[Catholic/Anglican] Why Today’s Men Are Repulsed By the Mainstream Catholic Church

Merely looking at some of the prominent aspects of the “mainstream church” today, we can understand why this is: flamboyant priests like Fr. James Martin are rewarded by the Vatican while good men like Bishop Joseph Strickland are banished; rather than finding the firm and immutable religion of the saints, we find an amorphous set of nice ideas that can change during the next Synodal listening session; and instead of finding Catholics who form the backbone of a moral society, we find cafeteria-Catholics who are more likely to follow the woke mobs than the saints. Real men fly from this, leading to a vicious cycle in which those remaining create even more emasculated institutions, further repelling men.

A post from Fr. David Nix recently highlighted this reality with a quotation from a young Catholic man, “TLM Ryan,” who made a video about Generation Z’s rejection of the Vatican II revolution:

“Gen-Z that utterly rejects the world will utterly reject the Vatican II reform . . . That’s so obvious. I haven’t met a single Gen-Z male who is attracted to ‘beige Catholicism.’”

There could be real men who follow “beige Catholicism” for other reasons, often related to family ties, but the effeminate trappings of the mainstream Catholic Church are generally unattractive to them. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but there are far too many indications of the phenomenon to deny it.

These two factors have been deliberately promoted by the Church’s enemies and have had widespread destructive impacts, even beyond repelling men. However, as we can see from those portions of the Church that have adamantly resisted these deplorable trends, the Catholic Church attracts and promotes masculine virtue when it insists on the unadulterated Catholic Faith and combats vice. As such, there is hope where the unadulterated Catholic Faith is allowed to thrive.

We can appreciate how important the defense of immutable truth is to attracting men to Catholicism by considering the stories of the martyrs who died rather than compromise with the Faith. Many of these stories, like the one below about St. Alban Roe from The Prey of the Priest Catchers by Leo Knowles, show us that the saints are willing to suffer torture and death rather than compromise with the Catholic Faith:

“Then it was Alban’s turn, and immediately the atmosphere changed. Stepping forward, he looked around him with a smile. ‘Well, here’s jolly company!’ he exclaimed. He did not speak for long, explaining that Thomas had uttered most of his thoughts for him. He offered his death for his sins and forgave his persecutors. Then he, too, turned to the sheriff. ‘Pray, sir,’ he said, ‘if I conform to your religion and go to church, will you secure my life?’ ‘That I will!’ replied the sheriff with feeling, ‘upon my word, my life for yours if you will do but that!’ ‘See, then,’ said Alban to the crowd, ‘what the crime is for which I am to die, and whether my religion be not my only treason.’” (p. 154)

Like the other English Martyrs, St. Alban Roe could have avoided his execution if he had accepted the new Anglican religion. He was absolutely convinced, though, that Our Lord had established the Catholic Faith and that all people were called to devoutly practice the Catholic Faith, and no other religion, to please God and save their souls.

Leo XIV’s October 2025 prayers with King Charles III in the Sistine Chapel marked one of the most significant milestones of the ecumenical movement, as reported by the USCCB:

“Pope Leo XIV welcomed Britain's King Charles III and Queen Camilla to the Vatican for a unique visit combining ceremonial flourishes and a historic moment of prayer in the Sistine Chapel. According to Buckingham Palace, it was the first time since the Reformation in the early 16th century that the pope and a British monarch prayed together at an ecumenical service at the Vatican. . . . Briefing reporters about the visit, Archbishop Flavio Pace, secretary of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, said the moments of prayer and the exchange of honors were clear signs of the progress made in Catholic-Anglican relations since the 1960s.”

Although Leo XIV owns this tragic dishonor of betraying the memories of the English Martyrs in the Sistine Chapel, John XXIII’s role in making ecumenism the priority of Vatican II was far more crucial in rendering the story of St. Alban Roe so anachronistic today.

Long before Leo XIV and John XXIII, though, the popes and other clergy warned against the Liberalism that threatened to undermine the immutable Catholic Faith. Fr. A. Roussel explained the effects of Liberalism in his Liberalism & Catholicism, published in 1926:

“The ‘Liberal Catholic’ is very dangerous: By perpetually seeking to operate an impossible accommodation of truth and error, good and evil, pure doctrine and pretended exigencies of hypothetical sciences, doubtful compromises and firm judgments, of substituting principles with expediency, he causes minds to be clouded in confusion. This causes them to lose the appreciation of rectitude. It causes falseness of mind, breaks down convictions and courage, and renders an inefficacious resistance to evil which is by now hardly perceived anyhow.” (p. 116)

Is this not what we see today from almost all of the bishops? This has come about through a emasculating cocktail of Liberalism, Modernism, and false ecumenism:

For those who mistakenly believe that Francis created this problem, here is an excerpt from Professor Romano Amerio’s A Study of Changes in the Catholic Church in the XXth Century:

“In a homily in Warsaw Cathedral on 9 April 1974, Cardinal Wyszynski, the Primate of Poland, gave his diagnosis of the state of the Catholic Church . . . . He described a post-conciliar church ‘whose life is distancing itself appreciably from the event of Calvary; a Church that is reducing its demands and no longer resolving problems in accordance with the will of God, but in accordance with man’s natural capacities; a Church in which the Creed has become elastic and morality relativistic; a Church wrapped in clouds and lacking the Tables of the Law; a Church that shuts its eyes to sin, and is afraid of being reproached for not being modern.” (p. 730)

This was the situation in 1974. No real man has any interest in this sickening cocktail of emasculating nonsense. But not all is lost — here is what Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre said about the crisis in the same year, with his famous 1974 Declaration:

“This Reformation, born of Liberalism and Modernism, is poisoned through and through; it derives from heresy and ends in heresy, even if all its acts are not formally heretical. It is therefore impossible for any conscientious and faithful Catholic to espouse this Reformation or to submit to it in any way whatsoever. The only attitude of faithfulness to the Church and Catholic doctrine, in view of our salvation, is a categorical refusal to accept this Reformation.”

These are the words of a true Catholic man; it is the Faith that made the martyrs strong; and it is the Faith that we must regain if we want to counteract the emasculating scourge of the Vatican II revolution.

In his Athanasius and the Church of Our Time, Bishop Rudolf Graber quoted a Freemasonic letter from 1839, which stressed the value to the Church’s enemies of promoting vice within the Catholic Church:

“In a letter dated 9th August 1839 the words are to be read: ‘We must not individualize vice: in order for it to grow to the proportions of patriotism and hatred of the Church, we must generalize it. Catholicism is no more afraid of a sharp dagger than the monarchy is, but these two foundations of the social order are likely to collapse through corruption: we at all events never allow ourselves to be corrupted. Do not, then, let us make martyrs but let us popularize vice among the masses. Whatever their five senses strive after shall be satisfied. Create hearts full of vice and you will no longer have any Catholics. That is the corruption, on a large scale, which we have undertaken, the corruption of the people by the clergy and that of the clergy by us, the corruption which leads the way to our digging the Church’s grave.” (pp. 39-40)

This effectively describes a process of emasculation we have seen for decades. As the letter indicates, the key was to corrupt the clergy so that they would corrupt the laity. In that light, the following quotations from Michael Rose’s Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church show us clearly why the situation is so grave today:

Mr. Rose wrote these words in 2002 but the situation he described had already existed, in varying degrees across various seminaries, for decades. Even if some seminaries are better in 2026, the products of the corrupted seminaries Mr. Rose described are now bishops, who do all they can to further emasculate the mainstream Church by “accompanying” sinners and their sins rather than trying to root out vice.

In Traditional Catholic communities in particular we see countless manifestations of men making true sacrifices to build strong families and parishes, foster vocations, and combat the encroachments of sinful society. Real men are drawn to Traditional Catholicism in part because they want to live by higher standards and go above themselves. In his Overcoming Worldly Concerns, Fr. Alban Goodier got to the heart of why this is:

“To live for the world is to degrade our human nature; to live above the world is alone to live like a man. But to live above this world demands another world in which and for which we may live; and this demand is met, in part by a world of intellect, which some men fashion for themselves, in full only by that real other-world, in which we Christians believe. This is the key to the secret of the saints. Whatever else they were, they were men; eccentric if you like, offensive if you like, fanatical and misguided, but tingling essences of human nature, humanity at its boiling point. . . . Says St. John Chrysostom, ‘Nothing so wears out a man as to be sodden with the love of things earthly.” (p. 13)

Thus, men are attracted and formed by the real meat of Christian truth and virtue, just as they are repulsed and deformed by the sickening worldliness they see in the mainstream Church. Accordingly, it is misguided to imagine that we attract men of good will to the Church by hiding or obscuring the true Faith, as has been done for sixty years. No, the only answer is to insist on living by, and transmitting, the unadulterated Catholic Faith that God gave us.

And because Satan and his minions have created this disastrous situation in large part through targeting priests, it is necessary for priests to play a vital role in restoring what has been lost. To this end, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s holy guidance is indispensable today:

“We cannot be priests only halfway. We cannot have a hesitant, stumbling vocation. To lead this combat, we need men with profound convictions, men who have the faith, who have charity. We need men who are ready to give everything in order to help bring about the kingdom and the victory of our Lord Jesus Christ. You are living in a time when you have to be a hero or nothing at all. You have the choice: either to abandon the fight, or to fight like heroes. You cannot compromise or you are going to be struck down in the first engagement; you are not going to be able to resist the repeated attacks of the devil.” (Priestly Holiness, pp. 469-470)

Priests must become heroes and form heroes. Where that happens, there is no shortage of virtuous men who make great sacrifices to rebuild society. As we know, it is Christ or chaos — if we are tired of the chaos, we must bring men back to the religion of Christ. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us! St. Joseph, pray for us!

Merely looking at some of the prominent aspects of the “mainstream church” today, we can understand why this is: flamboyant priests like Fr. James Martin are rewarded by the Vatican while good men like Bishop Joseph Strickland are banished; rather than finding the firm and immutable religion of the saints, we find an amorphous set of nice ideas that can change during the next Synodal listening session; and instead of finding Catholics who form the backbone of a moral society, we find cafeteria-Catholics who are more likely to follow the woke mobs than the saints.

The Catholic Charities being one of the largest supporters of illegal immigration doesn’t help their cause either.

6 posted on 01/15/2026 7:34:36 PM PST by wjcsux (On 3/14/1883 Karl Marx gave humanity his best gift, he died. )

LOL!!! The church is full of queers, run by queers, and no one WANTS to be a part of the catholic QUEERS

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[Catholic/Anglican] Why Today’s Men Are Repulsed By the Mainstream Catholic Church

One of the most devastating realities about the Catholic Church today is that men are generally repulsed by what they see, beginning in their local parishes and all the way up to the Vatican.