Uptodate "To Do" List for Pope Leo XIV
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Like many young Catholic males of the 1970s and early 1980s, I was attracted by the heroism of clerical and religious life and wondered whether I might be called to serve God as a priest or religious. It that same era, I was blessed to know a young priest, who was about 10 years my senior. Father Frank was extremely bright and a New Yorker, through and through. He liked me, because I was comfortable with his banter: The man loved to argue!....
Father Frank was not above punctuating his points with the rhetorical question, "Don't you read the newspaper?"
While I was ill equipped in the late 1970s and early 1980s to put it in clear language, I once suggested to Father Frank that there was an undervaluing in the Church of the Sacrament of Marriage....Father Frank returned my volley with a not so gentle reminder of how wrong he thought me to be....he was absolutely right theologically, [but] he was missing an historical/sociological phenomenon, called "clericalism":...
this clericalist way of thinking overlooks the reality and relevance of unique personal vocation – the particular, essentially unrepeatable role in the carrying-out of his redemptive plan to which God calls each baptized person (Russell Shaw, On Clericalism, 5/6/08).
[In addition to clericalism, that era saw failures to proclaim the truth about human sexuality!] At least since the late 1970s / early 1980s, numerous Catholics (clergy, religious, and laity) have been acting as though
When bishops, priests, deacons, religious, and lay people have difficulty understanding the exalted calling to marriage - the call to cooperate in God's very work of creation in bringing forth new human lives - we must sadly realize that "clericalism" is alive and well.
Treating marriage as less than the exalted calling it is has done none of us any good (blog, 10/25/15)
Joe Tevington is a proudly orthodox Catholic, a husband since 1986, a dad to two adult children, a grandpa to two, and a civil service retiree. He is a sign language fluent certified rehabilitation counselor with graduate degrees in deafness rehabilitation, religious studies/moral theology, & Christian counseling psychology, as well as a catechetical diploma and certificates in benefits planning and Catholic social ministry. He deeply appreciates Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of the transmission of human life, as well as how they are to inform us in our apostolates and ministries.
On much lighter notes, he fancies himself to be the foremost authority on his native Brooklyn, when it comes to architecture, cinema, geography, history, Italian food, stick ball, stoop ball, or wiffle ball.
