Updated. A couple of years ago our son asked me if I watched Michael Voris’ YouTube channel. I replied along the lines of, “Sometimes. Not very often. He’s been around for a long time; I know his thinking well enough. It can lead to wrong impressions, to schism or outright skepticism.”

I think it was understood that I was saying Mr. Voris’ channel (while relating many undeniable facts) can inadvertently tempt us to lose confidence in the moral uprightness of most of our priests, and indeed make us suspicious of the validity of the Church’s sacraments themselves upon which our salvation depends.**

It can also minimize other important dogmatic distinctions and certainties. As the important late traditional Catholic scholar Michael Davies pointed out regarding the priesthood and the “ministerial Intention,”

“The term “minister” is used here in the technical sense of the person who administers a Sacrament and not in the sense in which it is popularly used today, namely, a Protestant minister in contrast with a Catholic priest. It is also taken for granted that the term refers to a person who possesses the power to confer a particular Sacrament. An unbeliever can confer the Sacrament of Baptism by using the correct matter and form and intending to do what the Church does, but a man who had not been validly ordained could not celebrate a valid Mass even if he had the correct intention and used the correct matter and form.

“Christ Himself, our great High Priest, is the primary minister of the Sacraments. As Pope Pius XII taught in his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, “It is indeed He Who Baptises through the Church, He Who teaches, governs, absolves, binds, offers, and makes sacrifice.”

“Hence the human minister of a Sacrament is acting as an instrument of Christ and, as the Council of Trent teaches, he must intend at least to do what the Church founded by Christ does.

“Ideally, he should be a man of great holiness who believes what the Church teaches, but this is not essential.

“In order to administer a Sacrament validly the minister requires neither faith nor the state of grace nor holiness of life. He need not believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church; nor that what the Catholic Church teaches concerning a particular Sacrament is true; nor that the Sacrament will effect what the Church teaches it will effect; he need not even believe in God or believe that the administration of a Sacrament will have any effect at all.

“Furthermore, even if the minister is a heretic and intends to do not what the Catholic Church does, but what his own denomination does, believing his own denomination to be the true Church, his intention is sufficient providing he does not specifically exclude what is essential in a Sacrament. Thus the Holy See has upheld the validity of Baptism administered by the ministers of heretical sects who have publicly denied the doctrine of Baptismal regeneration (D. 2304).

“This is because the ministers in question intended to do what Christ and the Church do in this Sacrament—–a distinction was made between a failure to believe in Baptismal regeneration and a positive intention to exclude it (a positive contrary intention).

“The consensus of Catholic theologians is that the correct and serious performance of a rite as approved by the Church, and because approved by her, is a sufficient indication of the internal intention on the part of the minister. In such cases there is no means by which the Church can pass judgment on his interior dispositions. Thus Pope Leo XIII states in Apostolicae Curae:

“The Church does not judge about the mind and “intention” in so far as it is something by its nature internal; but in so far as it is manifested externally she is bound to judge concerning it.

A person who has correctly and seriously used the requisite matter and form to effect and confer a Sacrament is presumed for that very reason to have intended to do (intendisse) what the Church does. On this principle rests the doctrine that a Sacrament is truly conferred by the ministry of one who is a heretic or Unbaptized, provided the Catholic rite be employed (para. 33).”

We are, then, to honor all those who have been called and given legal authority to serve in Christ even though they remain sinners: i.e. to Popes, bishops and priests from whom we receive the sacraments, also kings and rulers, fathers of families,  teachers, etc. (for God is our Father, High Priest, Teacher, King and Ruler).

Catholics do not allow subjective judgements to undermine or override the objective truths of the traditional Faith and magisterium.

I think we must be careful in this time of tribulation that we do not flee the sufferings of the Cross and begin to hallucinate the lie that all of our priests and Religious are living hidden licentious lives. And then draw erroneous conclusions from wrong premises.

SH

** I think it is better to inform Church authorities of any apparent moral failures in priests and religious, asking the authorities to investigate and, above all, to act for the good of the Catholic people.

— Michael Davies on the Merciful Pre-conciliar Church

— “Effeminacy” in men is a vice. Or at least it used to be considered as such.

Updated