Cardinal Burke is right: The Church has become feminized.

In a recent interview with the New Emangelization Project, Cardinal Raymond Burke offered guidance on the state of Catholic men in the Church.  One point that the Cardinal made (representing less than 1/5th of his remarks) was that radical feminism was one of a complex set of factors that have led to the Catholic “man-crisis.”  It’s important to note that Cardinal Burke also made the point that he has great admiration of women and nowhere does Cardinal Burke suggest that the legitimate aspirations of women in the Church should be suppressed.

Above  is a screen shot from the Crux website (1/21.15 at 11:31 a.m. Central time) that shows the results of their reader survey on the question of the feminization of the Church.  Crux, if you weren’t aware, is a significant Catholic media outlet run by the Boston Globe.  Crux is not in any stretch of the imagination a citadel of conservative distortion (there is distortion of all kinds in our public debate, including conservative and liberal, feminine and masculine, etc.  What each Catholic should embrace is the fullness of the Catholic faith as taught by the Church, which is neither conservative or liberal, but Truth itself).

Interestingly, one might speculate that adding “Cardinal Burke” to the question would perhaps turn off Crux’s readers given that Crux’s articles on Cardinal Burke’s interview were severely distorted, lacking both charity and reason.

What Crux’s own survey shows is that 75% of those taking the pol (and since the pol has been up for over a week, hundreds perhaps thousands have taken the pol) AGREE with Cardinal Burke that the Church has become feminized.

This finding is consistent with the New Emangelization Project interviews with dozens of leading evangelists in the United States.  The Church has become feminized in the US in many parishes and as a result many men simply opt out of Church.

This is not a question of mobilizing men (and many women) to take up arms against “those nasty radical feminists”.

What the Church needs is to lift up both women and men and what we have now in the US is a lack of balance; lay men are significnatly underrepresented in the pews and almost completely absent in teaching the faith in parishes.  This lack of participation of men is bad for men, bad for women, bad for marriages, bad for children, bad for the Church and bad for society.  When men opt out, bad things happen.  The same can be said for women.

To address the imbalance, what’s needed is a major and sustained effort to evangelize and catechize men to be priests, prophets and kings in the self-sacrifical model of St. Joseph.

If we wish to have a New Evangelization, there must be a New Emangelization, creating generations of Catholic men who are on fire for Jesus Christ and His Holy Church.