Another book finished: Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men. It’s not a must-read, and I didn’t read the whole thing. It’s an accumulation of horror stories tending to show that many Catholic seminaries in recent decades have been dominated by homosexual cliques, heretics or both, that responsible officials have been disinclined to do much about it, and that Church bureaucrats with NewChurch inclinations have campaigned to keep qualified orthodox men out of the priesthood. Even unfavorable reviews admit that there’s something to most of the stories, but there’s no need to read all of them—a couple of reviews will give you enough specifics to get the idea.
The book does end on a somewhat hopeful note: some of the worst seminaries have self-destructed, others have reformed a bit, seminarians have taken a decided turn toward orthodoxy, and it’s becoming ever more obvious that orthodoxy is the best remedy for a lack of vocations. Maybe the book will help the shift in the correlation of forces. It may also encourage men thinking about the priesthood to look where they’ll land before they leap. I wouldn’t wish some of the places the book describes on anybody.