Church in
Crisis
Priest: beyond employee, to minister of the sacred
Editor’s note: Msgr. Philip J. Murnion, a priest of the
New York archdiocese, is director of the National Pastoral Life Center.
Following are excerpts of a presentation made Sept. 9 at a Catholic University
of America symposium on “Priestly Identity in a Time of
Crisis.”
By PHILIP J. MURNION
The cohort of priests ordained between 1962 and 1972 -- I call us
the Conciliar Cadre -- are a group for whom liturgy and social ministry were
part of the one fabric, the liturgy as the work of the people and work as the
liturgy of the people.
Ordained in 1963, I recall the years when solidarity and
creativity were the character of the priesthood, when the council and the civil
rights and anti-poverty movements of the ’60s inspired us to believe that
we could reshape church and world so that both would better fulfill their
missions. Ordination was for mystery and service -- for serving as an
instrument of God’s grace and the community’s care. Laity, bishops,
clergy and religious were proud of what we had accomplished as a church in the
United States and no less committed to the pope and the universal church. We
were a generation deeply rooted in a church whose devotions touched the heart,
whose sacraments interwove mystery and humanity, and whose ministry was to
equip its members for responsibility in the world.
I was ordained at a time when Cardinal Francis Spellman not only
defended the U.S. scripture scholars under attack from Rome and the right,
brought Fr. John Courtney Murray to the Second Vatican Council, and gave the
newly burgeoning Hispanic population of New York the creative leadership of the
truly radical Ivan Illich, but even defended a group of us seminarians whose
new journal had come under criticism from curial offices. Creativity and
solidarity were not enemies.
Things have changed.
But, as John Paul II said to a group of French bishops: “It
is not a question of cherishing nostalgic memories of a past which has
sometimes been idealized, nor of blaming anyone.”
Perhaps the current crisis in the church is one more sign of the
times -- one last chance? -- urging us to confront squarely and candidly what
has been happening in the church. It is time to take responsibility for the
present and leadership for the future. In recent years solidarity and
creativity have too often become unrewarded, undernourished, and unhooked from
each other. Solidarity is too often distorted into bureaucratic or integralist
claims of some that they represent “orthodoxy.” Creativity became too
often: “do your own thing,” and endemically in tension with
institution.
I will consider the ordained priest as pastor, presbyter,
priest.
Priest as pastor
Pastors find their greatest satisfaction in their sacramental
ministry and their greatest challenges in organizational demands --
administration, personnel management, finances. They suffer from the killer
b’s: buildings, budgets, boilers, bulletins and bingo -- and one bishop
admitted he could be another “b.” Typically, they have no training
for their role as pastors, as distinct from their role as priests. Increasingly
they have little time to learn from older pastors. They live “over the
store” in rectories that had once been clerical preserves and are now
organizational offices.
It is pastors who have been primarily responsible for welcoming
laypeople and religious into pastoral ministry (and, I dare say, the Conciliar
Cadre are primarily responsible for this flowering of parish lay ministry).
These lay parish ministers now number more than 30,000, more than the numbers
of parish priests. The motivation of the pastors is pastoral, not ideological
-- they carry on the great U.S. parish tradition of pastoral pragmatism,
employing every rite, movement or minister to do the work of the parish and
serve the people of the community. The creativity of pastors regarding both the
ministers and the ministries of parishes, mostly on their own initiative, is
remarkable. We now need to be concerned about the fact that half the younger
priests see no need for more lay ministers, for expanding the ministry roles of
women or for empowering of laypeople.
The diversity of parishioners, the diversity of parish ministers
and the increasingly complex role of pastoring even one parish, never mind two
or three, call for careful selection of pastors and much more support and
training for all who will pastor parishes. It requires diocesan offices to be
much more helpful in providing training, services, and resources to pastors and
parish leaders. The National Pastoral Life Center training weeks for pastors
are most gratifying for us because the pastors find them so helpful to their
ministry.
Presbyter
Presbyter has become a popular term among liberals for
ordained priests, wanting to underscore the uniqueness of the priesthood of
Jesus and the share in that priesthood of all the baptized. I use the term as
expression of the fact that the ordained priest is part of a body of
ministers sharing the responsibility of the bishop. It is the relationship
of priests with one another and with the bishop that is at stake here. Both
relationships are being renegotiated.
The greatest danger was voiced by Cardinal Avery Dulles just
before the vote in Dallas on the “Charter for Protecting Children.”
He warned that the charter would create “an adversarial relationship”
between priests and bishops. I know that many bishops are making every effort
possible to minimize this danger. Yet, the danger is widespread.
A still more pervasive danger is that the bond of mutual respect
and responsibility between priest and bishop, ritualized in the ordination
rite, is being eroded by a whole series of developments. Once priests began to
retire and were enrolled in Social Security, the lifelong responsibility of
church for priest in return for the priest’s lifelong commitment to the
ministry of his presbyterate began to fray.
The transformation of senates of priests, which were admittedly
sometimes adversarial toward their bishops, into presbyteral councils changed
the body from the priests’ council to the bishop’s council. Many
bishops have worked hard to develop a true sense of collegiality with their
priests through careful consultation with the presbyteral councils and greater
solidarity with their priests through annual convocations and other assemblies.
Yet, collegiality is too seldom the character of the relationship.
It is not surprising that the vast majority of priests in Catholic
University sociologist Dean Hoge’s recent study have little confidence in
the leadership of either their bishops or their presbyteral councils.
Furthermore, only a quarter of priests in the Hoge study find strong support
for their priestly ministry from their bishop. I also find widespread
disappointment among priests that the bishops as a body do not seem prepared to
represent and defend the pastoral wisdom of their priests in relating to the
Vatican congregations. (Think of Cardinal Spellman.)
The solidarity among priests is an equal challenge. Priests are no
more likely to experience strong support for their priestly ministry from their
fellow priests than from their bishop, the data demonstrate. Priests feel more
isolated because there are fewer priests in most dioceses, each priest has
fewer classmates, more are serving on their own in parishes, and more are
stretched thin by multiple ministries -- more than one parish and/or parish
ministry and work in a diocesan office.
Furthermore, there are sharp differences among those who are being
admitted to membership in the presbyterate -- by ordination or incardination.
This seems by default. It is not clear that the bishop with his priests has
decided what kind of men they want in the seminary or the presbyterate, nor
that the increasing use of priests from other countries is part of a deliberate
plan. (At the same time we are not recruiting Hispanic young men for the
growing number of Hispanic Catholics.) As a result it is very difficult to
carry out a shared ecclesiology. The need for common ground begins at home.
The missing voice in Dallas was that of the priest -- bishops and
laypeople examined how to govern the priests. The missing voice on the new
commission is that of a priest -- other than the resigned priest who was a
victim of clergy abuse. The National Federation of Priests’ Councils
itself can’t seem to get much of a hearing, unable to shake a reputation
for confrontation that goes back about 30 years.
The solidarity of the local presbyterate is also affected by the
fact that everybody moves but the diocesan priest: Bishops come from outside
the diocese and move from diocese to diocese, religious move according to the
plans of their communities, and the lay ministers move because of family
obligations. The average tenure of a lay minister in the parish is six
years.
If there is to be a strong sense of presbyterate, dioceses will
have to be more intentional about who is to be part of a presbyterate, what it
means to be part of a presbyterate, what it will take to develop a true sense
of collegiality between priests and their bishops -- for both mutual support
and mutual accountability, fostering a sense of shared ecclesiology while
allowing for enormous latitude with respectful dialogue among differences. And
more is needed. The presbyterate must be seen as part of the larger community
of ministry that the Fort Worth diocese calls the ministerium.
When I was ordained the priesthood carried the priest, providing
the authority and legitimacy of the priest’s role in people’s lives.
There is still a strong remnant of this. Newly ordained are welcomed with
considerable trust. Increasingly however, and especially in light of the
current crisis, the priest must carry the priesthood, establish trust and
restore the place of priests in people’s lives. We must do this by taking
responsibility for our own development and ministry, by caring for others in
the presbyterate, and by making deliberate efforts to strengthen the solidarity
and collegiality of the priests with their bishop. This need not be at the
expense of the relationships between priests and lay people, ministers and
parishioners. For those who see their lives in relational terms tend to be
consistent in this.
Priest
I turn now to the priest as “guardian of the sacred” and
“sacrament of the parish” (Fr. Andrew Greeley’s expression), one
through whom the people should discover, or be reminded of, their relationship
to Christ, their share in Christ’s mission in the world, and their own
sacredness as a community, as the Body of Christ. Priests are concerned that
such claims not encourage the distortion of charism into the entitlements of
clericalism.
The priest needs to be one who can help the parish to be, in the
words of John Paul II, “a school of prayer.” He is the church
minister who is the primary theologian in the church, for if, as Fr. David
Tracy proposes, theology is the relationship between revelation and experience,
no one is more consistently called to do this than the priest as preacher and
teacher.
He is the theologian on his feet, as distinct from the theologian
on his or her seat. This is the minister whose engagement in the life of the
local community helps to signal the sacred character of time and space.
To fulfill this role, the priest needs a continually maturing and
theologically grounded spirituality. Unfortunately, the life and culture of the
priest does little to foster that kind of spirituality. The problem was
captured in the novels of J.F. Powers who was widely respected for an ear well
tuned to the life and culture of the parish priest. A recent reviewer of
Powers’ novels recalled his chilling characterization of priesthood:
“Father Joe Hackett begins his seminary life determined to be saintly, but
quickly squanders the impulse in parish life: ‘The truth was he
hadn’t sacrificed his spiritual life -- it had been done for him, by his
appointment to Holy Faith’ … What piety and spiritual alertness
… [he] had has long softened amid the gluey fixtures and routines of daily
parish life.” Looking back over my own life, I found the description cut
too close to the bone.
It is true that spirituality is not simply or even most
importantly the quality of one’s prayer life or interior life. As Fr.
Ronald Rolheiser puts it in his article in the current issue of CHURCH
magazine, spirituality is where you put your ass. It is the way we live our
lives in fulfillment of the two great commandments. At least half of the
ministerial spirituality of the diocesan priest is faithful, reliable service
to the sacramental and pastoral needs of the people. In these terms, priests
have as a group displayed a solid spirituality.
And yet, and yet -- that is no longer enough. That worked in a
world where we all felt the presence of the mystical more readily and
frequently. In a world which is perhaps more banal than secular, the more
sacred, mystical and spiritual dimension of life needs to be more evident --
needs more evidence -- as the source and summit, the character and criteria of
who we are and what we are doing. It needs more prayer and study on the part of
the priest. Yet fewer than three out of five pastors report a regular prayer
life apart from their official duties of prayer. The priests in the Hoge study
make help in their personal spiritual development their No. 1 need.
When it comes to study, few of the pastors in our workshops report
reading books in theology. Many read periodicals, and we’re happy that
CHURCH magazine is their preferred pastoral periodical. The National
Organization for Continuing Education of Priests reports that the majority has
recently attended theology lectures, for the most part I’m sure in
diocesan programs. But the culture of pastoral ministry and the demands on
priests give little time or support for more serious reading. Central in all
religious traditions to the role of the religious leader is the responsibility
for handing on the tradition. To that we would add in the current context,
making the linkages between the tradition and life in the world.
There is renewed interest in discussing the “ontological
change” brought about by ordination. As one theologian wrote,
“ontological” means “real.” The person ordained to be
priest is meant to be really different. If this is not to mean reverting to
differences of status and privilege, to claims of prestige and acts of
domination, it will be because we will foster a priesthood whose theology and
spirituality, whose sense of shared priesthood with the people, and shared
ministry with the women and men in parish ministry, enable him to help people
be aware of the presence of Jesus in sacrament and their community, in family
and work.
As important as it is to enable priests to be effective pastors --
pastoral leaders serving with the women and men in parish ministry -- and to be
united in a presbyterate and ministerium with their bishops and fellow priests,
the church needs the priest to be the minister of the sacred, not an employee
of the organization.
A small illustration of how the priest can enable people to feel
sacred: Where I live, at the Holy Name Centre for Homeless Men, we have had
Mass for the men on the detox floor of the Municipal Shelter. One Sunday, as we
began the Communion rite in the tawdry lounge, I invited the men in their
city-issue pajamas and bathrobes to come around the altar, a table covered with
a sheet. I said this was like the apostles gathering around the table at the
Last Supper. One of the men did a quick count and said with delight: “And
we’re 12, too!”
Associated with the sacred, he was sacred also.
National Catholic Reporter, September 27,
2002
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