Want to feel more hopeful about the future of the Church? Try this.

Words of wisdom from Simcha Fisher: 

Who but priests understand better how serious our spiritual peril is, after opening their ears to an endless onslaught of sin, putting themselves every waking moment in the way of every kind of insult, assault, frustration, and spiritual infestation?

If anyone should be hopeless, it’s priests. If anyone should be in a panic, it’s someone who spends time listening to how they spend their days. And yet the holiest priests I know are placid. Not complacent, but full of a strange and contagious hope.

They spend countless hours among their flock, working with specific individual souls, diagnosing them, caring for them, treating them, and looking to the future to plan ahead for what they cannot change. And they are, on their best days, guardedly hopeful.

When I feel panicked about the future of the country and the future of the Church, I try to spend some time with priests — not fame-driven ideologues with an endless hunger for headlines and celebrity. Not the ones who make a living drumming up panic and fear, but the ones who spend the bulk of their days among the people.

Why? Because we have caretakers, who, through the power of the Holy Spirit, have the power to heal any spiritual disease. They see clearly the nature and scope of the threat, and they have a plan. They’re carrying out the plan.

The celebrity fear-mongers may not exactly be wrong, but they are wrong-headed, and they have nothing to offer but fear. Listen instead to the laborers, the ones who work with individual souls, day in and day out. They have a plan. Be open to the hope they can offer.

Read the whole thing. It’s well worth your time.