Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church

Rating:
Summary: Goodbye, Good Men
Review: This book has been touted since its appearance in 2002 by a number of my conservative clerical and lay friends who were aware that my own _Switching Churches_ came on the market at the same time. Where my treatment is shorter but broader than Rose's and offers the laity realistic advice and attainable solutions, _Goodbye, Good Men_ concentrates on the rot in our Catholic seminaries. Rose blames the clergy, especially the hierarchy, for the loss of orthodox theology and values and accuses them of deliberately driving away capable, devoted young men from the priesthood in the name of heterodoxy, homosexuality, and a secularized Catholicism marked by obeisances to every conceivable modernism including deceit, self-absorption, and outright immorality. The wreckers of the Church as we used to know Her are hell-bent on re-forming Her along the lines of their secular humanist lines. Prospective orthodox Catholic clergy and conscientious, believing laymen want no part of this approach. The result has been loss of membership at large, the reduction of the number of seminaries on the whole, and the almost total loss of orthodox seminary instruction. For me as a former college professor it was interesting to note that many of the same techniques of destruction of curriculum and decent social behavior as practiced in America's liberal arts institutions obtain in our seminaries. What is saddest of all, however, is that there is scarcely a single moral voice raised against such heretical doings. If one equates professors of all sorts with the Catholic hierarchy and teaching staff in seminaries, one knows exactly where to place the blame, for just as the majority of my university professor colleagues were ultra-liberal, Rose describes seminary professors as being of the same "tolerant" stripe. The main difference is that professors in secular institutions are not ordained to their function and consequently do not have the same obligation toward their flock as do clergy. Instead, it is now apparently acceptable to "act" as a priest and is not necessary any longer to "be" a priest, with all that that entails in knowledge, devotion, and moral uprightness. If you want more proof, read my _Clerical Failure_, which came out in 2004.

Rating:
Summary: Must Read
Review: This book will turn your stomach, the way Rose describes how psychological terrorism, militant homosexual intimidation, and brazen heretical teaching have been used to force out orthodox seminarians in many of our US seminaries.
This may sound extreme and implausible, but Rose presents not so much an argument as an agonizing parade of fact--interview after interview, statistic upon statistic. In the end, Rose does tie it together with a theory that seems eminently sensible: that our American priest shortage is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Liberal bishops seek an end to the celibate priesthood. Seminaries under their control are thus staffed with like-minded administrators, teachers and formation faculty who promote agendas of sexual liberation, feminism, sacramental irrelevance, etc. Orthodox candidates leave. This creates a severe shortage of priests, providing a convenient excuse to promote ordination of women and lay ministries--in short a "new" (i.e., Protestant) Catholic Church. Conversely, in conservative American dioceses, where young men of orthodox spirit are welcomed instead of repelled, vocations are on the rise, and priest shortages are less severe or non-existent. Rose contends the root of the problem goes back to the self-indulgent philosophy of the '60's. Self-fulfillment becomes more important than self-sacrifice. Experimentation displaces tradition. Pleasure trumps propriety, and moral relativism replaces moral objectivism and its corollary, rational thought. While these new values crept relatively slowly into American culture at large, they quickly gained power in our seminaries. The cumulative result is a priesthood without a clear identity, either of itself or to lay Catholics and the secular world. While many attribute the horrible sexual scandals of the priesthood to the practice of celibacy, Rose believes the explanation is just the opposite. Such scandal has arisen out of an immoral atmosphere of feel-good ethics and outright disdain for Catholic teaching. Rose believes the problem can be fixed, but first it must be understood.

Rating:
Summary: Hmm...
Review: What Rose doesn't tell you is that many of the ex-seminarians he interviews are biased due to being removed from seminaries for engaging in their own inappropriate behavior. Reading this book, one would be influenced to think that the seminary system in the U.S. today is out of control and hopeless. Not true. One of the Midwest seminaries that is mentioned in his book I am attending now is quite orthodox, and there is absolutely no homosexual promiscuity or discrimination against those who adhere to magisterial teachings. Almost all of the men I've met during my first year are wonderfully dedicated to serving God's Church and His people. I'm sure some of the accounts in this book are accurate, but I would wager that many are greatly exaggerated. I have a problem with the title "Goodbye, Good Men," which suggests that qualified candidates for Holy Orders no longer exist anymore. I would like to challenge Mr. Rose to spend a week at one of the "Midwest Seminaries" so he can see how his book speaks to an issue that no longer subsists at all (much less to the extent he was speaking of), and how the seminaries today have nothing to do with the sex abuse scandal in our Church.