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Even today young people can sense that they have a religious vocation, and then they can approach their elders for advice. But Mother Church is presently in great distress, so it is not easy to counsel them. What follows may seem rather negative, but it is one such attempt.

Dear youngsters.

Yours is a noble desire to serve God, but in today’s crisis of the Church, do not be too surprised or disappointed if you find special obstacles in your way. Ever since the 1960’s when the churchmen at Vatican II deliberately separated Our Lord’s Authority from Our Lord’s Truth, all Catholics have been forced to choose between clinging to His Authority at the expense of His Truth, or cleaving to His Truth at the expense of having to disobey what seems to be His Authority. Now you yourselves, God bless you, are pursuing a vocation in the movement of Catholic Tradition, in other words you are cleaving rather to unchanging Truth than to apparent Authority, but this means that you are at risk of not having above you a clear representative of God’s own Authority.

This means that you are going to come in contact with a variety of servants of Catholic Tradition engaged in bitter and more or less scandalous fights with one another, because there is no longer above them both that Authority to which both could turn to settle their dispute. Whether their dispute was personal or, more important, doctrinal, either way there was a hierarchical Authority capable of pronouncing on their difference, and of imposing, if necessary, an agreement. The lack of such Authority is the price that Catholic Traditionalists pay, as it were, for clinging to the unchanging Catholic Truth. And this is a state of the Church which must last at least until God intervenes, as He certainly will do, to put the Pope back on his feet, so as to restore Authority and re-unite Catholic Authority and Catholic Truth.

So what does all of this mean for yourselves? Continue to pursue your vocation, do not yet give up the pursuit, but be resigned in advance if it proves to be an unobtainable luxury. The Church is right now marching in the desert on iron rations. Mankind no longer has the right, as it used to have, to an abundance of good Superiors who know how to put together and keep in balance a religious community. God can very well make such Superiors out of human wreckage, but He will be disinclined to do that if our last state would only be worse than our first, alas! All of us today, we are more or less disintegrated beings, the fruit of centuries of liberalism. How do you make an integral community out of disintegrated members? And under a disintegrated Pope? Humanly, it is a tall order!

Therefore have a boundless trust in the God whom you wish to serve, in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but never let yourself be disappointed by men, and never be surprised if He writes on the blank cheque that you should be giving Him something different from what you expected. As far as possible, avoid criticising the churchmen who are all in difficulties in a Church which is in effect leaderless. On the contrary, have a great compassion for all victims of the godless 21^st century, clergy or laity, because never before has the world been quite such a “valley of tears.” Follow Providence, because God may have foreseen for you a religious house where you can fulfil the vocation He may have inspired within you. Heaven alone knows how our world needs your prayers and your devotion to the God it scorns!

So have courage, pray the Holy Rosary every day, five Mysteries at least, preferably fifteen if at all possible, and Our Lady will look after you, and bring you, by whatever way, to Her divine Son.

Kyrie eleison.