PRIESTHOOD CONVERSATION: Day Four thought starter... (Priesthood Discussion)

Brian

You wrote...

I could be wrong here — and would value input of men who have actually been through the seminary system: I shouldn't imagine any person enters the seminary with anything but the noblest and purest of motives. The 'corruption' (or whatever you want to label it: clericalism? cynicism? the misguidedness? even 'the sin'?) enters at a later stage down the track. Would that be a fair assessment?

As a somewhat "experienced" seminarian (view my personal history post below) I have never witnessed or encountered anything among any of my fellow candidates for the priesthood other than the noblest and purest of motives. That, of course, is a personal observation...but I believe my observations are correct. Quite obviously I cannot speak for any current group of students for the priesthood... except to say that perhaps they are being conditioned to a pre-Vatican 11 understanding of priesthood. If that is the case, then it is extremely unfortunate.

My own personal opinion, for what it is worth, is that power and authority can easily lead to corruption, and clericalism can fail to provide a meaningful leadership required in the local pastoral community.

I really believe that priests should come down from any pedestals either they or others have put them on, and deal with the joys, hopes, griefs and anxieties of all God's people where they, and all of us, experience our God. Only then can corruption and any other forms of misguided leadership be recitified.

Just a couple of thoughts...

Peter

Brian, I prepared a response to your words ...

I shouldn't imagine any person enters the seminary with anything but the noblest and purest of motives ...

but when Mary called me to eat I forgot to click 'submit'

The jist of what I wrote was that I could not imagine anyone going through the seminary years in my case 10, without the noblest and purest of motives. For me those motives remained so as a missionary priest until I experienced somewhat a "midlife crisis" or maybe just loneliness or hankering for intimacy beyond the close friendship of those I lived with.

I also wrote about the condemnation I and others like me received from the editor of a certain Catholic Journal who said that it were better that we had never been ordained. I replied at the time that he should consider the Holy Spirit may have been involved to bring Providence or a catalyst into play.

Francis

My purpose is to remember the love that created me in God one with my brothers and sisters and with all life. My function is to extend that love and unity each moment to all.

The link below is to an article re 'Defending the Pope' (much of the same).

http://blog.georgetownvoice.com/2010/04/07/thomas-reese-of-georgetown-defends-the-popes...

However my reason for posting it is the following response posted after the article.

(My highlights).

Tom Degan says:
April 7th, 2010 at 5:16 pm
In my parish, St. John the Evangelist in Goshen, NY, the first major pedophile scandal materialized in the early nineties. The priest in question, “Father Ed” had been molesting boys in their early teens for a couple of years. To say that the parishioners were traumatized by this would be an understatement. They were devastated. Then something wondrous happened….

Father Ed was defrocked and eventually replaced by Father Trevor Nichols. Father Trevor had been an Anglican in merrie old England when he converted to Catholicism. On becoming a Catholic he was transferred to Saint John’s -
WITH HIS WIFE AND TWO DAUGHTERS! A married priest! WITH TWO KIDS!

You want to hear the punch line? Our little parish did not implode. The sun did not fall from the sky. Huge cracks did not appear in the earth’s surface. In fact, it was nice having them. They were – and are to this day – deeply beloved by the people of St. John’s.

Allowing priests to marry would transform the Catholic Church. Having Father Trevor, his wife Marian and their two lovely daughters in our midst certainly transformed the people of St. John’s.

Great to hear such a positive response.

We have probably all been experiencing some difficulties in this task of confronting priesthood online. Just look at the Indexes Brian has put up. Talk about Sodano ‘chatter’. Just keeping an eye on the extensive material takes more time than most can allow. In addition Easter would have caught a lot of us out – at our place we had 15-20 people through the house in changing groups for bed and board, and yesterday a nostalgic mixed family excursion to a distant part of the State to visit the restored farm house of a particular pair of great grandparents.

Over the last two days of all this I determined that in contributions to the discussion succinctness was one rule of thumb, and another might well be fixing a focus or two. As it is, we have apples and pears – and kiwi fruit – all in a jumble. Selecting items to build on or to comment upon is a challenge in itself.

Succinctness? Just look how I have started!

Meantime Tom is riding high in the saddle, not exactly directing traffic but helpfully identifying many elements of the discussion. Some of us, however, would probably prefer to change to choppers to get a better view of the herd and the lie of the land. Maybe we would like a home paddock set up within our free-range cattle run.

My own early contribution concerned the distinction between ‘priest/sacerdos’ and ‘priest/presbyter’, one being essentially a ‘sacrificer’ and the other essentially a person endowed with a responsibility for the tradition.

In his Day 4 Starter, Tom acknowledged this ‘clarification on the original word Presbyter, around which this whole discussion revolves’. Actually, however, discussion has hardly touched on the distinction. PeterR, of course, has for a long time been interested in the implications of the distinction for a priesthood of tomorrow, and I am grateful to him for bringing it to the fore on more than one occasion.

Priorities for many lie in rather different zones. A few of these would appear to be entirely ‘churchless’, and hence they would dispense with titled functionaries altogether. Not very different in effect are the views of those who recommend that the ‘church’ represent itself among us solely through small – and even leaderless – communities.

Of course, already within the ‘Great Church of the West’ thousands of ‘members’ choose to express their Christian affiliation through some such communitarian experiences. Many books provide guidelines – or used to! - for initiating and sustaining this expression of ‘churchlife’.

But is this enough? Is it realistic? Will it work generationally? Do people so involved care if it does not? Can it elicit the kind of critical awareness of itself and of Christianity as a movement for tomorrow that international movements require if they are not to fall foul of parti pris, envy, sloth, and corruption à la RCC today?

Questions of this kind have long been close to my mind, even as I have for decades – in company with my family – participated in small Christian groups for the good of (at least) my soul. (Over these same decades my wife has always had a much more sanguine view of such enthusiasms, and our offspring have long since gone elsewhere for enlightenment.) At the same time, from these situations I think I can say that I observed many individuals deriving considerable and even great benefits that they did not find available from ordinary parish life.

Given this habit of questioning, however, I tried in my earlier contribution to raise the issue of whether, in order to have a meaningful experience of ‘church’, we might need something more than the casual inspirations available within small groups. I wrote (in a post below on Day 1 2010-04-06, 15:09 that even Tom only discovered on Day 4) the following:

...we need to identify what look like essential elements that go to the making of such ‘ministers’. These will be more than the personable qualities we would like to see community leaders exhibiting. The elements will include something more specifically ‘christian’ and, of course, ‘catholic’ (the latter word in its broader sense – and certainly not in any pursuit of ‘uniformity’ across the ‘catholic’ church). Any such search will take us to where we need to rake over old theologies and dig up old history.

And on this theme I moved towards the following conclusion:

Men and women who have vainly tried to breach the walls [of official theology of priesthood] at different points of apparent weakness these last decades include the following (surnames only):

Schillebeeckx Congar Lemaire Küng Häring Kerkhofs O’Meara Cooke Schüssler-Fiorenza Mitchell Boff Power McBrien Whitehead Hoornaert Lawler Rademacher Fox Bernier Richards Hahnenberg Lavin Wood Gaillardetz Macy Lobinger Sesboué Zulehner Lakeland Ruether Burrows Bosch Schonheimer Schneiders Ranke-Heinemann Dinter Haunerland Rinere Rausch Haag Demers Wilson Burtchaell Robertson Collins Fiedler Rabben Quinn O’Sullivan Curran Sullivan Balasuriya Gramick Nugent Byrne Winter Cozzens Eisen Clark Osiek Madigan Rice Powers Balch O’Malley Kowalski Unsworth Tavard Tillard Philibert

In whatever direction we try to take ourselves, we would be foolish not to take with us what we can gather from the wisdom and courage of these – and many other - torchbearers.

This morning’s reading of several news reports and op-ed here and on CathNews about the total inadequacy of conventional ecclesiology (hierarchy, priesthood, overweening authority, unaccountability, and effete laity) have prompted this return to the seeming need for a closer consideration of the major issue.

Among the several striking pieces, note perhaps especially the reflection of the Dominican Paul Philibert (whose name I have now attached to the list above) on the debilitating and dysfunctional ‘popular’ theology of priesthood:

http://ncronline.org/news/faith-parish/clericalism-and-liturgy

To suggest a closer consideration of this issue is not, of course, to exclude any expression of our hopes for a diversification of ways of being church. A genuine ‘church’ will always be sensitive to what we might call higher or at least alternative spiritual needs among some of its members. And it will be sensible enough to foster initiatives to meet those needs – or at least to leave people at liberty to find their own preferred spaces.

This is a rather different arrangement from what has been evident in the Vatican’s policy of supporting ‘the new movements’, because, as we have been observing, that policy was one way of the Vatican riding roughshod over the rest of us in the persons and ideologies of conservative and restorationist movements. And we now know that not all movements have revealed what one might call the spirit of the Gospel, as the Letter to the Legionaries of Christ by its two North American Field Marshals has gruesomely illustrated.

http://www.legionariesofchrist.org/eng/articulos/articulo2.phtml?lc=id-27251_se-242_ca-...

Brian

You speak of your discussion with a friend last night and you write

A friend rang me last night to have a long conversation about the crisis. One of the points he made, and strongly, is that in his opinion one of the key problems is that many priests have simply stopped believing.

The question that immediately comes to my mind is "stopped believing in what?" I don't know of any priest who has stopped believing in God or in the person and teachings of Jesus Christ (but there may undoubtedly be some...although this would place their own sanity under extreme duress and their mental health would surely suffer if they were to continue preaching and teaching about the loving and compassionate God of Jesus Christ!). However there are several priests of my acquaintance who have serious doubts and questions regarding certain aspects of Catholic doctrine and dogma. I have just reread an essay written by Ian Elmer and published on Catholica some months ago regarding The Holy Family in the context of "Who is Jesus?" The conclusion he arrives at regarding whether or not Jesus had siblings is apparently the conclusion "almost unanimously accepted by modern biblical scholarship" and endorsed under the Imprimatur by the Catholic biblical scholar John P Meier is that Jesus, although born of a virgin, had younger brothers and sisters born to Mary and Joseph...and that the "entire patristic record of the first two centuries accepted without qualm that Jesus was not an only child, and that Mary had other children".

This is in contra-understanding to the perpetual virginity of Mary which was declared a doctrine of the Church at the Lateran Council of 649 CE.

I quote this as but one example of some dogmas and doctrines and theological opinions of the Church which are being discussed and analysed and prayed about by dozens of contemporary priests and theologians...and many are seeing these issues as "grey" areas or even unacceptable areas, and would see some of these doctrines and dogmas easily obfuscating or eradicating the essential teachings of the man Jesus.

I recall some years ago speaking with a young seventeen year old girl who was preparing for Confirmation. In our discussions she stated quite categorically that there were a few aspects of the Catholic faith that she found very difficult to reconcile with the teachings of Jesus. Hell was one of them ...Hell and Jesus did not mix! And the Doctrine of the Virgin Birth as per the Lateran Council was another.

I suggest there would be many priests struggling with these issues and who may very well have reached the point of "not believing". And therefore I would go along with what you wrote a little later although, as I stated above, I would find it difficult as a priest (even a retired one lol!) to remain agnostic while still proclaiming the message of Jesus

I suspect there are a lot of not only priests, but people in high positions in the lay administration, who essentially are agnostic today but they are adept at "going through the motions", or saying things they no longer actually believe because they have to say them if they want to keep their jobs or protect their superannuation...

My suggested answer is that there may be many priests still proclaiming the saving message of Jesus, presiding at the Eucharist and celebrating the Sacraments who have great doubts regarding some of the doctrines and dogmas of the church...but keep that to themselves for the sake of keeping the peace and their own job security. The "thought police" that you mention are ever active and it may well be for these undoubtedly good priests to keep their questioning minds silent. The message of the compassionate and freeing Jesus and his loving, all embracing and unconditional accepting God should be the principal preaching and proclamation of the priest.

I just conclude by printing a recent letter to "The Tablet". It was written by a lady in NSW but I will not divulge her name...but if you are reading this, Rosemary, thank you for a beaut and meaningful letter and one which reflects a little on what Catholica has been on about these last few days:

When I read that there are over "100 frock-coated papal gentlemen" (The Church in the World, 13 March), I wonder yet again how it is, with all that pomp and ceremony, we have strayed so far from the simplicity of the Gospel message. Even some of the Irish bishops appear to have been embarrassed over the papal formalities, which included the kissing of the Pope's ring. It reminded me of one bishop in Britain after Vatican 11 who wanted to break this latter habit. When asked by devout parishioners if they could kiss his ring, he would say, "Certainly. It is in my back pocket!"

Lol!

Peter

I hope Tom might take up some of the ideas you explore in this.

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]

Gaspode,

Thank you for that rich, experiential contribution to these discussions.

My wife and I were having a discussion along those lines this morning related to my other discussion on Catholica re priesthood and ontological change. The context of our discussion was the changes resulting from a teacher friend becoming a principal of a school.

I don't think of a human being in terms of body and soul. I think of a human as a person-in-relationships-to-others. It is in and through our relationships that we experience calls; in our response to those calls we become.

(Put overly simply, in the case of our friend, the relationship of teacher to teacher is not the same as that of principal to teacher. A 'new person' is formed in the process of responding to calls in new one-to-one situations. We recalled a few difficult situations that developed when a teacher on a staff became the principal in the same school in which she previously taught.)

Extending that, I see a Christian as a person-in-Death/Resurrection-relationship-to-others. When we consciously live the Death and Resurrection of Christ as a quality of our life in our response to the calls made upon us, we become Christian - in a life long process: We become persons for others in loving service.

A mother has introduced a new relationship - of interminable responses to calls - into her life. Further, they are calls within the unique mother-child quality of relationship which involves one totally dependent partner in a relationship. The life-long commitment to fostering life that one has created (with one's spouse) is surely a unique relationship.

As a mere male, I haven't a clue of the totality of the human experience of a woman's bringing new life into the world.

All I can contribute to your thoughts really is to suggest that I think that when there is a significant change in our personal lives, there is the potential for newness to enter into our relationships in the changed situation, which newness, in turn, may change the quality of our pre-existing relationships as well.

As always, I like to start from the human experience. I can recall changes in my life situations which have had the effects I am trying to put into words.

Peter