Why Camp Maccabee Now?

Scandals within an institution have a tendency to cast suspicion on any and all parts of that institution. The Catholic Church is not exempt from that. Furthermore, any thing to do with youth, especially young men (who made up the majority of victims in the sexual abuse scandal within the Church), comes under additional scrutiny. It should.  The camp that I lead is no exception.

Why then, should you fiscally support, prayerfully support, or send your high school son to this Camp?  Why not just shut it down in such an atmosphere?

Why Camp Maccabee was Founded

Let's start with the why the camp was founded. The camp was founded in 2009.  The scars of the opening salvo of the scandal where still very much in mind. Many within the Church's ministerial roles had adopted the procedures put forth by the Dallas Charter on the Protection of  Youth.  There was a palatable fear, though, among those who worked with youth about working with youth. Founding a camp to work with the one group that had been the major target of the abuse was a risky proposition.

That said, the camp was founded because so many young men within our Church were failing to grow into leaders. I noticed this with doing recruitment for priestly vocations and in working with young couples for matrimony. The idea of virtue was not where one would hope for those looking at a sacramental vocation. I saw this, as well, in the work I was doing with annulments. We saw young men drifting. We also noticed that these young men wanted little to do with the Church.  Many were drawn to sports. I noticed this long before 2002.

I started paying attention to the message we give young men in our classrooms and churches.  Their coaches, if they play sports, challenge them.  They tell them to give their best, push themselves, and succeed. Their coaches, the good one at least, were pushing teamwork, fellowship, and interdependence. These, of course, are the things that make a great team a great team. What were they hearing from us?  Be nice. Be nice ad naseum. We were not challenging them.  We were not calling them to faith.  We weren't calling them to heroism or greatness. They needed us to sound more like a coach and less like a children's TV program.   We were getting the young male leadership we were forming.  

What Do We Do?

The Camp is a Sunday through Friday camp. That is not a lot of time in a young man's life.  That is 117 hours of the 8736 hours that young man has throughout a year.  That is time to sow a few seeds. We have to make the time count.

First, we realize that most young men have loads of energy.  We use that to our advantage much like a coach does. The days include some type of expending of physical energy, all of which has some deeper lesson.  Some activities are meant to build teamwork and interdependence. We want to teach them that building a team means bring out the best in each other and lending help to those who are deficient in an area. They have a warrior dash (mile long obstacle course), low ropes course, rock climbing, and archery to help build up that sense of teamwork. They have a 7 mile float trip to build up a sense of comradery. They learn to fly fish as a lesson in patience.

Second, we realize in the midst of these activities, we must plants those seeds of virtue.  We see masculinity as a matter of growing in the corporal and theological virtues. We will use some text through the week to drive this home. We will sprinkle it through small talks and homilies. We tell them that being a leader is learning to virtuously serve and not be served. You want to talk about a message that flies in the face of the causes of the abuse scandal in the Church!  A man of virtue doesn't abuse.  He doesn't prey on his flock. He protects them.

Third, we realize that they must understand that it not merely by their own efforts, or even the efforts of their team, that they succeed.  Without God, their motives, however noble they be, will fall short.  Prayer is central to the camp.  To be a leader in the Church, whether it be a s a layman or as a cleric, requires a selfless man of God. Daily mass, Morning, Evening, and Night prayer, are part of the daily schedule. Time for Eucharistic Adoration, Confession, Rosary, Stations of the Cross, and such are scattered throughout the week. One cannot be a virtuous leader in the Church without a prayerful relationship with God.

We make clear that Christ and His Church call them to excellence...that each young man is called to virtue.  If they understand this, then the type of husband, dad, or priest they will be is greatly effected.

Why Support Us?

Not every young man who passes through the Camp gets it.  I would like to tell you they each do, but that is not the case. That might seem a odd thing to say.  The camp understands that the worlds these young men come from shift. We only have them for 5 and a half days. The Governing Board of the Camp keeps evaluating what works and what doesn't work.  We keep looking at how we can be better.

The camp, from its inception, has been completely (maybe even militantly) compliant with the Dallas Charter.  No person who interacts with these young is allowed to do so until they have done the required Protecting God's Children/Virtus training.  Staff is vetted.  Staff is warned that any immoral interaction will be treated with such and criminal behavior will be directly referred to local law enforcement immediately. We run a tight ship.  This year, we are instituting better guidelines in the training of staff and procedures for discipline.

The leadership of the Camp receives no payment for their duties. A modest stipend is offered to our college age staff as a recognition that most have to take time off of necessary jobs to help us. Monies raised go to the running of the camp and the upkeep of material needed for the camp.

The camp holds fast to the Deposit of the Faith.  What we teach is fully in line with the teachings of the Church.  Both in liturgical practice and in materials used, we do not diverge from the Church. Anyone who supports us should know that we don't monkey around with, water down, or rebel against any teaching of the Church, including her sexuality morality. We want to raise men of virtue, not worldly hedonists.  

Why Send Your Son?

I tell the parents who have children in my parochial school or PSR/CCD programs that we view ourselves as partners with you in the Catholic formation of your children. I know many of you reading want to raise young virtuous men who will be the leaders God calls them to be.  If you son is called to matrimony, I know you want to raise a son who will be an awesome and faithful husband and an awesome dad who will teach his children to be leaders as well. If your son is called to priesthood, I know you want a son who will be seen as a true virtuous leader who will protect and provide for whatever flock is assigned him. We, at Camp Maccabee, want that as well!

We want leaders.  Your son needs to hear that from his church.  Your doesn't need to be nice by his church, he needs to be told to be heroic. He needs to be rallied to virtue.  He needs to be told and shown a path of relationship with Christ.

The camp is not for everyone.  It is a physically demanding camp. We do adjust for some limitations. However, even then, we challenge as much as we can. No electronic devices are allowed.  No phones, no tablets, no portable music or gaming devices. There are some disciplinary problems that might make the camp not an option.  We will work with what we get, but 5 days is not enough to shift an entire lifetime.  It is a moment to sow godly seed.

Details, Details, Details...

The camps for 2019 are June16th to 21st, June 22nd  to 28th, and July 21st to 26th.  The camper needs to be there by 1PM on Sunday and will be released at noon on Friday. We are based out of St. Robert, Missouri. We spend two nights elsewhere.  One night is in Camdenton, Mo.  The other night is at Montauk State Park near Licking, Missouri.

The cost of the camp is $150.00 per camper.  No young man will be turned away from the camp because of funds.  The actual cost per camper last year was $483. The difference comes from generous contributors.  That includes everything necessary for the camp: food, transportation, equipment, venues, junior staff, and insurance.  While we are connected with the Diocese of Jefferson City, Missouri, we receive no funding from them nor do we ask from funding from them.

While we have been able to take some young men with milder physical limitations and take young men who are higher on the Autism spectrum, we are not equipped to take anything more challenging.

No camp is perfect.  Some young men have loved this experience.  Some have hated it. We do our level best to make this a strong, spiritual, and positive experience.  More information can be found at our website www.campmaccabee.com  

Of Holy Mother Church

I had a discussion with my spiritual director yesterday about the recent scandals in the Church. While not defending any of the malfeasance,  he stated that many of the bishops and clergy were do what they were doing because they believe they are protecting Holy Mother Church.  It led to a discussion about what was meant by that.  Both of us think that there are many laypeople, priests, and bishops who first see Holy Mother Church as a collection of buildings, wealth, and other earthly structures. I can honestly say I have never seen Holy Mother Church as merely earthly structures, building, or hierarchy. They are her patrimony to be sure.  They serve a purpose. However, I have always seen Holy Mother Church as the beliefs, teachings, sacraments, and what we refer to as the Deposit of the Faith.  Holy Mother Church has had to forego her patrimony many times.  Her patrimony is usually laid waste in every persecution. From Rome to Elizabethan England to ISIS controlled territories, historically her churches have been destroyed and her hierarchy killed.  Yet she remains.  She remained in the catacombs or Rome.  She remained in the barns and hidden rooms of England. If the pressing RICO act investigations into the Church were to decimate the physical structures of the Church in this country, Holy Mother Church would remain.

I am not saying Holy Mother Church isn't being battered.  She most certainly has been and continues to be.  But the battering doesn't come in the form of dilapidated buildings long abandoned nor closed seminaries and convents.  It is coming from what emptied those buildings and caused property to have to be sold to pay the debt of lawsuits. It is what leads to the suspicion, disregard, and even potential criminal charges being leveled against priests and bishops. When the Deposit of  the Faith is assailed, that is where real damage is done. The Deposit of the Faith, the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Church, are the soul of the Church.  Without it, no mater how beautiful the structures or how powerful her bishops, when the Deposit of the Faith is attacked Holy Mother Church suffers.

How is Holy Mother Church attacked?

She has been severely damaged by neglect. The work of evangelization has suffered greatly.  It failed when the primary form of education fell into a disorder of the validity of faith being validated by how a teaching made you feel.  If a teaching challenged, then permission was given by clerics to ignore the teaching or adapt it to what was comfortable.  How on earth did we go from the sanctity of marriage and family life to inviting the demonic presence of artificial birth control, homosexuality, pornography, and such being not merely turned a blind eyed but to be given permission?  Too many clerics worried about being approved of rather than protecting both Holy Mother Church and the sheep of their flock. Sometimes it was done because the desire to build Church buildings, schools, new departments at a university; truth was overwhelmed by the desire to build earthly kingdoms and expand power.

If Holy Mother Church was wrong about sexuality and family life, what else was she wrong about?  Is she wrong about Mass?  Gosh, maybe that might fuel both the rampant disbelief in the Eucharist, the decline in Mass attendance, the decline in clergy, and the shifting of Mass from Divine worship to bad theatrical productions?   What about confession and sin? Might the selling of the Deposit result in the nosedive of confessions and the disbelief in personal sin? No wonder the shift from personal sin to corporate sin took place!

Now, anything the Church teaches seems to be automatically disbelieved.  Pick your teaching want to ignore. Want to justify your belief in Social Darwinism, throw the corporal and spiritual works of mercy out the door.  Want to justify your belief in eugenics? Throw the teachings of human sexuality out the window. Want the worship of God to be more about the worship of you?  Throw the sacraments out! This is where Holy Mother Church is damaged.  Here is where she suffers.

To my brother clerics who have sold out the Deposit of the Faith to some other advantage, whether it be personal notoriety or accumulation of wealth,  to just keep people off your back, or to build or maintain: Not one brick of one church building enters the Kingdom of Heaven. Not one vestment, regardless of how grand,  tacky, or even creepy they are will enter the kingdom. There will be no Vatican nor chancery in heaven.  All of these things will no longer be needed. All these things, like our preaching, teaching, and witness are to point to heaven.

Every bit of damage that Holy Mother Church suffers is a direct result of a Judas moment: that moment where we decide that the Church can be compromised for my own personal gain.  What on earth goes through a cleric's mind to prey on his own flock in order to get some sense of sexual rush or power?  Can you be worried about the faith and prey on believers at the same time?  Why didn't bishops immediately put themselves between the flock and the predator, even if the predator was one of his own priest? I will wager that one cleric who has his Judas moment will aid and abet another cleric in their Judas moments...which is itself a Judas moment.  Why would a cleric tell a parishioner to engage in a behavior that will harm them?  Is it to be liked?  Is it to be thought of as relevant and cool?  Is that what your 30 pieces of silver are going to buy you?

The damage doesn't just come from the clergy.  Parents will teach their children the same kind of toxic lessons for the same self-serving rewards. The parent, for example, who teaches his or her children the unimportance of Mass is usually a parent that believes that themselves. The parent who teaches their children that what makes you happy or gets you ahead (sports, money, for example) is usually the parent who has done so themselves. The parent who hands their son the condom with the attitude that he's going to do it anyway is usually the parent who has bought into that reasoning. What do you buy with the thirty pieces of silver? Sleeping in?  Being thought of as being relevant and cool?

If we want to turn this around, if we truly want to protect Holy Mother Church, then we have to accept the following:

1) We have to repent.  To repent means to turn from evil and embrace the good. We must be able to identify our Judas moments and repent of them.  That means we must make amends for our Judas moments.  If that means we lose part of the patrimony of the Church, then that is what it means.  Notice, God never let the People of Israel keep the gains of their sins.

2)We have to embrace and teach the truth and nothing but the truth.  We have to accept that teaching the truth will bring persecution.  People will walk away angry.  They did from Jesus.  If we are following Him, some will walk away from us as well.

3)We must live so as to point to heaven.  Our job is not to be popular, honored, or comfortable.  We must be willing to risk everything to engage in the faith.

How did Catholicism survived the persecutions of Elizabethan England? It survived, although it lost every ounce of it earthly structures and hierarchy, because brave men crossed the English Channel to train in seminaries, knowing that in doing so, they signed their own death warrants.  It survived through a network of laypeople who hosted and hid those priests, and continued to be Catholic.  They ended up winning, but it did cost people their lives. It survived because people believed.

I don't want our bishops to protect buildings and power at the cost of covering up sin.  I want them to protect Holy Mother Church, especially from diabolical wolves in shepherd's clothing with banks of silver pieces to dole out to each and every Judas they can find. Holy Mother Church will survive. It is she who ends up married to Christ. We who are attached to her through faith and way of life enter the marriage feast with her. She doesn't bring stones of buildings, but the living stones of her body...us. We can not hold onto Holy Mother Church on one hand and hold the purse of the thirty pieces of silver in the other hand. To protect Holy Mother Church necessitates the dropping of that purse and every bit of ill gotten gain bought with it.

We Dropped Our Guard

As a priest, I have come to view the Book of Blessings as a banal collection of lukewarm sentiments that could have been written by a greeting card company.  The point of each blessing is blessing the person or blessing the person who uses whatever is being used. It is all a blessing to do good. Benign.  Lifeless. To look at the Book of Blessing one would think we are in a time of peace and all we need is that little extra oomph to be better at being good.

It reflected a worrisome trend that followed after the Second Vatican Council although it was not called for by the council. The trend is simple: we regulated the demonic and Satanic to almost the same level of danger of teddy bears.  They got regulated to mythological status bearing no more danger to the soul than puppies.  Our mention of evil, for the few times it comes up,  almost seems embarrassingly brief. It is  regulated to three hastily asked question before the profession of faith during baptism.  It is not as if we are inducting these newly baptized into the Church Militant, it is more like a benign ceremony inducting them into a country club.  The Dies Irae became Happy Happy Joy Joy.

That certainly flowed into art and architecture.  It is rare that churches are built and appointed to the extent that one gets a feeling of a connection to the power of the Church Triumphant, into the Heavenly Court populated by towers of faith, the angelic choirs, and the full power of God. No, we now enter rather largish theaters with all the transcendence of a doctor's office waiting room. Catholic art devolved into either highly disjunctive figurines that one has to try to believe was a human or angelic form, or subjected to milquetoast renditions of candy glass skinned dainty figurines. Our churches went from training grounds for the Church Militant to buffet lines for the Church Inoffensive. As in our prayers and rituals, so in our art and architecture, we dropped our guard. We willfully forgot that we are at war with an enemy whose only option is our eternal destruction.

Sooner or later, that would find its way into preaching and teaching. We now make friends with our sins.  We don't fight the demonic anymore.  We invite it, give a glass of sweet tea, and tell it to put its feet up!   How can we not look at the current state of the Church and see anything less?! Once again, our Church is rocked with scandal.  Sin was given a home in too many clerics' hearts and souls. The silence on moral issues was a warning sign that having made nice with their own demons, some clergy, even bishops, expected us to place nice with our demons.  Furthermore, they chastised anyone who called the demonic what it was.  Shame on us for our intolerance!  Personal sin and the preaching of it fell away to the much more comfortable corporate sin.  So, the sin of Sodom was unnatural sex, oh no, it was being inhospitable ...the people of Sodom were...you know...not nice.  Dropping your guard against evil leads to an unbelievable inability to see truth.

We dropped our guard in every possible way against an insatiable enemy. The Devil and his minions have run over the Church with almost no effort to respond. He will continue to run rampant until we understand who we are, who he is, and who God is.

That we are at war with the devil has to find its way back into our common vocabulary and consciousness. In the old blessing prayers, there were exorcisms.  We chased the demonic out of what was being blessed before handing it into the hands a soldier for Christ. It needs to find its way into our art and architecture. We should visually understand the army of angels and saints who fight right by our sides in this struggle. We should find in it our music.  We are too busy singing commercial jingles about ourselves and how nice we can be to get who God is and who we are before God. In our worship and preaching we must re-establish that understanding that the Church asked for, especially of the laity: You are an holy army fighting against evil as light invades and overcomes darkness!

We can establish all the protocols and rules we want (and in many cases should), but we must be realistic about who we are up against. The Church Inoffensive would have you believe we are merely up against unjust structures and inequality...something that can be dismissed with protocols and procedures.  That has all the brilliance of saying I am up against these pock marks on my skin and not a virus that makes those pock marks appear.  We are up against the hellish, the demonic, against the father of lies himself.  He doesn't come in the form of the hellish creatures that populate horror films and juvenile caricatures splashed across your average death metal album cover.  He comes  as an angel of light, dressed up in all your worldly hopes and dreams.  He seems all so nice.  He seems so reasonable.

As a Church, we dropped our guard against the demonic.  We rid ourselves of the offensive military jargon and became the Church Inoffensive.  From that time on, we have seen the Church in the West be decimated.  Our Confession lines disappear, our Masses empty out, our seminaries empty out, our religious orders die, our parishes struggle, too many of our clergy become demonic in action themselves, and we double down on the same exact recipe for failure.  We are being laid waste because we drop our guard in exchange for worldly baubles and kitsch hoping the tenets of Universalism are true and we all go to heaven anyway.

As we lay among the wounded on the battlefield looking for someone to blame, perhaps instead of blaming God, we should blame our adversary the devil. God didn't point us in this direction.  The smoke of Satan has entered the Church through the doors and windows we opened for him to enter through.  If we don't like the resulting destruction, then perhaps, we need to start fighting back.  We need to be building ramparts against evil instead of accommodating it.

How do we fight back? Use the armaments St Paul talks about in Ephesians 6:11-12.  Pick up the weapons of abstinence, fasting, mortifications, and alms-giving with the same valor that a star athlete embraces exercise and training in order to be more effective on the field. Unite yourself to the champions that have gone before us, especially the Blessed Mother. Pick up the Rosary as a warrior would pick up a mace to drive back the demonic.   Our fight isn't against flesh and blood, it is against the demonic and satanic. These tools detach us from the candy coated poisonous temptations that the devil offers us. They drive him back.

Finally we must start calling the truth truth again.  We dropped our guard when we allowed in artificial birth control, abortion, every deviation of sexuality we could imagine, cohabitation, pornography, fraud, and whole litany of evil. These are every bit effective as Oijia Boards and other occult accoutrements for inviting the devil into a place in our life. Truth will lead us to humility.  Humility will allow us to pursue reconciliation (especially sacramentally) and regain our strength to get back on the field of battle. This, by the way, is why the devil tempts us so on not going to Mass and Confession.  The enemy hardly wants us to find the field hospital.

We are at war.  We will be until Christ come again.  The Church in the west had better come to grips with that soon and very soon before the Church in the west becomes so ineffectual that it dies altogether. You want strong priests and vocations?  Start encouraging the courage needed.  We are training soldiers in a theater of war, not concession stand attendants in a theater of song and dance.