u/p_veronica

For Catholics, there's 1 active priest for every 441 regular massgoers. For Orthodox, that ratio is about 1 for every 65 regular liturgy attendees.

I've calculated the numbers using data from Georgetown's CARA, official Orthodox Church in America clergy numbers, and the US Religion Census.

The formula for Catholics was (Parish-connected Catholics x Percentage of Catholics who attend Mass every week) / ((Total diocesan priests x percentage of diocesan priests active in ministry) + total religious priests). There isn't easily accessible data on the percentage of religious priests who are active, so the ratio I calculated actually looks better than it really is.

Formula for Orthodox was straightforward (active priests / number of regular attendees).

Gnosticism was one of the earliest movements to pervert the teaching of Jesus. Perhaps its defining characteristic was its contempt for the material world. Gnostics looked to Jesus as the teacher of the way to cast off the body and return to the world of pure spirit.

St. Irenaeus, who wrote polemics against Gnostic beliefs, said this about them:

>For the heretics, despising the handiwork of God, and not admitting the salvation of their flesh, while they also treat the promise of God contemptuously, and pass beyond God altogether in the sentiments they form, affirm that immediately upon their death they shall pass above the heavens and the Demiurge, and go to the Mother (Achamoth) or to that Father whom they have feigned.

Any of this sound kind of familiar? It might be because mainstream Christianity has essentially become Gnostic in its beliefs about the afterlife. The body and bodily needs don't matter as much as getting your "soul" to "Heaven." What is Heaven? Where is it? What is a soul? Mainstream Christian authorities struggle to answer these questions, yet they nevertheless keep these concepts at the center of their hopes for the future.

Contrast their beliefs with those of Jesus, Irenaeus, and the earliest Christians, who awaited a universal bodily resurrection and believed that they would live forever, as fleshy people, in a perfect physical world of hyperabundance. Simple. Easily comprehensible. Exciting. Good. Where do I sign up?

Radical Christians have to de-Gnosticize the Church. We have to teach people that a lot of the "spiritualized" nonsense is not original to the message of Jesus. Our Lord's message was not about gaining access to a ghost realm where you spend eternity doing who knows what. His message was about total human salvation. Of course you'll have a body, and that body won't get sick. It won't starve. It won't die. You won't be drafted into war or have bombs fall in your neighborhood. Also, you won't be isolated or lonely or depressed. You'll be able to truly live, on Earth, and life will be good.

Despite being the pretty steady consensus for many decades now, embraced even by major Catholic historians like John Meier, this view of Jesus and his ministry does not seem to have trickled down to the Catholic faithful at all. Most are totally unfamiliar with the notion of Jesus as someone primarily proclaiming an imminent apocalyptic event by which the Kingdom of God would come here in power.

It's clear to me that this unawareness is in large part due to the consensus' lack of acceptance among Catholic presbyters. I've yet to hear a homily in which this view of Jesus' message is even really touched upon, let alone clearly articulated and allowed to affect the preaching in a major way.

This makes me curious about how the consensus regarding Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher of God's Kingdom (a view described by scholars like Johannes Weiss, Albert Schweitzer, Dale Allison, Bart Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, and the aforementioned John Meier) is taught in Catholic seminaries. Is it taught at all? Is a lot of time spent confronting the evidence behind the position, or is it brought up and dismissed in a few minutes with a handful of counterarguments? Are there actually a lot of presbyters who do embrace this view, but don't preach about it for fear of disturbing the flock?

The argument is simple:

1. Jesus said repeatedly that whatever we ask the Father in his name will be given to us.
2. I will ask the Father in the name of the Son to end the torture of the damned, if it is indeed happening.

I'll ask, therefore it'll be done. Eternal torture won't be a thing.