Part Six: Priesthood of the Future

   Beyond Clericalism

 What is the proper sense of self a priest should have in relating to other priests and to people? He should be a disciple focused on, and lost in, Jesus Christ. The priest “creates” himself, he forms his character, and he develops his personality in response to the Christ event. This response is what it means to live as a disciple. Clericalism made and makes it easier for priests to be churchmen only, rather than disciples, easier to be official functionaries than to follow the Master, easier to go through the motions, rituals, and activities, than to go through the continuing conversion required of us as “clay vessels” in Christ’s hands.   Clericalism makes it possible to reduce the Christ event to moralism, ritualism, legalism,  dogmatism, or to an ideology like any other, instead of a lived relationship to Christ in Faith, Hope, and Love. Clericalism promotes a codependent system whereby empty forms could become a substitute for the adventure of a real spiritual life.

Since every human being is a mystery, no one can ever claim to perfectly know or understand another. The” you” I know is the result of my perceptions of you, and my perceptions of you are largely dependent upon my perceptions of myself as well as how you impact me. Inevitably I will project onto you what is not there, but simply baggage I carry because of who I am. You will do the same in your perceptions of me. Neither of us is ever in full touch with ourselves or the real human person the other is. Complicating this truth is the changing Culture we live in. At any given point of time, America has a somewhat established and yet somewhat fluid way of seeing and treating men of the cloth. Also, men of the cloth, clerics, have come to expect a certain level of treatment based on past experience and have difficulty dealing with shifts in their social standing. This fixed-fluid social reality of Clericalism is as unstable as the greater Culture it fits into, so it is highly volatile!  In addition, because American Culture is increasingly secular, Grace is a constant challenge and surprise as it brings the unforeseeable action of God into the picture. (Clericalism, of course, makes Grace unnecessary, because it enables the priest to operate out of his own ego.)

Take the situation of any priest ordained, in 1977, or in 2007. He is part of a church system and social structure that is in place but also in flux because of the influences both natural and supernatural. The Culture of the Day, the influence of Grace, all interpenetrate priest and people to varying degrees. The priest daily has to decide if Grace will shape him.  If he makes no decision, he will be a product of the Culture. Culture’s power is to cultivate, perpetuate itself and its hold on society. Culture is an ecosystem that fosters and rewards the organisms in it to take on and incarnate its values. It is never a neutral grocery store in which one can freely pick and choose from assorted options. God’s Grace, however, creates its own culture built on man’s free response to it, which flies in the face of the predominating social culture. It will always be easier for a priest or any Christian to act out of the influences of the culture around him than out of the graces that come from above.

The most any priest can do is live up to his call to be a disciple and define himself by his relationship to the Christ event. If he functions only as a churchman, he works without grace, with only his personal charm, intelligence, will power, character, etc.  In short he becomes like any professional who functions on an ego level without God. If he lives as a disciple, he puts his skills and talents as a churchman in the service of Christ.

The priest has to live from grace to grace, inspired, sustained and led by the promptings of the Spirit. The Law of the gift is the operative principle of his priestly existence. No matter what natural gifts he has, they can never accomplish what he achieves by faithful discipleship. How can a priest take himself seriously when he says “I absolve your sins?” How can he do anything but laugh at himself when he says “This is my body”? Nothing he does as a priest is the result of his natural, human capabilities. His communion with Christ, his discipleship, consists in realizing that his ‘nothingness’ is precisely what makes him Christ’s instrument. Ordination makes him the property of Jesus Christ. That is the beauty of the Sacrament. Clericalism, on the other hand, encourages the self deception that he can somehow belong to Christ and still be his own man.

  The surprise is not to find forms of Clericalism and codependency in the Church.  The surprise would be if church were free of it. That will not happen till the kingdom has come in its fullness. Grace builds on nature but cannot be superimposed on it. Clericalism prevents authentic human relationships . The infused virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity cannot plant themselves in a human nature that is not open receptive to them.  Their purpose is to open us human beings to the Christ Event. An ungraced humanity ends up being inhuman.  I am incapable of recognizing who I really am as a human being or who another is, without the help of grace. I have to be living as a fallen-but-graced self in order to relate to another in a manner that is not codependent.  To live unaware of my fallen state, or to live unaware of my need for God’s grace, is already to be in a state of wrong relationship to others, and therefore codependent.

 Are there more serious matters than Clericalism for the priest to concern himself with?  Not really. Poverty, world hunger, drugs, racism, injustice, trafficking in human beings, genocide, abortion, etc. – all  obviously destroy countless people on a daily basis. That is the real world the priest is called to bring Christ’s love to. He cannot communicate Christ’s love to anyone unless he is first living in it. Clericalism prevents him from doing what he is called to do in Christ’s plan. Remember Christ’ words about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees who “…. preach but do not practice” (Matt. 23:33).  “They bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with their finger. (vs.34)” Certainly the point is that false piety should not be imitated.  But Our Lord is saying that it should not be winked at either. The collusion in Clericalism is the winking, the unspoken agreement that neither priest nor laity has to live the stuff that is preached, only pretend that they do. Priests are called to lead by example, not by word, and not by posturing. Artificial niceness reduces the faith to good manners and a pleasant demeanor. Courtesy and politeness can be no more than protecting one's personal space from interference and preserving one's individualism.

Once pretence is portrayed as the norm for people to live by, it becomes the “heavy burden” Christ speaks of, the one that cannot be borne.  What is so unbearable about it? The split it causes inside us who try to carry the burden by living one way and believing another. The longer the split is lived, the more ingrained and deformative it becomes.  In the short term such a psychic split prevents spiritual growth in priest and people.  In the long term, it leads to spiritual death, the “second death” that lasts forever.  (Rev.2:11 and 2O:14)  It is inevitable that either we end up living the way we believe, or we end up believing the way we live.

 Clericalism is based on the priest’s covenant with his false self: “I will pretend to be better than I am, I will project that image before all, I will lay on them my expectation that they will deal with me as if my idealized image were my real self, I will resist with all my might any attempt on the part of God or man to break through my façade, and I will build my life on this lie. To this I pledge myself.” That is a narcissist’s vow, a “Baptismal Promise” to his false self, which ultimately leads to his self destruction.  If a priest continues to shape himself on the basis of what he is not, he is acting as if what he is did not really exist. Thus he grows further and further away from his real identity as well as more and more incapable of recognizing that he is doing so. He becomes so blinded and so bound by his behavior that he falls in love with his false self and never sees that he is his own worst enemy.

      As with every human being, it is the priest’s real self that is called to be holy.  His calling is to put his humanity in the service of Christ, as Christ put his humanity in the service of all. How is the priest to do this? The way Christ calls him to do so at the Last Supper, by drinking from the cup of suffering that will result in his transformation and salvation. By eating the bread that will enable him to give himself up for the people he serves.  He is called to make of himself the victim and sacrifice he offers in the Eucharist. The priest has to become what he offers, live the sacrament he celebrates, that is what his vocation calls him to.

Why not just say that his calling is “to grow in holiness”? Certainly that is true, but it is also vague and vacuous. In our culture, holiness is the impossible dream of Don Quixote, and only possible by denying, repressing, or falsely “transcending” one’s humanity. The priest has to witness to Christ by being a man whose real human self is immersed in Christ’s gift of his divine-human self to His people.  This is the way he is to grow in holiness and lead his flock to Christ.  Any other life style makes his call to Orders a hoax.   

The priest may live his sacrifice by serving his people in many ways: by working in a poor, or rich, or ethnic parish with the various ministries that entails; by specializing as a priest teacher, high school principal/chaplain/guidance counselor, hospital chaplain, chancery official, etc... No matter what the ministry, the element of self sacrifice is an essential part. Even in retirement, the component of self sacrifice is never absent. Today it is an ironic fact of priestly life that forced retirement is imposed on some priests because they have been wrongly accused of sexual abuse of minors.  What greater sacrifice than to suffer this kind of victimization precisely because of one’s configuration to Christ by the Sacrament of Orders? It is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s plight as he awaits death in Herod’s dungeon instead of being allowed to work in the marketplace for the Messiah. What could be more sacrificial than the slow martyrdom of forsakenness and abandonment?

Brotherhood 

What should facilitate and strengthen the priest today are: 1) the brotherhood of the priesthood and the communal  nature of church life.  At present,  the individualism of American Culture as well as the anticlerical attitudes among priests and people make ministry more difficult than it has to be.

                How do we priests get beyond Clericalism?  First, recognize that it is real, it exists, and its hold is firmest when it is not recognized. One of the surest signs of addiction is denial, and Clericalism is an addictive life-style. Since addiction is complex, the cure is multifaceted.  Look at some of the main ingredients in the stew that create the climate of Clericalism in the USA: individualism, priestly formation, low morale and mutual mistrust among clergy, a lone ranger style of ministry, ignorance of one’s human nature with its innate needs for communication, and shifting social expectations. With a stew like that, how could any priest or person be so stupid as to think he could deal with the dilemma by himself?  Brotherhood is the basic, ongoing need that has to be part of priestly lives in the future in order for the present system not to perpetuate itself.

                In American culture a sense of community is no longer the foundation of society; autonomous individualism has replaced it. Our society may be communal in some places more than others, but it is so only superficially, and as a whole, a spirit of individualism predominates. In underdeveloped countries, such as the African Continent, where the individual is seen as an extension of the people, a sense of community is as natural, and tribal brotherhood is as normal as breathing. In America neither community nor a sense of brotherhood can be assumed. Education into both has to begin in the seminary with young men who are already on the road to being largely individualistic. Their formation in community and brotherhood cannot be left to their personal initiative because American males would see individualism as a positive part of their personality and be unaware of their need for brotherhood in the priesthood.

                If formation is to involve the whole person and make him capable of communion with God and man, it has to start with the actual human nature of the seminarians. As students they need to absorb the truth of Monsignor Giussani’s words, “To be good priests, you first of all, have to be men, to feel what men feel. Live the relationship with everything that becomes present. Live the truth of your humanity. Cry because you need to cry - or you are afraid, because the problem is difficult and you feel the inadequacy of your strength. Be human; live your humanity as an aspiration, as a sensitivity to problems, as a risk to face, as a faithfulness to what God makes urgent in your soul. In this way, reality will appear to your eyes in a new way.” When seminarians and priests live those words with one another, Clericalism will fade away. Living that humanely will open them to the Christ who calls them to be brothers in his priesthood.

                The seminary has available to it the firm foundation of Christian Anthropology established by John Paul the II from his writings both as a bishop in Poland and later as Pope in Rome, in which he bases the dignity of the human person on Scripture, Philosophy, and Theology.  But this treasure is largely left buried, like gold that has not yet been taken from a mine. Seminaries in this country need to build their formation programs on the riches left to the Church for the formation of generations of priests to come. ALL candidates for ordination, whether recruited from abroad or native born need to benefit from John Paul II’s teachings in order to form the brotherhood that will enable them to be priests after Christ’s own heart. A seminary or diocese that does not base their priestly formation on a well developed Christian anthropology will only continue to codependent clerical system that now exists.