As a young Robert Barron clearly indicated in his 1997 interview in U.S. Catholic ("How to Build a Better Priest") that the crisis in priesthood we're facing in our time has everything to do with priestly identity. Who is the priest? What does he do? And what sort of man are we looking for in the priesthood today?
This vocal quest for a priestly identity is a fairly contemporary one. This does not mean that it was completely understood or grasped by the priest or the people. It was just commonly understood and accepted that the priest was the Alter Christus, the other Christ, and it was his role to live out the munera of teaching, of administrating, and of sanctifying.
There were very different days than today in the Catholic Church in the United States. Culturally, we live in a different world, and, to be honest, being born in the 1970s, it is a world that I never experienced personally. But even growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, it was still a very different Catholic cultural experience than what is the lived experience of 2019.
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