When I was a young priest some 40 years ago, I would hear stories at priest gatherings from middle-aged brothers about the pastors served with in their own early days. “Those were the days of the giants,” they often waxed.
My generation, by contrast, may be accused of being the days of the Lilliputians. That would be due in part to changes in the culture, as well as the effervescence of egalitarian (and mildly anticlerical) antipathy for the sometimes-exaggerated respect for clergy before the Second Vatican Council.
Whatever the causes, there’s no doubt been a paradigm shift in the popular conception of the priesthood. I still remember when, during my seminary days, I heard a bishop cite the pre-Conciliar ethos expressed by the Pere Lacordaire, a legendary 19th century French Dominican priest and orator:
To live in the midst of the world without wishing its pleasures;
To be a member of each family, yet belonging to none;
To share all suffering;
To penetrate all secrets;
To heal all wounds;
To go from God to men to bring pardon and hope;
To have a heart of fire for Charity, and a heart of bronze for Chastity.
To teach and to pardon, console and bless always.
My God, what a life; and it is yours
O priest of Jesus Christ.
That’s almost the opposite, the bishop complained, of Henri Nouwen’s more fashionable image of the priest as “wounded healer.” Both then and even now, Lacordaire’s more poetic image would risk reeking of clericalism.
It isn’t a stretch to acknowledge that both images are powerful, and that pendulums can swing too far both ways. But the fact remains that the Church needs a respect for the priesthood that is idealistic, even when her priests are not ideal. In fact, the imperfect priests themselves need to know what they represent or should represent, an idea conveyed in Iris Murdoch’s novel “Henry and Cato.”
Cato is a Jesuit priest contemplating leaving the order and the ministry. When he shares his thoughts with his old friend Henry, an atheist, Henry says this:
"Now Cato, you're not to lose your faith, just when I need it! I can’t believe in God, but you can do it for me, that’s what priests are for.” Henry was clearly unwilling to discuss Cato’s difficulty or even to think that it existed. “That’s not a bad idea of a priest,” said Cato, “but I may not be up to it.”
“I may not be up to it.” I think the thought has crossed the mind of even some great priests. There is tremendous pathos in the words. The weak priests of Georges Bernanos and Graham Greene’s stories who ministered almost in spite of themselves probably could relate to the suffering of not feeling worthy of your vocation.
Murdoch, who was not Catholic, has the doubting priest then confide to a young delinquent his predicament:
He said, “Joe there’s something I have to tell you about myself.” “I know it, Father.” Cato could make nothing of this answer. He went on, “I’ve decided that I have got to stop being a priest.” This was evidently not what Joe had been expecting. “Oh, but you don’t mean it, Father. You can’t be anything else but a priest. If you weren’t a priest, you’d be nothing.”
“You’d be nothing,” the young man says.
Cato’s surprise at this helps explain the aforementioned paradigm shift: The perspective of what a priest is from outside is that he is someone at the service of others. The view of the priest himself is often less ideal. As Murdoch has a character reflect, “Being a priest, being a Christian, is a long, long, task of unselfing.”
The “unselfing” that priesthood implies is often mocked by priests who are sanctuary entertainers or sacramental CEOs, fundraising empresarios, self-appointed Delphic oracles, and in general attention getters, who see themselves as somehow the fulcrum of the Kingdom of God on earth. As an Italian nun who promoted vocations to the priesthood once complained to me: “These young priests think that they are the panacea of all the problems of the Church and the world.”
The bourgeois trappings of some priests are a bit distressing, also.
Linguistics professor and later conservative California senator S.I. Hayakawa once wrote that the greater good of society depended on lawyers being more honest, doctors more zealous and priests being more pious. Such professions form part of a society’s civilization. The piety of a priest is an expectation of the community – and one that sometimes sadly falls short.
Being what you are supposed to be is “unselfing” at times. Some priests may think that naked honesty about doubts and failure might be more “authentic,” but they forget that their doubts may shake the weaker faith of those who barely cling on to the faith. St. Paul warned the Corinthians about wounding weak consciences (1 Co 8:12) Some priests rely too much on personality over piety and think they are the templates of their congregation’s discipleship. At times we preach too autobiographically, as though the Word is best illustrated by our frustrations and difficulties. French writer Albert Camus noted in “The Fall” that some people climb on to the cross only because they want more people to notice them. We should beware of how much we draw attention to ourselves and away from the Lord.
Vocations to the relaxed (as opposed to the ideal) priesthood have slacked. Perhaps it is time to go back to the nobility evoked by Lacordaire. In the meantime, priests are aging and need to work a little more on esprit de corps and at the same time humbly acknowledge that the sacrifices are never as important as the privilege.
The last lines of Tennyson’s Ulysses come to mind:
Tho much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not the strength which in old days
Moved heaven and earth, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.
Prayer wouldn’t hurt, either. St. Thérѐse of Lisieux had a daily prayer for priests that applies to them all: Lacordaire’s knight, Nouwen’s wounded healer, and Murdoch’s Cato.
O Jesus, I pray for your faithful and fervent priests’
For you unfaithful and tepid priests.
For your priests laboring at home or abroad in distant mission fields.
For your tempted priests.
For your lonely and desolate priests,
For your dying priests;
For the souls of Your priests in Purgatory.
…
O Jesus, keep them all close to Your heart,
And bless them abundantly in time and eternity. (From Vianney publications)
