I am not a shepherd or a dresser of sycamore trees. I am an academic psychiatrist, sitting in an airport lounge. Sweet life, you say. But over the last two days…

• The first thing I saw in Sydney was a sharps dispenser
• The number of hipsters was too high, and their lives are spent on being stylish. These are men. It did mean that I was staring at my cellphone a lot, lest my face show what I was thinking
• Everyone is virtue signalling. Admittedly, I was in hipster territory (see above)
• The hotel was shocked that I would walk a km to the meeting
• The morale in public health services in Aussie is lower than NZ. The health service is seen as uncaring, and the nurses consider nursing as something others do. Like enrolled nurses. (I am informed that in private they are cared for by the managers and are happier and give good care). The number of academics working in private because it is simpler less difficult shocks a kiwi, for in NZ we all work in the public system
• Corruption is accepted. No one is shocked

The pattern is of a society in decline, where standards are slipping. The government micro regulates, has hate speech laws, and the tension increases. This is not a good pattern. I am no prophet, but the historical pattern is one of collapse.

Amos 7:10-17

¹⁰Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to King Jeroboam of Israel, saying, “Amos has conspired against you in the very center of the house of Israel; the land is not able to bear all his words. ¹¹For thus Amos has said,

‘Jeroboam shall die by the sword,

and Israel must go into exile

away from his land.'”

¹²And Amaziah said to Amos, “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; ¹³but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.”

¹⁴Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, ¹⁵and the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’

¹⁶“Now therefore hear the word of the LORD.

You say, ‘Do not prophesy against Israel,

and do not preach against the house of Isaac.’

¹⁷Therefore thus says the LORD:

‘Your wife shall become a prostitute in the city,

and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword,

and your land shall be parceled out by line;

you yourself shall die in an unclean land,

and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land.'”

The priest of Bethel was a priest of a corrupt imitation of the true temple: his idol was set up by Jeroboam so that the Israelites would not travel to Jerusalem where the temple was. He stands, with all his panoply, and tells the prophet to leave, because the warnings he is given must not be said in Israel. The results for this man are damning. His wife will leave him and whore herself out, making him a cuckold. His daughters will be destroyed by invaders, and his family will lose their land.

The land itself will be defiled, and all the people he leads will be taken into exile.

And such men still exist. Mundabor is talking about priests for the Romans, but the same thing applies on my side of the tiber.

I for myself would add my two pence: what makes most of the credibility problem of priests nowadays is that very many of them are as fake as a six pound note, clearly ashamed of their own profession and – generally speaking and forgetting for a moment that they can consecrate the host – a waste of space.

A priest who is not afraid of being a Catholic priest can be criticised, berated or even insulted. But everyone, even his own enemies, will know he is authentic.

On the other hand, no one has any use for a priest who speaks like a snake oil salesman, never disagrees with anyone if it costs even a shade of conflict, and limits himself to the most useless, trite banalities about social justice (for which we already have bad politicians galore), or “the joy of Christ” which strangely seems to exclude the fear of the Lord, or to the flattery of his own parishioners in the most sugary, cheesy, stupid way (“thank you for being you!” is one I will never forget).

Then of course the one or other is suspected of being a homo, or does not give any sign of testosterone ownership at all. They have suspiciously high-pitched voices, and an affected gentleness of ways unbecoming a man. When people are left wondering whether everything is in order with him, Father has already lost.

In order to be respected, a Catholic priest must be, in this order, a) a man and b) a Catholic. If the one or other component is lacking, the public (not only the Pewsitter) will see the guy for what he is: a fake, a pretense, an excuse of a priest. As a result, no one will respect him. Not the real Catholics, and not those outside the Church. Fake vocations have a way of stinking from very far away and in the same way as true revolutionaries can easily spot the fake revolutionary, true Catholics can easily spot the modern priest as a fraud.

No, I don’t think it has to do with education, as priests used to be respected by illiterate peasants and extremely well educated people alike. It has to do with the fact that Church has become almost unable to produce respectable priests, and produces instead unmanly social justice whinos no one would want to be identified with and whom no youth would take as a model.

The trouble is that we have stopped having the courage to say what we see and fight for what we know. I am an academic psychiatrist. I have spent the last two days revising and fighting over words for a document, part of which is correction of current errors[1]. We need to do the same within the church.

For I can see the pattern of the fake on the streets as well as in the shonky papers, and it is nauseating.

1. Which I cannot talk about until the revised version is published.