving the ship, even if it seems to be sinking.
In this moment he asks us to have more faith in Him than in the men of the Church.
We are reassured from the outset that the Church will not sink because He said: “I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:20).
He also said: “the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail” (Matt 16:18). 

6. When Napoleon imprisoned Pius VII he said that he would be imprisoning the last Pope in history.
Cardinal Consalvi, who was Secretary of State, reportedly replied: “Your highness, we ourselves weren’t able to destroy the Church”.
That “we” referred to the men of the Church, especially those who were part of the hierarchy. 

7. On this topic, I like to cite what was written by a great French thinker – Giuseppe de Maistre (1754-1821) – at the beginning of the XIX century.
He had witnessed everything that had happened during the French Revolution and what had followed, especially with Robespierre first and Napoleon after him.
One of his most important works – the “Du Pape” – says: “Those who insistently point out  the stains on the papacy do not realize that they are arguing in favour of its indefectibility; in fact, if the men of the Church had possessed a superior intelligence and outstanding holiness, the conservation of the Church would have been less remarkable.
The miracle consists in the concrete fact of an eternal and infallible Church founded on a man like us: incontestable miracle for us who are living 18 centuries after that promise”.

8. Remember then the likely prediction about the end of the Papacy that was made when the Pope was witnessed being at the mercy of a man in front of whom siluit terra (the land was silent – meaning Napoleon), a prediction that was repeated by those who are condemned by the double punishment of seeing in Scripture that which isn’t there and of not seeing that which it clearly contains.
Arguing against scripture, which assured us of the perpetuity of the Papacy, they assured us of its irreparable ruin and read in the Apocalypse the hour and the minute.
And while these prophets assured and the crowd listened to them enraptured, a visible prodigy from the Omnipotent, made manifest through the alliance of the most discordant powers: the Pope escaped from the most perfidious persecution and, consoled by the sweetest hopes, rose back to the Vatican and Augustus raised his head in the middle of a stunned Europe…” (L. Todisco, Corso di storia della Chiesa, vol. V, p. 151).

9. That is what is always going to happen.
Take courage, then, because Christ is loyal to His promises.
Take courage because Christ, with His divine omnipotence, knows, in the moment that He decides, how to bend the mind of the prideful and exalt the humble and the oppressed, even in the realm of the Faith. 

I thank you for your prayers for me and promise you mine in return – may your faith always grow, for the Faith and especially for the calling that the Lord is placing in your heart.
I bless you and wish you the best.
Father Angelo

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