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So one Sunday last year after 10:30am Mass on Sunday the family and I went to Wendy’s for lunch.  My son loves their Frosty’s.  So there we are eating away when I notice five nicely dressed women come in an order.  There were no men with these women and you could tell they were coming from their Sunday services.  After receiving their food and sitting down, they prayed before eating their meal.  While my family and I pray before our meals in public you could tell these women were not Catholic.  Oh how I hope, and pray, that more Catholics would pray before meals in public.  There is no reason not to, you won’t offend anyone, and if you do let them know you will pray for them.

So here these five protestant women sit thanking God for their food and enjoying their time together on a Sunday afternoon.  But one question rose up in my head and would not leave, “Where are the men?”  Usually when I see a group of folks out for lunch after their Sunday services (i.e. Protestants) I see a few men in the bunch.  In this bunch there were five women, and zero men.  And it just hit me that the trajectory of Protestant denominations and the advent of women’s ordinations will drive the men from the pews.  Not to be sexist here but what man wants to go listen to a woman week after week preach to him about Jesus? Sure there will still be a few men left in the pews but I can see men leaving in droves as women take more of a leadership role in Protestant churches.  I’m not being chauvinistic with my assessment I’m being realistic and honest.  As a man I have no problem listening to the spiritual direction and insights of women, specifically religious women, i.e. Nuns, but if women were priests turn out the lights, what men that show to Mass now up now, would just shrivel up and vanish.

The concept is no different when it comes to male and female alter servers.  The vast majority these days are girls.  Why is that?  Just think about it for a second, what adolescent boy wants to hangout and do anything with girls?  The more girls you have helping the less boys you will have participate.  The same goes for grown men.  What grown man wants to sit week after week listening about God from a woman?  Thankfully as Catholics we will never have to experience that.  Some women will take offense at my comments but God in His wisdom knows the mind of a man, He created us after all, male and female.  He gave us certain roles in life and my role is never to be a mother and a mother’s role is to never be a priest.

I pray those five women will be able to bring Christ to their husbands but with the current trajectory of Protestantism adding with female minsters to the mix I’m pretty sure the odds are stacked against them.

So on New Years day as my Nebraska Cornhuskers struggled with the Georgia Bulldogs I started watching some YouTube videos that I had saved on my Watch Later list.  One of the suggested videos appeared a video called King Solomon, which I have linked.  It was almost a three-hour movie from 1997 with decent acting, a great set, and obviously an intriguing story.  I’ve read the book of Kings before but this movie made want to read it again.  When you see characters of a story in the flesh, the story makes more sense, especially when the names of the people are difficult to pronounce and appear to be similar in spelling.

I believe the movie to be very close to the historical bible story of King Solomon from the book of Kings but there are some artistic liberties taken with the story specifically as it relates to the Solomon’s relationship with the Queen of Sheba. The movie is unrated but I would rate the movie PG-13.  There are definitely a few scenes, sexual in nature, which would not be appropriate for younger viewers.  There is no full nudity but some backsides showing more than enough to be obvious.  I think the movie does an excellent job of showing King Solomon’s fall from being a great man with the gift of wisdom, doing God’s Will to gradually ignoring God and falling into worldly pursuits of power and control little by little as he ages.

I think one poignant scene is when Solomon, the man who has everything, is not allowed to determine his own legacy by picking the son that will succeed him.  The priests would not agree and said it was not his place to decide, God would decide.  It seemed from that point on in the movie Solomon started falling further and further away from God.  The man who had everything started to act if God didn’t exist.  Solomon began to think that what he had was because of his wisdom, which was true, but Solomon’s wisdom came from God.  In this new year may we realize that what we have comes from God and may we give thanksgiving for all that we have whether it be material possessions, in tangible gifts, or both.  May we not fall for the trap in thinking that we are the only cause of our successes in life.