Challenging Times

“I have also found several Catholic families who now have no religion at all, and whose children are not even baptized. But they are also the ones who live farthest away from the church… How much care I have already put into talking to them, visiting them, instructing them! And how little it helps that I usually can come back only after several weeks! And the children, often between seven and eleven, will, if they are not won for the church, create again … totally godless families in another twenty years. Hundreds of their children have been lost to the church in this way; and unfortunately, many more are still perishing, many of them because they themselves are too indifferent; many because they have been ensnared by the heresies all around them; many, finally, because they often have not had any opportunity in years to maintain their relationship with the Church. They themselves do remain Catholics, but see their children succumb to heresy. Thus, tremendous damage results for the Church from the dearth of priests; and at the same time, it loses out on a great gain that is no less important…”

—Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B.

—From Boniface Wimmer, Abbot of Saint Vincent in Pennsylvania, translated by Dr. Maria Von Mickwitz and Father Warren Murrman, O.S.B., editor.