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Special
Report: PRIESTS Saving Fr. Ryan: understanding the good priest
By EUGENE KENNEDY
Whatever happened to the Prodigal
Sons brother, the one relegated to a supporting role in as famous a
parable as we know?
This brother, it may now be told, became a priest in contemporary
America where he lives out his eternal calling with an asceticism anchored in
never being thanked much for being on duty all the time. He represents the
taken-for-granted men who understand from their own bittersweet experience the
taken-for-granted women in the church.
The Father still throws banquets for latecomers, embracing married
Anglican priests by the hundreds, for example, and singing of the secret
virtues of organizations such as Opus Dei. Good priests witness the coddling of
such borderline characters as the prodigal inheritors of the schismatic
Archbishop LeFebvre while repeated investigations are carried out on such fine
and orthodox theologians as Fr. Richard McBrien.
American Catholicism is meanwhile interpreted to the pope by men
such as Michael Novak and Richard Neuhaus, who regard themselves as special
prosecutors of what they apparently consider the criminal reforms of Vatican
II, a position ambitioned if not already held by some elitist seminarians as
well. The hammering in the background, as disheartening as the sounds of
scaffold building, comes from the systematic dismantling of the Vatican Council
II to whose implementation these priests have given their lives.
Those who stick to their pastoral work every day are criticized
more than congratulated, crank letters of complaint are filed instead of burned
and may well be held against them, and they had better not make even a small
mistake: What is this we hear, Father, about your using general absolution?
In short, good priests better believe that virtue is its own
reward as they feel more intensely each day the strain of their high-demand,
low-reward style of life. Were contemporary American Catholicism a movie, their
names would not show up in the long crawl of credits at the end, not even as
best boy, the role the vanishing culture preferred them to fill.
The prime burden of our best priests is both psychological and
spiritual. They are subject not only to pressures from the structures of the
organized church but from the irresistible dynamics of social change that play
as fiercely on them as the noonday sun.
A century ago, in a seldom-noticed
prophecy, impressionist painters dropped institutions from their scenes except
where their facades, as in Monets celebrated Cathedral series at Rouen,
France, offered envelopes of shifting light. Institutions were disappearing
from the artists view of the world in a symbolic foreshadowing of the
collapse of hierarchical institutions the containers rather than what
they contained in the century that followed. Authoritative justice,
wisdom and faith were not disappearing from history but the authoritarian
medium in which they had for so long been expressed no longer bore the
message.
Remarkably, the Fathers of Vatican Council II anticipated the
crisis in institutional housing, that is, the collapse of hierarchy as
the form to express human experience, that would erupt painfully and
expensively, a generation later in all other great institutions from education
and the military to medicine and business. The worlds bishops restored
church governance to the collegiality of its founding, putting aside the
already brittle hierarchical forms that were doomed by the advent of the
Space/Information Age. Far from squandering magisterial authority, the council
re-invigorated it, providing new conduits, such as national conferences of
bishops, through which its freshened authority would flow more swiftly
throughout the church and the host world. Since then the church has blossomed
through the practical labors of its priests and people in collegial
reorganization that, infused with healthy authority, has transformed the most
remote of its parishes.
During this time of internal renewal, good priests found their
enthusiastic implementation of Vatican II could not renew and, in a sense,
rewire the churchs authority without reworking the overlapping cultures
in which, until that time, they had themselves lived. The world-unto-itself
Catholicism in which they grew up came apart around them.
The loosening of the obsessive controls, source of great
discipline but also of almost trademark ambivalent guilt and compelled rather
than freely chosen callings, hastened the disintegration of the clerical
culture within the larger Catholic culture. Thousands of priests and religious
suddenly felt free to put aside what they had previously accepted as their
inescapable divinely ordained duty.
Broken open to a suffering world, the dark paneled rectories that
once echoed to the laughter and comradeship of priests gradually emptied, the
Roman collared good times of its molted clericalism fading like old
photographs. Caught in these enormous vectors, those remarkable priests who
chose to remain, sustained the American church through the post-Vatican II
work-in-progress of renewing the church, working in battlefield conditions
without battlefield pay.
One cannot suppose that these priests were immune to the
attractions of the non-clerical life chosen by many of their best friends. The
pull was not for sex but for an end to the loneliness of the calling that was
being exposed as the insulation of the once-protective cultures wore thin. They
stuck it out even as they were drawn by the healthy intimacy they seldom if
ever experienced with other priests despite the surface merriment of the
irreversibly declining clerical culture.
There was great value and good fun in the masculine bonding of the
priesthood, but did clergymen know much about each other, did anybody know much
about them? As their own parents aged, many discovered that emotionally they
had never left home, that they had lived out the mantra of priests
mothers, You never lose the son who enters the church. To another
woman, that is. Good priests examined their own psychological development,
wondering if they needed to find other human relationships as deep or deeper
than those established in the parental home in which, to their growing
uneasiness, they were Father Jim or Father Tom, good
boys in aeternum.
The center of that old universe did
not hold and dealing with their own growth, as we shall see, was an
unanticipated but not totally unwelcome challenge, motivating priests to grow
not for their own delight but to enter better relationships with the people
they served. They acquired new skills, such as counseling training, which
allowed them to capitalize on their own growth in expanding their pastoral
effectiveness.
Many of the nations finest priests, adjusting to this shift
from an authoritarian to a collegial mode, encountered a life that required
constant adjustments. Some separated from the past by moving psychologically,
if not physically, out of their rectories into what they termed real
life. They located themselves emotionally with their people or, often,
with supportive sisters, sisters-in-law, or other members of their suddenly
vastly extended families.
Visit today a rectory that not so long ago was warmed by
gatherings of laughing and chatting priest confreres at the breakfast table.
That room aches with museum silence because the lives of priests no longer
center on rectory life but on separate destinations for each day, on tasks and
relationships with others that at the same moment symbolize both the problem of
living in a de-centered culture and their solution for it.
Ask a good priest what he looks for in an assignment change and
high on the list of specifications would be community, a healthy
response that tells us what is missing or so rarely found in the
de-clericalized universe. This fundamental search for friends parallels the
problem of the larger culture as well. Its deeper meaning is that good priests,
like the impressionists, no longer see institutions as central to lives they
must now largely fashion on their own.
This de-centering of priests lives is therefore both gain
and loss for them. But they could not have survived had they not made healthy
adaptations after the clerical life began to collapse. At the same time, they
also had to work and sometimes fight for a living wage, a pension plan and the
other standard conditions of ordinary American adult existence.
Already de-centered American priests found that they were
also being radically de-mystified, in part by the unintended effects of
the liturgical changes of Vatican II that undeniably removed a measure of
mystery from the liturgy and its celebrant. The priest found himself, in a
collapsed hierarchy, on the same level with everyone else. Is it an accident or
an inevitability that some priests unconsciously acknowledge their
de-mystification by wearing clearly visible casual clothes and shoes beneath
their vestments? Look at us, call us by our first names, theres nothing
special about us or what we do, were just like you. This from a group
that, in the high hierarchical culture, was celebrated as ontologically
different, that is, different in their being, from their brothers and sisters,
from their parishioners, from the big-city cops who would wink, close their
traffic ticket books and wave them on.
The functions once reserved to the priest such as bringing
the Eucharist to the sick behind fluttering candle flame in a silence broken by
heralding bells that in 1950s Catholic communities defined his otherness
have for some time been routinely performed by lay persons, many of whom
are now as theologically sophisticated as the priests they assist. Good priests
have accepted these changes as aspects of Vatican II renewal, recognizing what,
like growth, has no remedy, the de-mystification inherent in the leveling and
equalizing effects of collegiality.
While the Catholic church rightly defines itself as primarily
sacramental, a community whose native tongue is that of symbols rather
than logic, many factors have come together to blur this identity. This has not
been easy and, for many priests, as for many Catholics, it has been estranging.
The impact, for these priests and believers, resembles that of the
overconfident restorers on the windows of Chartres. In cleaning them, they
destroyed their optics, their eyes, we might say, that received the light of
the sun, a constant symbol of eternity, and focused it in time. Although the
light now falls through them as sharp and clean as a dagger stroke, their
capacity to diffuse it sacramentally has been weakened. So, too, many Catholic
churches, their sacramental atmosphere cleansed by reform, seem the same as
they were and yet radically different. Spare and gleaming as the scoured
windows of Chartres, they are all but indistinguishable from most Protestant
houses of worship.
Pope John Paul II, the man of the century as one
biographer called him because of his extraordinary influence on the world, may
be making the mistake of the millennium in his insistence on the restoration of
hierarchical authority within the church. Catholics would not deny him the full
measure of his authority but they cannot and do not respond to it when he
expresses it in the authoritarian language of a closed era.
Unfortunately, the side effect of
this determined papal restoration has been to lessen the dynamic authority of
both this truly remarkable pope and the largely unremarkable majority of
bishops that he has appointed. The spirit of this restoration has been to
return to a period, as the nostalgic see it, when religion was harder and life
was better. We can bring it back, they promise, with more rigorous church
discipline and a more concrete religious teaching program. Both these outcomes
ignore or naively beggar what many priests understand: The essential mystery of
religion is communicated in sacramental symbols rather than in decrees,
penalties or fundamentalist literalism.
A crucial example is found in the
popes efforts to suggest that an all-male priesthood is an infallible
church teaching and that any discussion of women becoming priests should
therefore come to an end. The form of this unilateral communication was
essentially hierarchical and subtly authoritarian. The true test of the
authority with which the statement was invested is found in its failure to
close down the theological discussion of ordaining women. People do not reject
this because they do not like the pope, deny him authority or because they are
closet heretics. The argument against women priests lacks efficacious authority
in its thesis and presentation. In the long run, such documents spend down
magisterial authority by transmitting it on an authoritarian network whose
lines were long ago shorted out by history.
Our best priests live between a layer of bishops, some of whom
have lost their nerve and initiative, and a laity that is rich in both
characteristics. Operationally and imaginatively, the American bishops have
functionally merged with the pope. Few of them realize that, despite the fact
that they are on the A list for civic and ceremonial events in
their dioceses, they have ceded a significant measure of their own rightful
collegial authority by becoming incorporated into the grandiose model of papal
authority that John Paul II has so vigorously re-instated.
Bishops may not question their role, but their good priests do.
They want to be loyal to the pope and the bishops but they identify with the
church as a people rather than as a hierarchical organization. This places them
in a truly impossible position for, in the Internet Age, they no longer relay
papal teaching but are receivers and reactors on the same plane with
well-educated Catholics. The pope talks past them and the bishops in an array
of languages. There is no there, there for intermediaries.
Good priests, traditionally defined as mediators, now find
themselves in the middle in a church that has no middle anymore. The reduction
in the number of individual confessions heard and the rise in the use of
communal penance services are predictable outcomes in a leveled hierarchy in
which ordinary people feel that they can represent themselves well in the court
in which their sinfulness is judged. Sensible shepherds work to shape a richer
identity for priests as collegial leaders while stewards of the administrative
church call them back to authoritarian forms dubbed communio, the code
word for noncollegial. But these structures, like pyramids, house the dead more
than the living.
The pedophilia crisis exploded like an anti-personnel mine in the
mid-80s as heavily publicized stories documented the renting of the temple veil
that once shrouded incidents of the sexual abuse of boys by priests. Mothers
who had rejoiced as they watched their sons celebrate their first Masses wept
in this new era as they watched these once-pure offerings corrupted, and, like
late century Oscar Wildes, manacled, shamed and imprisoned. The clerical
culture was as dead as Wildes Victorian era.
During these dark times, good priests kept at their pastoral tasks
although many found themselves rendered suspect. Some restrained their own
healthy spontaneity for fear that an embrace or a pat on the back of a boy or
girl might be interpreted as a sign of ominous desires barely controlled. Some
who were falsely accused found little support from their bishops who tended to
follow the advice of their insurance companies and their lawyers rather than
the possibilities of their own pastoral instincts.
No history of the awkward handling of the pedophile crisis
the bishops still lack a truly uniform national policy on this matter
can recapitulate its impact on the good priests who remained on line and
unrelieved during these troubles. Wearing the Roman collar suddenly acquired an
ambivalent character. Today, even in predominantly Catholic cities such as
Chicago, a keen observer must be near the diocesan offices to find a priest
dressed in clerical garb.
As the great door of the century slowly closes, fine priests find
themselves wearing out despite themselves. They are often alone in very large
and successful post-Vatican II parishes. I recently lectured in a not untypical
suburban parish in which there were 3,500 families, one priest with dark
circles under his eyes, and 100 ministries being carried out by lay people well
aware that they are the church. What is life like for priests who live in what
is becoming the model for the 21st century parish?
Todays good priests often live
by themselves, sometimes in a house or apartment near the parish that they
maintain, sometimes more in the manner of Oscar than Felix of The Odd
Couple. TV dinners cram the freezer as unwashed laundry does the
hamper, and the phone rings all the time. Wonderful priests live in this
fashion, the demands of their work leaving them alone and yet with little time
for themselves. When they do talk about themselves it is less with self-pity
than with self-doubt about how long they can keep working at such a pace in
such conditions. Their bishop may be very understanding, but he is often
removed and, since the latters own life has not changed as much as that
of his priests, remains unaware of the incredible stress under which these men
work. The leadership of the church on the practical, day-to-day, collegial
level is largely in the hands of these pastors. But how long can we expect so
much from them?
Such priests read the new culture of the priesthood realistically.
They see themselves as the Vatican II generation and they understand that the
church is a people more than as a place, a mystery rather than a series of
measurements. Who, however, will succeed them? And how can they guarantee the
sacramental life of the church when its bishops substitute scripture services
for the celebration of the Eucharist, a plan that deals with the scarcity of
the sacrament by making it even scarcer. They think that the bishops have not
thought through the importation of priests from the Third World, as if anybody
from anywhere could be plugged into American culture successfully.
Many of our finest priests are,
therefore, frustrated and often angry at the cadre of administrators who, in a
real sense, represent the last stand of classic clerics. The latter naturally
defend the system that defines their careers although many are tempered by
their experiences in helping out in parishes. Officials in general, however, do
not seem keenly aware of their own diminished impact on post-Vatican II
Catholic communities.
This theological independence of many laity disturbs those bishops
who do not understand that such moral confidence is a signal of the success of
Catholicism in America. This misreading of the church is daily increasing the
psychological separation of the administrative church from the people. Their
people have grown up, grown past them in many ways.
Because no reward system now exists in the priesthood, except for
the occasional bright rash of monsignors, good priests shoulder on, largely on
their own faith, and because of the successful human relationships they have
developed with their people. That is a healthy achievement. Some bishops,
however, continue to observe the term limits for pastors that were set up two
generations ago to meet a totally different situation, the haphazard tyranny of
many pastors in the pre-Vatican II church. To ask men in their 60s to break
away from the human relationships that sustain them and to move to another
parish is clerical capital punishment. Although the priests in some dioceses,
such as Milwaukee, have voted to retain these norms, many dioceses have
sensibly abandoned these terms of pastoral office.
Experienced priests are concerned about some young priests who
refuse sick call or other duties that interfere with their schedules. Are we
in, they wonder, for a Boomer priesthood of self-regard more than
self-sacrifice? Their greatest reservations, however, center on those
seminarians who, as described by Sr. Katarina Schuh in her recent study of
theologates and seminaries have a rigid understanding of their
faith and create a climate of distrust and defensiveness, publicly
questioning the orthodoxy of professors and fellow students.
As described in a New York Times Magazine cover story, such
candidates see themselves as counter-cultural saviors with a mission to get sin
back into sex in order to denounce it from the pulpit. They are being groomed
for a world that no longer exists. Without considerable maturing, they will
find it difficult to serve in a collegial church when their hearts are in an
authoritarian one. Their conversations about themselves bring up a question
that, like the last fire of the night, has been temporarily banked but not
extinguished. That concerns sexuality.
As the average age for American priests climbs toward 70, many
good priests are eager for retirement, for a way out, at last, from a life they
have loved but can live no longer. Largely unexamined or discussed are the
personal adjustments that these men have made in order to stay alive.
In this aging population of priests, there are men in their 70s
who are just beginning to feel how lonely and isolated they are after keeping
faith with their vows of celibacy all through their lives. Now, with family and
friends dying, with the environment of the church transformed, they experience
the irreparably burned-out feelings of having dutifully forsaken intimacy with
another human being. Retired or on a diminished schedule, they are good men
suddenly assailed by longings and fantasies they were convinced that they had
conquered like desert fathers many years before. The resurgence of these
longings and fantasies is disturbing in itself and disorganizing in its
effects.
These are not returning tides of
temptation as much as they are the understandable human overflow from the flood
held off for so long and so valiantly but at a cost they had never quite
understood before. And to what end, some ask, now that I can do nothing about
the way I have lived, to what end, all this obsessive worry and denial, what
have we done to ourselves? They have kept the faith, they are finishing the
course, but they are still working hard at adjusting themselves to times that
are far different from the way they expected they would be.
It may be said that good priests adjust to celibacy rather than
live it as some energizing virtue. In a previous era, their humanly
understandable adjustments, such as having large cars, costly hobbies and
taking expensive vacations, brought them some criticism. In more recent years,
good priests have found less time for such recreations and have had to deal
with celibacy in different ways. Their adjustments now range from workloads
that squeeze out rumination to deepened prayer to strengthen their grasp on the
meaning of celibacy in and to a community.
Many priests, sensitized by their pastoral experience to the
puzzlement, wonder and pain that surround sexuality in a supposedly knowing
world, have thought deeply about their roles as teachers, confessors and as
sexual beings themselves. Still others, difficult to number, have incorporated
celibacy into their lives in choices about which they, and their bishops, have
made pacts of peace and quiet. Dont ask, dont tell.
In this post-clerical, de-centered
priesthood, the adjustments to celibacy are as varied as the new relationships
into which priests enter in their pastoral labors. Many of these relationships
are highly supportive of their work in the priesthood. Without friends, often
without the love and understanding of a specific woman or, in some cases, a
certain man, these priests would not be able to function. Their energy comes
from these relationships, and their spirituality is inseparable from them.
Where priests flourish, it is because they import healthiness into their
pastoral work from that place, different for each, at which the center of their
lives may truly be found.
Any examination of the true human north in the lives of American
priests would lead, therefore, to relationships outside the now-outmoded
hierarchical structures. Within these relationships, many priests have had to
review their convictions about human sexuality, that great area always marked
off as posted territory, forever off limits to them. To say that many priests
have changed their once-strict ideas about sexuality would be an
oversimplification of a reality about which little has been asked and little
has been told. The real world of the priests that keep the church going is,
however, profoundly human. And nothing human can ever, they feel, be
intrinsically alien to them.
Some of these relationships are sexual, according to such
observers as Terry Dosh, editor of the church reform newsletter Bread
Rising, but, in fact, and despite varied wonders, assertions and denials,
we have a surfeit of anecdote and a lack of data about this matter. What we do
know is that these relationships, from friendship to profound loves, are far
better for the church than the quirky asexual adjustments that could be found
within, and at times characterized, a lost and gone clerical structure.
The adjustments to celibacy in the contemporary American
priesthood are, for the most part, healthy and they are also a sign of how
greatly transformed is the priesthood beneath the surface. It is also testimony
to what good men must do to stay alive when they are living lives that are as
pressured and largely unrewarded as theirs.
These men are true brothers to the Prodigal Son. It is time we
killed the calf and lighted the candles for a feast to honor them.
Eugene Kennedy, a former Maryknoll priest, is a professor
emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of My
Brother Joseph, published by St. Martins Press.
National Catholic Reporter, March 31,
2000
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