Death watch

So, the St. Francis Center for Spirituality is closing down and- just like the Mount Manresa affair- all anyone can talk about is the threat of overdevelopment on the site. As a native Staten Islander, I can well understand that, but there has been no Catholic response as such, as if it is just to be expected by our clergy that we are to suffer, in the natural course of things, one humiliating defeat after another and just eventually die out. Are any of our clergy wondering why it is that a seminary has no seminarians and what we can do about this non-stop decline?

Fun fact: only 40,000 Staten Islanders attend Mass every Sunday, according to spokesman Joseph Zwilling. Approximately 54% of Staten Islanders are counted as being Catholic (although the actual percentage of baptized is probably much, much higher). Even going by the lower number, that is only 8% of Staten Island Catholics who go to Mass on Sunday.

8%

And how many of those church-goers have the slightest clue about the Faith, considering polls show that the vast majority of even church-going Catholics dissent from or are ignorant of basic Church teaching on the Eucharist, sexual morality, the authority of the Pope and the Bible, the divinity of Christ, et al. The situation over the past 40 years, but especially today, should prompt any faithful priest to run frantically through the streets, trying to salvage whatever souls they can from this wreckage. However, all our priests and bishops seem focused on is gaining amnesty for illegal invaders, pandering to homosexuals, destroying the orthodox Catholics who point out the truth and turning the One True Faith into a hand-holding Episcopalian community center.  We are on a death watch here, and our spiritual fathers just don't do or say anything about it.