Esolen's Strong Warning

We're not big fans of Anthony Esolen, but on occasion, he hits it out of the park.

 ...The American Church in my lifetime, as an institution rather than as individual priests or bishops here and there, has done nothing to keep the indigenous working class in the fold, and has especially done nothing to keep such men as many of those high school boys will grow up to be, if they are not going on to college. Men who work with their shoulders and backs don’t listen to feminist scolds, male or female, whose hands are as smooth as their words are shrill.  ...

And that saps the vigor of the Church. Where did the American Church once get all her vocations to the priesthood? Where, I mean, before the elitism of the college-educated set in after Vatican II—when priests and religious sisters sure that they knew better obliterated one form of popular piety after another and devastated the churches the people had long cherished? In my small town, which I guess was typical in this regard, the Church got them from an energetic, faithful, and multi-ethnic working class; roughly fifty, from my town’s incorporation in 1876 to 1965.  I count only three since then.  ...

 You cannot get priests unless you appeal to men, and you cannot do that unless you actually like their company, and by that I emphatically do not mean the company of the occasional effete and effeminate. But feminism is a luxury belief, as is, in the United States, a high-toned costless pretense of charity regarding the influx of millions of people, many of them men thus detached from their families, to depress the labor market at its low end. All men who do manual labor understand the point, and a Church that blithely ignores their situation says to them, implicitly, “Get lost.” 

You've heard about the ordo amoris.  Esolen reminds us that unless the ordo justitia is recognized and obeyed, the Church will continue to shrink.  She will never disappear, of course; but losing souls through sabotage will cost many Churchmen their eternal souls.