Goodbye, Good Men: How Progressive Bishops Sabotage Vocations

Two studies show that major ideological differences between bishops and their priests and seminarians are destructive of vocations to priesthood and religious life.

June 4, 2025 by Father Gordon MacRae

On June 5, 2025, the day after this is posted, I mark forty-three years of priesthood. Thirty one of those years have been spent in wrongful imprisonment, and the last sixteen of them have been lived out in your presence through this blog. Reflecting on priesthood in these circumstances has always been a challenge. Even as I offered Mass alone in my cell last Sunday night, I was struck by the absolute absence of anything or anyone around me that supports even the idea of priesthood. But yet, here I am. I reached into an older post with elements that may sound a little familiar by their repetition, but it is important that I uphold them. I do not want my life as a priest to go the way of my favorite Willie Nelson song about the things I should have said and done.

Not long ago, I was surprised to be bestowed with the honor of membership in The Catholic Writers Guild. One of my first thoughts as I plugged in my typewriter today is that this might be the post that gets me kicked out. We are in one of the strangest times in the life of the Church and in the ministry of bishops and priests that we have seen in many centuries. There have been times almost as strange, but the difference is that you were kept from knowing about them.

My priesthood ordination took place on June 5, 1982 at St. John the Evangelist Church in Hudson, New Hampshire. It did not start off well. There was another candidate for ordination that year, but he fled just days before. Someone then scrambled to revise and reprint the program for the Mass of Ordination. It was presided over by The Most Reverend Odore Gendron, Bishop of Manchester. That was four bishops ago.

Like most Catholic priests in America, I was ordained on a Saturday afternoon. Unlike most, I was ordained alone. Such a thing became a more prevalent phenomenon, however, as the signs of the times began to reflect the sins of the times. In the 1970s and 1980s, fewer men found the courage for such a counter-cultural commitment as the Catholic priesthood, a response I will be presenting in a special restored post for Pentecost this week. That post will describe the story behind the story of the gathering of the Apostles at Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles (1:13) reports that the Eleven — Judas had come to ruin — came to Jerusalem in the company of Mary, Mother of the Resurrected Jesus, to mark the Pilgrimage Feast of Weeks fifty days after the spring celebration described in the Book of Leviticus (23:15-16). Among the Greek-speaking Jews of the New Testament, it came to be called Pentecost for “fiftieth day.”

Pentecost had long been a Jewish festival but it became a Christian feast when the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles in Jerusalem in the form of a mighty wind and tongues of fire. Immediately after, the newborn Church saw its first scandal as Peter rose to defend the Apostles against a false accusation that they were all intoxicated at 9:00 in the morning (Acts 2:15).

One of my most vivid memories of my ordination is lying prostrate alone on the floor before the altar while a choir intoned for a packed church the Litany of Saints. I had a moment of terror on that floor as I imagined my sister shouting at me from a pew several feet away, “Get up, you fool! Flee!” I later asked my sister if she actually had such a thought. “Yup, that was me.”

Thirty-one years later in 2013 Dorothy Rabinowitz was writing “The Trials of Father MacRae,” her third in a series for The Wall Street Journal. She interviewed my sister who spoke candidly with a comment that never made its way into the articles. “The Catholic Church took my brother,” my sister said, “And now look what they have done to him.”

I have written of this in past Ordination Anniversary posts, but many people have since asked me The Big Question. If I knew then what I know now, would I have joined John, the man who was to be ordained with me, in flight from this fate?

The Signs of the Times

Back in 2012, Anne Hendershott penned a research study for The Catholic World Report entitled, “Called by Name.” There were some interesting statistics analyzed in the study. In 2010 in the Diocese of El Paso, Texas, a region that is 79-percent Catholic, there were no priesthood ordinations.

In the same year in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, a region that is only 17-percent Catholic, there were seven ordinations to the priesthood. In Portland, Oregon, the population of which is only 16-percent Catholic, there were nine ordinations in 2010. Researchers suggested that areas with large Latino populations may have fewer candidates for priesthood.

That turned out to be untrue. In the Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas in 2010 there were seven priesthood ordinations and most were Latino. But across the nation in 2010, the number of priesthood ordinations and their ratio to the Catholic population varied greatly. Something less obvious was driving this.

In 1996, then Omaha, Nebraska Archbishop Elden Curtis penned an article entitled “Crisis in Vocations? What Crisis?” He theorized with some compelling data to back it up, that the attitudes and strength of fidelity in Church leadership is the number one causal factor in reduced numbers of viable candidates for priesthood. Archbishop Curtis wrote:

“When dioceses and religious communities are unambiguous about the ordained priesthood and vowed religious life as the Church defines these calls; when there is strong support for vocations, and a minimum of dissent about the male celibate priesthood and religious life; when there is loyalty to the Magisterium; when the bishops, priests, religious and lay people are united in vocation ministry — then there are documented increases in vocations. Young people do not want to commit themselves to dioceses or communities that permit or simply ignore dissent from Church doctrine”

— Archbishop Elden Curtis

In her article for The Catholic World Report  cited above, Anne Hendershott analyzed a study by Andrew Yuengert, a Pepperdine University sociologist, who tried to quantify the observations of Archbishop Curtis about the connection between priesthood vocations and the attitudes and fidelity of Church leaders. He discovered some fascinating corollaries.

Andrew Yuengert found that dioceses with bishops ordained in the 1970s had significantly lower numbers of priesthood vocations than those with bishops ordained before or later. He found that corollary to be most prominent in the ordination statistics of bishops who were characterized as orthodox or progressive. Of interest, he discovered that bishops who regularly published articles in America magazine — considered to be more liberal — fostered fewer vocations than bishops who were more likely to publish articles in The Catholic Answer, considered to be more orthodox.

There was another interesting corollary in the Yuengert study. You may remember the great controversy at the University of Notre Dame in 2009 when then-President Barack Obama was invited to give the Commencement Address and was bestowed with an honorary degree.

At the time, eighty-three U.S. bishops signed a formal statement disapproving of the University administration’s decision to bestow an honorary degree on the openly pro-abortion President Obama who worked to expand access to abortion throughout the U.S. and the world. Yuengert discovered in this another unexpected corollary: Many of the 83 bishops who signed that statement led dioceses with the highest percentages of priesthood ordinations in the country.

The Sins of the Times

I have heard many horror stories from priests ordained in the 1970s and 1980s that the seminaries they were sent to were anything but loyal to the Magisterium and supportive of priestly vocations. I have a horror story of my own that I wrote about a decade ago. It is worth repeating because it was typical of the sins of the times in the 1970s and 1980s, the era in which the decline of priesthood was set in motion.

Following my 1978 graduation from St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, I was making a transition from religious life as a Capuchin to study for diocesan priesthood. I had requested to study at St. John’s Seminary in the Archdiocese of Boston which was where I grew up. I was sent instead to Baltimore. This story took place in the fall of 1979 in my second year of graduate theological studies at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore. St. Mary’s was at the time considered to be the most academically challenging and most theologically liberal of U.S. seminaries. It was called “The Harvard of seminaries,” but it also had a reputation for fostering — even demanding — dissent.

There were about 160 seminarians from some 40 U.S. dioceses studying for priesthood at St. Mary’s then. It had a capacity for more than twice that number, a reality that created an atmosphere of competition between national seminaries (as opposed to local seminaries like St. John’s in Boston). Though St. Mary’s has undergone a complete revision of its direction since then, in the 1970s and 1980s it was known among priests as a birthplace of theological dissent.

The atmosphere reflected that. Seminarians never wore any form of clerical attire, and would have been laughed out the door if they did. The beautiful main chapel was used for Mass only once per week — on Wednesday nights where a weekly seminary-wide liturgy took place, often hosting clown masses, experimental music (“Dust in the Wind” by Kansas was once the Communion hymn).

There were many liturgical abuses, and any refutation earned the commenter a notation of “theologically rigid” in his file. Other weekday masses were held in small groups in faculty quarters. On Sundays, seminarians were on their own, encouraged to attend Mass at one of several Baltimore parishes. Some rarely ever attended Mass at all.

In 1979, a rift of sorts formed between the seminary rector and those planning for a U.S. visit by Pope John Paul II at the end of the first year of his pontificate. In October, 1979, Pope John Paul II spent six eventful days in the United States, visiting Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Iowa, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

One of the highlights of the visit was Pope John Paul’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on October 2, 1979. He stressed the theme of human rights and the dignity of the person, deploring violations of religious freedoms. However, most of the 67 addresses given by Pope John Paul II during his visit were directed to Catholics and stressed their responsibilities as believing members of the Church.

The messages were conservative in tone and contained unqualified condemnations of abortion, artificial birth control, homosexual practice, and premarital and extramarital sex. The Pope reminded priests of the permanency of their ordination vows and also ruled out the possibility of ordination for women, bringing protests from a number of misguided Catholic activists.

Little of Pope John Paul’s vision for the Church in the modern world was received with any enthusiasm by the administration and faculty of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. It was in the weeks before this momentous visit that all hell broke loose at St. Mary’s. The seminary rector, Father Leonard Foisy, now deceased, was a priest of my diocese and a member of the Congregation of St. Sulpice — aka The Sulpicians — which ran the nation’s oldest seminary since its founding some 200 years earlier.

Just weeks before Pope John Paul’s planned visit, it was somehow learned that all seminarians from several major seminaries in the region were invited by the Holy Father to take part in a Mass for seminarians on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Upwards of a thousand seminarians were to have special seating with an expected crowd of 100,000.

Seminarians at St. Mary’s in Baltimore, one hour from Washington, DC, however, were never told of the invitation, nor were we told that the Seminary Rector had declined it on our behalf for reasons that he refused to divulge. The resultant furor was shocking; not only for the majority liberal seminarians, but for the administration and faculty who just assumed that we would disdain the theology and vision of Pope John Paul II just as much as they did. A line had been crossed that threatened to sever our identity as future priests.

A letter of protest was quickly drafted and signed by more than half of the 160 seminarians representing some forty dioceses across the land. I was one of the signatories of that letter, a fact that the Rector took very personally because we represented the same diocese, the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire. As a result, I was labeled a disobedient rebel.

A seminary-wide meeting was held, and the Rector doubled down on his rejection of the papal invitation. He warned that anyone who attempted to attend the Pope’s Mass one hour away in Washington would not receive permission to do so, and would receive failing grades for any course work assigned for that day. He also said that several crucial exams would be held that day and failing grades would be reported back to the diocese of each seminarian along with a report of disobedience to his legitimate authority.

Needless to say, we went anyway. No one has a vocation to the seminary.

The Priest Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The graphic above is not a real book, so please don’t try to order it from Amazon. It was created by the BTSW editor in response to a post of mine that stirred an uproar when first posted in November, 2013.

That post publicly refuted another priest who published a letter in Our Sunday Visitor calling for expanded use of the death penalty in the United States. As a prisoner-priest, I wrote in favor of mercy. But it was I, and not he, who kicked the hornet’s nest.

Back to the seminary: One factor that struck me at St. Mary’s in the 1970s was the unwillingness of some bishops to become involved in — or even aware of — the training of their future priests. Formal complaints from seminarians about the blatant disregard for Pope John Paul II by seminary administration were ignored by most of the bishops who received them.

Some of the more traditional seminarians survived only because they were academically brilliant. They became the priests who kicked the hornet’s nest merely for refusing to either bend in their fidelity or be driven out as candidates for priesthood.

In the years since my ordination, I have heard many stories from priests whose priestly spirits were wounded in a kind of spiritual abuse that characterized their seminary years. Perhaps some will comment here.

In January 2023, I wrote and posted “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.” It is a most important document that especially needs the Church’s attention at this time of great transition in Rome. A good deal of pressure had been placed by the previous pontificate upon those who have come to express their devotion and find spiritual solace in the Traditional Latin Mass. The Catholic University of American Study examines what has been happening in the breech between more liberal bishops and younger more conservative priests. The absolutism of disdain from upper levels for more conservative and traditional expressions of Catholicism has had the effect of driving people toward Tradition, and not from it. In more recent times some bishops have reacted to this by edict and fiat rather than by leadership. One newly appointed bishop in an East-coast diocese has created a great stir by forcing any observants of the Traditional Latin Mass into the rural hinterlands in his diocese. The previous bishop there had opened a seminary which has attracted a significant number of candidates for priesthood. It remains to be seen what becomes of them, but they should henceforth be treated as a treasure of the Church and not as an experiment. Anything less is to repeat a grave mistake from the 1970s captured in the book, Goodbye, Good Men.

When you think about it rationally, the Traditional Mass, which at one time was the only Mass, seems a very strange place for any bishop to plant his flag on a hill of battle with the People of God. As I pointed out in these pages one week ago, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

+ + +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. Sharing this, along with one or two of the timely posts below, just may be a Corporal Work of Mercy for someone else:

Did Leo XIV Bring a Catholic Awakening Or Was It the Other Way Around?

In the Absence of Fathers: A Story of Elephants and Men

Priests in crisis: The Catholic University of America Study

Convicted for Cash: An American Grand Scam

The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”

For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

Holy Orders in an Unholy Collision with a Disposable Culture

Raymond Cardinal Burke at the imposition of hands as he ordains a candidate for priesthood.

Dealing with the sex abuse crisis has led many bishops to now treat priests as disposable for any infraction resulting in a serious erosion of Catholic theology.

February 1, 2023 by Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL

Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  A few weeks ago in these pages I published, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”  Because it was highly recommended to the huge membership of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, it was one of our most read posts of the year.  I then invited Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, a priest and canon lawyer who serves as advisor to this blog to present a guest post analyzing the same topic and its importance to the Church.  Father Stuart’s last post here was “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

+  +  +

I finally went, reluctantly, to a performance of the musical Hamilton.  Neither American history nor rap are my particular interests; however, a friend convinced me to go.  I am unqualified to offer any observations on the theatrical performance; however, I was indignant at the final message of the show and the audience reaction to it. In a nutshell, if you haven’t seen it, Hamilton is the story of Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States of America and the author of a large number of the Federalist Papers. He was perhaps the first American politician to become involved in a public sex scandal involving marital infidelity. The musical suggests that history has been unkind to Hamilton and that his infidelity played a role in this.  It concludes with a rousing song about one’s reputation and posterity.  In other words, Hamilton was a great guy and how silly of us to judge his whole career by a single moral failing.

I could not agree more.  But let’s face it, the hypocrisy of modern, woke, me-too movement aficionados rapturously cheering this message is comical.  In less than a decade, North American culture has accepted as unquestionable the notion that it is unacceptable for leaders of any kind to have lapses in judgment or moral failings.  When they do, in the current me-too mindset, they deserve to be cancelled, obliterated from history, never to be seen, heard from, or discussed again except, I realize, when it comes to Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton, the play, is a huge success being performed in several places throughout the world. Does no one else see the hypocrisy? Do people not think anymore? (No, don’t answer that question yet.)

Most readers are aware of the National Study of Priests conducted by The Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America.  Father Gordon MacRae wrote of it with his usual aplomb in the link atop this post. What some of you may not have seen is an equally worthwhile analysis of it in Catholic World Report, entitled, “The National Survey of Priests Suggests a Deep Crisis in Catholic Theology,” by Msgr. Thomas Guarino.  Father MacRae and I both highly recommend it and we will link to it again at the end of this post.

The import of the study, and the two articles linked above, is the fact that priests, not just in the United States to which all of the above-noted articles are limited, are suffering from a fear of the modern, woke, me-too movement aficionados who seem to be as prevalent in the Church as they are in the world. I do not need to reiterate the scenario of a priest being accused, removed from ministry and either being dismissed from the clerical state or left in limbo on so-called administrative leave.  In cases too many to count, priests are abandoned, having been prohibited from exercising any priestly ministry, save the celebration of Mass in private.

Let me be clear, I am not referring to priests accused of sexual abuse of a minor. While the scourge of the sexual abuse crisis is going to be with us for a long time yet, the unfortunate and concomitant truth is that priests are now sitting ducks for any type of accusation.  It is specifically to the other stuff that I am referring.  Dealing with the sex abuse crisis, however, has led many bishops and Church leaders to think that priests are now like chattel, pieces of property who can be used or discarded at will. The praxis in the Church these days is that a priest can act as a priest only with the explicit permission of his bishop or superior.  To put it another way, it is as if a priest is ordained and receives the sacrament of Holy Orders, but the power of those orders is like a tap is turned on or off by the bishop.

Perhaps Father has fallen into sin with a woman, someone doesn’t like Father’s preaching, or maybe Father is insisting on his right to offer Mass ad orientem, or, Heaven forbid, Father uses vulgar language in a fit of anger or impatience (pace the news reports, if indeed true, of Pope Francis’ recent tirade with seminarians from Barcelona).  Any of those things, to name just a few, can lead to a priest’s removal from ministry cast into a form of canonical limbo with no defense and from which he may never emerge.  The idea seems to have taken over the collective episcopal mindset that a priest exercises his Sacred Orders at his bishop’s unfettered discretion.  As Father Thomas Guarino points out so well in his article at the end of this post, this has serious consequences for the Catholic theology of priesthood.

The Expulsion from Eden by Gustave Doré

Catholic Crime and Punishment

Of course, the Church and bishops need to maintain discipline and authority among clergy and religious.  No one questions that.  But one does rightly question the overreach of control that has crept into our day to day living.  Not every bad behavior, or even sinful behavior of a priest is an ecclesiastical crime for which he can be punished or even destroyed.  Clearly, if a priest violates his promise of celibacy by sexual acts with an adult woman who is not his parishioner, he commits a mortal sin for which he must repent and do penance like all other sinners.  But the Church does not say he has committed a crime. A crime exists, in these specific circumstances, only if he begins to live with her in a married fashion (it doesn’t mean he literally has to live in the same house with her).  That is the sin and crime of concubinage.

The last punishment meted out to a priest guilty of that crime is dismissal from the clerical state.  It is not the automatic penalty.  Clearly, the mind of the Church is that clerics are capable of very serious sin, and the greater is their fall when that happens; but it is naïve to think that clerics are not going to sin, or that some clerics will never commit sexual sins.  There is a reason why the Church has had laws against such behavior from the earliest days of her existence.

So, what is happening today?  The public backlash from the sexual abuse crisis has placed bishops and religious superiors on edge.  No one likes to be unpopular. In an effort to re-instill confidence that the Church is no longer turning a blind eye to the nefarious actions of some clergy with minors, bishops are just appearing ‘tough on crime’ in general.  Therefore, anything that a priest does which might reach the ears of the bishop is now fodder for tough disciplinary action.  Notice the change in terminology.  It is not crime, which would involve inflicting penalties (like suspension, excommunication) using penal law and processes (like criminal law, trials, and sentencing in the civil sphere). Rather, it is disciplinary action for behavior that is not a crime.

The priest who has grievously sinned with a woman, and who has repented of his sin which remains unknown to the public, is now removed as pastor, has had his faculties for preaching and confessions revoked, is forbidden from celebrating Mass in public, and cannot present himself as a priest.  All of that for something that is not a crime. No one would tolerate that in the civil sphere.  Let me remind you, as Father MacRae has written elsewhere that Saint Padre Pio was falsely accused of all these things and spent years under the unjust cloud of suspicion.

Analogies always fail in some way, I realize, but imagine that you are a manager of a large store of a famous brand name and your supervisor finds out that you committed perjury in court over a traffic accident.  Would the supervisor be justified in terminating your employment over actions which did not directly encompass your work duties? Does the priest deserve reprimand? Yes. Should he be advised that any future fall will constitute a crime for which he will be punished? Certainly. Does he deserve immediate dismissal? I don’t think so, no more than the store manager deserves to be punished by his employer.  Does his dishonesty raise a red flag about his integrity? Yes. Should his supervisor monitor dishonesty in the workplace? Yes. But it is difficult to imagine that he should be terminated.  When priests are terminated or cancelled in this way, the Sacrament of Holy Orders is much diminished, reduced to mere employment from which a priest can be discarded.

It is precisely this situation that has caused the angst so prevalent among priests as described in the articles by Father MacRae and Msgr. Guarino.  It is naïve to think in these cases that a bishop’s first interest is going to be the priest. It really should not surprise us, however, that we are in this state.  Just as seminarians are the product of the culture whence they come, and the Church must take pains to purify them of all that is wrong with the culture, so the Church, our bishops, are products of the culture in which the Church lives.  We are living in the midst of the me-too movement, of the culture of ridiculous wokeness in which some believe five- and six-year-old children need to be educated about transgender ideology and sexual identity.

This dominant culture seeks rogue justice, not repentance. It seeks conformity, not diversity.  We claim rights, not just the fulfillment of duties.  We live in an age of wicked hypocrisy. Priests are labelled as dirty child molesters, not men of learning on a mission.  Bishops steer the difficult course of confronting all that is evil in culture while trying not to make themselves and the Church irrelevant.  But at what cost? With what methods?

Pandering to the mad mob is not the answer.  Rather, we need to re-claim and re-publicize that the Gospel message is one of repentance and forgiveness and a call to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.  We are bound to fall along the way, which is why the Second Person of the Trinity humbled Himself to be born of our human flesh.  When we can regain our equilibrium after the scandals, we will be a much healthier Church, but less so if we simply discard those who have sinned but have embraced the grace of repentance.  For now, as with so many other scandals and confusion in the Church, we ought as priests and laity to keep our heads down, say our prayers, and keep our Faith.  This, too, shall pass.  God knows when, but it will pass.  How long, O Lord, how long?

+  +  +

Fr. Stuart MacDonald, ordained in 1997, is a priest of the Diocese of St. Catharines, Canada. Pastor of a parish, he is currently a canon law doctoral candidate at St. Paul University in Ottawa and assists accused priests with canonical counsel. Previously, Fr. MacDonald studied canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and served as an official for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Most recently, he has been asked by Fr. MacRae to be the Canon Law Advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls.

+  +  +

Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  I thank Father Stuart for this candid and most important post on the state of priesthood in this troubled time.  Both he and I want to urge readers to visit and ponder the posts cited herein by Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino in The Catholic World Report entitled, “The National Survey of Priests Suggests a Deep Crisis in Catholic Theology.”

+  +  +

Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL at the Vatican

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine

The world is changing, and not for the better. The Annunciation proclaims an eternal truth: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)

Forty years ago, at my priesthood ordination on June 5, 1982, I received a number of gifts from a multitude of friends who had entered my life at various points along its path. Not a single one of them is a part of my life today. Many have left this life, almost all in God’s friendship but some also at various stages of doubt. It is not easy to keep the company of a friend you constantly doubt, but in the case of God we should just be thankful that it was never mutual.

One of the gifts I received on that day was from one of the greatest of my lifelong friends, Fr. Tony Nuccio, CSS. A priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata, he served Holy Family Parish in Lynn, Massachusetts, a rather rugged industrial city on the North Shore of Boston. I was a 17-year-old lost, faithless, fatherless teen, a condition which had not yet become so common, when Father Tony arrived to rescue me from the path of the Prodigal Son.

Father Tony filled in some very empty space in my life. He was present fourteen years later for my priesthood ordination. Tony died a year later from complications after a heart transplant. I have missed him ever since, but thanks to him that empty space in my life remained filled. I thank him, and thank God for him, at every Mass I have offered ever since.

The ordination gift that Father Tony gave me was very special. It was a wood panel reproduction of The Annunciation, a famous painting by the 15th Century Italian artist and Dominican friar, Fra Angelico. Father Tony brought it back from Rome and it was one of my great treasures, gracing the wall of every place I have lived since — except the place where I live now.

The scene depicted in the Annunciation, which is honored by the Church on March 25, is that of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that the Messiah is about to enter our world through a union between her and the Holy Spirit. I wrote of that scene with all its meaning in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

The Archangel Gabriel appears in only two places in Sacred Scripture: in the scene above and in the Book of Daniel (8:16 and 9:21). The two appearances are like bookends. In Daniel, Gabriel is an interpreting angel who explains to Daniel events that will accompany the Messiah to come (9:21-27). This places the Archangel at both ends of Biblical prophecy. Having foretold the Messiah’s coming in the Old Testament, he now heralds in the New the arrival of Jesus and John the Baptist, his forerunner.

I have pondered Father Tony’s gift for most of the years of my priesthood. There is no doubt in me that the scene of the Annunciation took place on Earth, but, like the painting itself, it seems to have been made in Heaven. In the landscape, you can see Adam and Eve in a side panel that depicts their exile from Eden, an exile mended by the Birth and Cross of Christ.

Then one day, through the betrayal of false witness, the bottom fell out of my world. I never saw Father Tony’s gift again. For a long time, I had no idea what happened to it, and to all the other signs and symbols of my priesthood. When this miraculous blog took shape from behind these prison walls, I wrote of that loss and many other losses in “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”

That post was read by many around the world, including some who had become misplaced from my life by the cruel waves of time and circumstance. I learned that Father Tony’s gift had a chain of custody, ending up in the home of another priest and dear friend who took it into his heart without fully knowing from whence it came or what it meant to its owner.

Saving a World in Crisis

I was overjoyed to learn all these years later that Father Tony’s gift awaits my return to the land of the free just as Father Tony himself awaits my life in his company in a place where justice reigns and loss is unknown. Father Tony knew that his Redeemer lives, and he passed the surety of that knowledge onto me just as a real father should. And for those who doubt whether there is any real plan in place here, it was because of what Father Tony passed onto me that I passed onto Pornchai Moontri that same surety of faith. You can read about it, if you haven’t already, in “To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

In the few decades just before the Birth of Christ, the Roman Empire adopted a calendar introduced under the authority of Julius Caesar. It was the first calendar to observe a solar year, the 365-day passage of one revolution of the Earth around the sun. The Julian Calendar also included a leap year, an additional day observed every four years on February 29 to compensate for the six extra hours of Earth’s yearly revolution. The Julian Calendar was observed throughout most of Europe until it was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory VIII in 1562.

The “New Style” Gregorian Calendar observed the New Year as beginning on January 1, but in the “Old Style” Julian calendar, March 25 was New Year’s Day. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, New Year’s Day came to be called “Annunciation Day,” a tribute to the centrality of its meaning and message.

The world is once again in a time of great political and social upheaval. After writing a week ago here of the latest grim manifestation of evil in our midst, I wanted to follow it with something that may give hope. This is not the first time the world has been under the dark cloud of a regime spreading war like a plague.

In 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to three peasant children, I received a letter from Craig Turner. An accomplished journalist and historian, Mr. Turner had been working on a CD presentation for Lighthouse Catholic Media that placed the Fatima appearances and all that followed into a context against the backdrop of history.

The result was fascinating. Having read some of my posts, Craig offered his CD presentation to me for a guest posting at Beyond These Stone Walls. He placed it into a narrative format that on its face may seem a little daunting. It turned out to be the most read and shared post of that year and one of the most read in the five years since.

After I wrote my recent post, “Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us,” many readers asked why Pope Francis has not consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as was once requested in her appearance at Fatima. At one time, I joined some of the rest of the world in not taking this very seriously. It is serious now. So I posed the question to my friend Father George David Byers. He in turn posed the same question to a close contact in Rome. On March 16, Father George received a response which he passed on to me.

His friend confirmed that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, intends to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at 5:00 PM Rome time on the Feast of the Annunciation, Friday, 25 March, 2022. The Holy Father had said he was going to be doing this in union with Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the Papal Almoner sent to Fatima for this purpose. Father George asked his friend to request from Pope Francis that this consecration be made in union with all the other bishops in the world. Having made this request with the Holy Father about 12:00 Noon Rome time, 17 March, 2022, Pope Francis affirmed that all the bishops — “every bishop around the world” — will be joining him for the consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Five minutes later, at 7:05 AM EST, on 17 March, Father George received this email from his friend:

“Dear George, I have just asked the Holy Father about the Consecration with all the Bishops of the world. He confirmed that that is the way it is going to be: He will do it with every bishop around the world. Let us pray to Our Blessed Mother to stop the devil’s work …; and I also pray to her to stop the ongoing cultural revolution. God bless you!”

Much later that day, seemingly in response to what was set in motion here, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States sent this message to Archbishop José Gomez, President of the U.S. Conference of Bishops:

“In the context of the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine, the Holy Father, Pope Francis, will lead an Act of Consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25 next. The Holy Father intends to invite each bishop, together with all priests, to join in this Act of Consecration at an hour corresponding to 5:00 PM Rome time.”

Mary is at work here, not in the human sin that lies beneath Vladimir Putin’s horrific assault on the people of Ukraine, but in the spiritual warfare that all human beings face. In the end, the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph. On the 100th anniversary of Mary’s apparition at Fatima, I was immersed in a time of spiritual warfare of my own as chaos descended all around me. I was unable to write. It was at that time that I was contacted by Craig Turner and made a decision to host his guest post which opened my eyes and the eyes of many to our need to submit to the Immaculate Heart of Mary the knots of a screwed up world. Please do not miss:

“How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis.”

+ + +

You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

+ + +