Luke delays recording to attend a concert and relive the early 2000's, we blame the clergy for speaker-culture, we talk the crappy Atlantic article, we BRIEFLY discuss the terrible Game of Thrones ending; Oh look, Fr Dave is the new FUS President! Then, Gomer's rapid fire: financial independence, peeing, Luke has anger issues, and our Live Show in Appleton was fun!

Here's this gem from Nat'l Catholic Reporter

Like too many boomer authors, he jumps from a whim to ontology in the twinkling of an eye: The priesthood did not work for Carroll, so the priesthood is the problem and must be abolished. It would be sad if he believed this and did not publish this rubbish. As he does publish it, his influence is pernicious.

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• The Catholic Church Should Abolish the Priesthood - The Atlantic — What remains of the connection to Jesus once the organizational apparatus disappears? That is what I asked myself in the summer before I resigned from the priesthood all those years ago—a summer spent at a Benedictine monastery on a hill between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. I came to realize that the question answers itself. The Church, whatever else it may be, is not the organizational apparatus. It is a community of memory, keeping alive the story of Jesus Christ. The Church is an in-the-flesh connection to him—or it is nothing. The Church is the fellowship of those who follow him, of those who seek to imitate him—a fellowship, to repeat the earliest words ever used about us, of “those that loved him at the first and did not let go of their affection for him.”
• Abolish the Priesthood? A Young Priest Responds — "Abolish the Priesthood? A Young Priest Responds- The Catholic priesthood will outlast all those who call for its abolition" Fr. Dominic Bouck
• The Case Against Abolishing the Priesthood | America Magazine — In the Dec. 11, 2000, issue of The New Yorker, the magazine’s revered literary critic James Wood began his review of the writings of J. F. Powers with a blunt question, “Does anyone, really, like priests?” I read that article a few months after my ordination to the priesthood. I found it hard to understand not only how an intelligent person could write a sentence like that, but how a prestigious magazine could print it.
• James Carroll's call to 'Abolish the Priesthood' is misguided and tiresome | National Catholic Reporter — Carroll's embrace of theology is thoroughly opportunistic. At one point, he yearns for the pre-Constantinian church of Jesus' early followers, but later he states, "When the Catholic imagination, swayed by Augustine, demonized the sexual restlessness built into the human condition, self-denial was put forward as the way to happiness. But sexual renunciation as an ethical standard has collapsed among Catholics, not because of pressures from a hedonistic 'secular' modernity but because of its inhumane and irrational weight." But it is in the Gospels themselves that Jesus advocates self-denial, encourages the unmarried to remain celibate, and tells his followers to take up their cross and follow him. Following Jesus can lead down many different paths, but none of them have to do with sexual liberationism.