Ran across
this post on the feedback from this years
Men of Christ Conference in Milwaukee. Some interesting thoughts captured.
Why do you believe men are not engaged in their faith?
Don’t want to be seen as “religious”
Because they are weak, cowardly, girly men who do not know what true and authentic faith is? Their pride gets in their way to realize something is greater than they are.
Feminized parish life.
They feel it is private. They feel afraid.
Not enough “real men” as role models and visible leaders in the church. Many men cannot relate to overly feminine nature of priests
Forty years of lacking catechesis.
Men are more loyal to their unions/political parities then to their Catholic faith.
Anybody else have thoughts?
5 comments:
Touchy-feely liturgy with folk music from the seventies does not help. Also, Sunday sports have become a religion unto themselves. I'm sure it's hard to compete with ESPN and Sunday morning hockey games.
I read the original post and a large number of the comments either blamed poor catechesis or a feminization of the church. Perhaps the two are related.
We've run all the masculine virtues out of the church. Things like discipline, penance, logic, righteous indignation have all gone by the wayside. If you walk the halls of any school athletic department you'll find it decorated with motivational posters that do not show smiling athletes having fun. You see posters of sweat and discipline - and lo men gravitate to sports.
Anger is now socially taboo. Well, if a man doesn't get seething mad reading the front page of the paper nowadays he lacks virtue. Like our linguistic confusion with the word love, we also over-use the word anger. So we confuse the Deadly Sin, anger, with righteous indignation.
We no longer teach ancient Greek philosophy and logic. Good catechesis starts with these basics.
And then Hollywood doesn't help. Men who are religious are constantly portrayed as milquetoast. Think Fr. Mulcahey from M*A*S*H or Ned Flinders from the Simpsons. I don't recall seeing John Wayne pray, or if he did it was always in a clumsey way to make sure everyone understood it was something his characters rarely did.
I think we would be served well if we simply had some good catechesis on how to be properly angry. When you think about it, it is an emotion created by God, therefor it cannot be bad. It is what we do with anger that leads us to good or evil.
I think legalized abortion has played a huge role in taking away men's natural and spiritual want and need to be responsible and to provide for their families. Education and material stuff has replaced God and family.
There is little accountability for either gender's behaviors anymore.
I'll subscribe--partially--to the 'privacy' thesis. And it was R. Weakland (!!) who pointed to the 'privacy' thing as wrong-headed.
The other part is the 'milquetoast' Faith offered by the typical homily. There is nothing compelling, nothing demanding (see, e.g., the utter silence on birth control). As mentioned above, vaporous twaddle inspires ...vaporous practice.
Not what Vince Lombardi showed us, eh?
I don't believe that men are not engaged in their faith. There are lot's of men at my church who are very much engaged in their faith.
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