|
Chapter 7 The Crisis of the Priesthood There was not much Pope Paul’s disinclination to be sad about the sad events besetting the Church could do in the face of a statistically charted defection of priests apparent in the Church at large.1 The Pope discusses this thorny and painful matter in two speeches. On Holy Saturday 1971, while recalling the paschal drama of the God-Man who was deserted by His disciples and betrayed by His friend, the Pope drew an analogy between Judas and the apostasy of priests. He says at the outset that “one must distinguish one case from another, one must understand, sympathize, forgive, be patient, and one must always love.” But then he described those who defect or apostatize as “unfortunates or deserters,” spoke of “base earthly reasons” that move them and deplored the “moral mediocrity that thinks it natural and logical to break a promise one has given after long consideration.”2The Popes heart is vexed by the evidence and, not being able to remove all guilt from the act of apostasy, he reduces it somewhat by using the expression “unfortunates or deserters.” But desertion is not an alternative to misfortune; those who have fallen away are unfortunate precisely because they have done so. Speaking to the Roman clergy in February 1978 about priestly defections, the Pope said: “We are oppressed by the statistics, disconcerted by the casuistry, the reasons do indeed demand a reverent compassion, but they cause us great pain. The feeble kind of strength that the weak have found in order to abandon their commitment amazes us.” The Pope talks of a “mania for laicization” which has “undone the traditional image of the priesthood” and, by a somewhat improbable process “has removed from some men’s hearts the sacred reverence due to their own persons.”3 The Popes dismay stemmed partly from the scale of the phenomenon and partly from the depth of the decay it suggests. The point here is not that the priests have behaved badly by breaking their commitment to celibacy, because that had already happened in earlier times without the priests in question apostatizing; rather it is the appearance of a new sort of corruption, which consists in a refusal to acknowledge the nature of things, and in the preposterous attempt to turn a priest into a non-priest; his new state is of course parasitic on the old. In considering the statistics one should remember that the sacramental character of the priesthood can never be lost; hence what they reveal is how many have ceased to act as priests in either of two available ways: a dispensation from the Holy See or an arbitrary and unilateral break. The latter is not a new thing in the Church’s history. During the revolution in France, twenty-four thousand of the twenty-nine thousand priests who had taken the oath to uphold the Civil Constitution of the Clergy apostatized, as did twenty-one of the eighty-three constitutional bishops, of whom ten later married.4 Under St. Pius X quite a number abandoned the cloth because of difficulties with the faith or a desire for independence. Until the council, however, it was a rare thing, each case would arouse interest or scandal, and the defrocked priest was a theme for novels. What is new about the defection of priests in the post-conciliar Church is not so much the extraordinarily large numbers involved, but the legalization of these defections by the Holy See, through a widespread use of dispensations pro gratia.5This removes a priest’s right to exercise his ministry, and reduces him to the state of an ordinary layman, thus making the indelible character he received in ordination inactive and meaningless. It was indeed rare in the past for priests to be reduced to the lay state as a punishment, but it was even rarer for them to be reduced pro gratia by reason of a lack of due consent, similar to a defective consent in marriage. Apart from the period of the French Revolution, apostate bishops have been a very rare thing in the Church’s history. The famous cases are those of Vergerio, the Bishop of Capo dTstria at the time of the Council of Trent; de Dominis, the Archbishop of Spalato under Paul V; Seldnizky, the Bishop of Breslau under Gregory XVI and, more than a century later, Mgr Mario Radavero, auxiliary bishop of Lima and formerly a father of the Second Vatican Council.6 1.
In the Annuarium statisticum for 1980 a slowing down in the
decline in the number of priests appeared, and there were some signs
of a revival. The rate of priestly ordinations rose from 1.40% to
1.41 % of priests. Defections decreased by half. The total number
of Catholic priests nonetheless fell by 0.6% over the year. Male
and female religious continued to decrease, but females rather more,
with a fall of 1.4% as opposed to 1.1% over the previous year. In
general the decline is in Europe and the increase in Africa. O.R.,
28 May 1982. 80. The canonical legitimation of priestly defections. As we have said, the change in the way the Church has dealt with and evaluated priestly defections is the new thing in question here, rather than the disproportionately large numbers involved in comparison to the pre-conciliar period.7 Recent human history contains nothing that has not happened in the past, so far as mere physical events are concerned. That is why the ancient author could say Nihil est iam factum quod non factum sit prius8 The important and novel element is the moral judgment that the mind makes, and it alone is the indication of the real direction of events. The Pope may have been dismayed by the number of defections, but the practice of dispensation nonetheless became habitual, after having long been unknown, and that changed the moral and juridical character of the abandonment of the priesthood, removing from it the air of defection it had once had. A very senior person in the Roman Curia, whose task it was to look after the procedures, told me that the reductions to the lay state, which happened by the thousand in the years from 1964 to 1978, were once so unusual that many people, even members of the clergy, were not even aware that such a canonical procedure existed. It can be seen from the Tabularum statisticarum collectio of 1969 and the Annuarium statisticum Ecclesiae of 1976, published by the Secretariat of State, that in the whole Catholic world during those seven years the total number of priests fell from 413,000 to 343,000, and members of religious orders from 208,000 to 165,000. The 1978 edition of the same Annuarium statisticum reveals that defections numbered 3,690 in 1973 and 2,037 in 1978. Dispensations ceased almost entirely from October 1978 by order of John Paul II.9 Although these defections have thinned the ranks, their real importance lies in the fact that they were legitimized by the granting of dispensations on an enormous scale. Canon law laid down10 that by being reduced to the lay state a cleric lost clerical offices, benefices and privileges, but remained bound to celibacy. The only clerics to be released from it were those whose ordinations could be proved invalid through lack of consent.11 It would seem that in the recent jurisprudence of the Holy See, lack of consent is no longer to be judged by a mans dispositions at the time of ordination, but by subsequent experiences of unsuitability or moral discontent during his life as an ordained priest. It is this same criterion that the diocesan tribunals of the United States tried to introduce in marriage annulment cases, and that Paul VI criticized and rejected in 1977. By this criterion, the very fact that a priest asks at any given moment to return to the lay state becomes a proof that he was immature and incapable of giving a valid consent at the time of his original commitment. The possibility that there may have been a subsequent act of consent and thus a convalidation, which would prevent a dispensation from celibacy under canon 214, is also ignored. As with the American tribunals, we are here confronted by a veiled denial of the importance of every individual moral act and a tacit adoption of the principle of globality.12 Each individual moral act is stripped of importance, so that the sum total of such acts can be invested with it. Perhaps the fundamental reason for decline in priestly vocations, that accompanied the increasing number of defections, was this trivialization of the commitment involved, which robs the priesthood of the air of totality and permanence that appeals to the noblest part of human nature, by persevering through trial and hardship. It is certainly true that, as John Paul II has said, these defections are “an anti-sign, an anti-witness, which has contributed to the disappointment of the council’s hopes.”13 The crisis among the clergy has been explained by the usual references to sociological and psychological factors, which are not true causes, while the moral factor has been ignored. The origins of the phenomenon are principally spiritual and operate at two levels. Firstly, at a purely religious level, there is an impoverished understanding of freedom, whereby man is held to be incapable of joining his free will absolutely to something which is itself absolute, but his free will is, conversely, held to be entitled to untie any existing bond. There is an obvious analogy with divorce. It too is based on the idea that it is impossible for the human will to bind itself unconditionally; based, that is, on the denial of anything unconditional. Secondly, beyond this failure to understand that liberty is a capacity to bestow an absolute character on a possibility of our own choosing, and thus to instill an indefectible coherence into ones life, there is also, at the supernatural level, a failure in faith, that is, doubt about the existence of the absolute to which a priest dedicates himself, and to which there can be no authentic dedication unless it is de jure absolute. This failure, which could right itself or be righted, is instead abetted by the dispensation that the supreme authority grants. There is thus a vicious circle, whereby liberty is thought to be denied by an insistence on absolutes, when in fact the latter is precisely what is needed if a mature liberty is to be attained. The granting of dispensations and the abandonment of obligations was in itself a scandal and a sign of moral weakness and of a diminished sense of personal worth, as well as a cause of scandal when comparisons were made with lay people bound by the indissoluble bonds of marriage. The granting of dispensations was soon stopped by John Paul II. On 14 October 1980 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith promulgated a document establishing a stricter regime whereby grounds for dispensation are reduced to two, and two only: a defective consent to the act of ordination, and error by the superior in agreeing to ordain.14 7.
Another novelty is that members of the hierarchy
have joined the movement against celibacy. Cardinal Leger says for
example: “One might wonder whether the institution could not be
reconsidered.” I.C.I., No.279, 1 January 1967, p.40. 81. Attempts to reform the Catholic priesthood. The numerous proposals for a reformed priesthood that are now bruited about by the gigantic megaphone of public opinion, have not the slightest novelty about them since they have cropped up repeatedly during the Church’s history; being put forward usually in an unorthodox spirit as by the Cathari, the Hussites and Luther, but being sometimes simply an innocent aberration, as in the case of the celebrated Cardinal Angelo Mai, a better philologist than theologian,15 who wanted the clergy to be given the right to request a release from sacred orders at any time. The reasons underlying these proposals for a reformed priesthood can all be reduced to a denial of essences, that is of fixed natures in things, and in a desire to cross the frontiers that delimit those essences and that, by delimiting them, cause them to be what they are. The complaint is heard that priests are kept in a subordinate state without full responsibility for their own acts and it is urged that they be “given back the right to control their own lives” by being given the right to marry, work in factories, publish books and air their own opinions.16This last demand is out of touch with facts, since the Catholic clergy have never been allowed to speak out more fully, more easily or louder than they do at present. Priests can publish books without prior approval from their bishops, issue statements, hold protest meetings, speak on radio and television, go onto the streets to demonstrate against papal decrees, mix with non-Catholics and take full part in their meetings. The relaxation of canonical discipline at once became an ever-present and influential reality. Indeed, under cover of the authority derived from their ordination, many priests preach their own ephemeral and transient opinions as if they were the message of the Gospel and the doctrine of the Church; that is, they preach themselves or something of their own. In so doing, they are committing a typical and historically familiar clericalist abuse, which once stemmed from a confusion of religion and politics but now stems from a detachment from Catholic doctrine, and aims to remodel dogma and dislocate the Church’s organization. Priests thus enjoy not simply the authority they derive from their ordination, but an authority which is in practice much wider, because they use their position illegitimately to invest their own private opinions with the authority of the Church. That a priest should demand greater power “to control his own life” (what man does?) suggests a weakening of faith, and a weakened understanding of the dignity of the priesthood, which faith alone can make one grasp. How can one who has the authority to produce the Body of the Lord sacramentally and to forgive sins, thus changing human hearts, feel he is inferior and lacking in responsibility except as a result of a clouding of the mind and an eclipse of faith? This feeling of inferiority comes from a priests having forgotten the true purpose of the priesthood, which is to provide men with the sacred, and from thinking of the priestly state as being a state like any other, that is, something in which one seeks to achieve one’s own potential and make ones own contribution to the world. 15.
Angelo Cardinal Mai (1782-1854), noted
antiquary and Prefect of the Vatican Library. [Translator’s note.]
See Nuova Antologia, January 1934, p.80, Memorie di Leonetto
Cipriani. 82. Critique of the critique of the Catholic priesthood. Don Mazzolari. Priests are said to suffer because they find themselves in the midst of an indifferent or hostile world which is not open to what they want to do and which passes them by without coming into contact with them. The psalmist’s verse with which the First Vatican Council opened is not appropriate to today’s priest: Euntes ibant et fie bant mittentes semina sua, venientes autem venient cum exsultatione portantes manipulos suos.17 Today’s priests weep both sowing the seed and returning, because theylack the sheaves that gladden the heart. Certainly a priest is in a difficult position, but the difficulty is an original and essential element in what he is; it was no easier for the apostles, nor were they promised it would be. It is particularly incongruous to complain at length about the alienation of the priesthood from society and then to turn around and accuse the ages of faith of being triumphalist because during them there was no such alienation, because the tension between the two had been absorbed into the structures of an integrated Christendom. Don Mazzolari observes that “the priest suffers from having to preach words that demand a higher standard than is realized in his own life, and by which his life is condemned.” But every man is in that position vis-à-vis the moral law and the standards of the Gospel; the tension is not restricted to priests. To realize that no one can preach moral truths in his own name, one need only recall the distinction between the ideal and real orders of being, which is necessary to the existence of moral obligation, since it is derived from the attempt to unite the two; nobody’s virtue is equal to the ideal preached. To base preaching on anything other than the truth of what is preached, would involve measuring its validity by the moral worth of the preacher, as the Hussite heresy implied. Preaching would thus become impossible. If what gave a priest a right to preach were a moral level equal to the demands he made, even the most holy priest would abstain from preaching. In fact, however, “it is necessary that many men, that all men, preach a morality more perfect than their own behavior. The ministry...involves weak men, who sometimes give in to their passions, preaching an austere and perfect morality. No one can accuse them of hypocrisy, because they speak as ones commissioned to do so, and speak with conviction, and they confess implicitly and sometimes explicitly that they are far from the perfection they teach...Unfortunately it sometimes happens that preaching descends to the level of behavior, but this is an abuse: without the ministry however, it would be the rule.18. The inadequacies of a priests life are simply an instance of the inadequacies in all mens lives when compared to the ideal. The conclusion to be drawn is that we should have humility, not an anguish stemming from pride. Then again, the human capacities a priest has do not vanish simply because he is a priest, since the exercise of the ministry affords opportunities for the unlimited employment of all the talents, zeal and ability an individual may have; opportunities to do everything that makes for personal excellence. Is not Church history full of beautiful ideas, charitable undertakings and teaching organizations, that give ample opportunity for people to develop their potential, even though they are not allowed to preach themselves? Where, outside the Church, does one so often find the name of a particular individual used as the name of whole bodies of men, united together in their opinions and aims and works? 17.
Psalm 125:6. “Going forth, they went weeping carrying their
seed, but returning they will come exulting carrying their sheaves.” 83. Universal priesthood and ordained priesthood. The fundamental error of the criticisms of the Church’s historic priesthood, which is the true form of priesthood as such, lies in not recognizing the essence, or fixed nature, of the thing and in reducing it to a merely human and functional level. Catholic doctrine sees within the priesthood an essential, not merely a functional, difference between the priest and the layman: an ontological difference due to the character impressed upon the soul by the sacrament of orders. The new theology revives old heretical doctrines, which came together to produce the Lutheran abolition of the priesthood, and disguises the difference that exists between the universal priesthood of baptized believers and the sacramental priesthood which is proper to priests alone. Through baptism, man is joined to the mystical body of Christ and consecrated to the worship of God by a sharing in the priesthood of Christ, the only man who has ever offered God due worship in the most perfect way. Over and above this baptismal character, the priest receives in ordination a further character which is a sort of reinforcement of the first. Thanks to ordination he is capable of performing acts in persona Christi19. of which laymen are incapable. The first among these are the act which produces the eucharistic presence and the act of forgiving sins. The tendency of the theological innovators is to dissolve the second priesthood in the first, and to reduce the priest to the same level as all Christians. They maintain that the priest has a special function in the diverse makeup of the Church, just as every Christian has. This special function is bestowed upon him by the community and does not imply any ontological difference with respect to the layman, “nor should the ministry be considered as something higher.”20 So then “the priests importance consists in having been baptized like any other Christian.”21‘The difference between essences, or natures, is thus denied through a rejection of the sacramental priesthood, and that reduces the differentiated and organic structure of the Church to something formless and homogeneous.22 This thesis is expounded explicitly in a book by R.S. Bunnik, which is a good example of the thinking dominant in the Dutch church and its center for theological training.23 “The universal priesthood must be seen as a basic category of the People of God, while the particular ministry is only a functional category” and is “a sociological necessity emanating from below.” From the universal priesthood being the basis of the particular one (which indeed it is since an ordinand must have been baptized) this Dutch theologian goes on to deny that ordination sets a man on a new basis from which new acts proceed which were impossible simply on the basis of baptism; although baptism gives an active capacity to do some things, it gives only a passive capacity to do others, among which are the receiving of the Eucharist and of holy orders. This paralogism concerning the priesthood runs in tandem with another concerning the position of the Church in the world. The author maintains that “the conciliar Church is progressively discovering that in the final analysis the Church and the world constitute one and the same divine reality!” Thus the natures of things are first dissolved and then compounded; the ordained priesthood is confused with the priesthood deriving from baptism, and the supernatural theandric nature of the Church is confused with the whole undifferentiated mass of the human race. 19.
“In the person of Christ. 84. Critique of the saying “a priest is a man like other men.” This theological compounding of separate things has come to be commonly accepted and has in part caused, and in part been caused by, the wide dissemination of certain authors’ opinions. The idea is that “a priest is a man like other men.” This statement is false and superficial both theologically and historically. Theologically, because it clashes with the doctrine of the sacrament of orders, which some Christians receive and others do not, and by which they are differentiated ontologically, and thus functionally. Historically, men are not equal in civil society, except in their essential nature considered in the abstract apart from those concrete circumstances by which that nature is differentiated. To say a priest is a man like others, who are not priests, is even falser than saying a doctor is a man like others, who are not doctors. No, he is not a man like all others, he is a man who is a priest. All men are not priest-men, just as all men are not doctor-men. Watching how people behave is enough to show that everyone can draw a distinction between doctors and non-doctors, priests and non-priests. In some emergencies they send for a doctor, in others for a priest. The innovators fix their attention on the abstract identity of human nature and reject the special supernatural character that the priesthood introduces into the human race, and by which a priest is separate: Segregate mihi Saulum et Barnabam.24 Obvious practical consequences flow from this error. Today’s priest should do manual work, because he can only fulfill his own destiny by working, and only by working can he discover the ordinary human life which reveals Gods purposes for the world. Thus work is taken as either man’s end, or as a sine qua non for reaching his end, and contemplation and suffering are ranked below utilitarian productivity. Being a man like all others, the priest will demand the right to marry, dress as he wishes and take an active part in social and political struggles; so too he will join revolutionary struggles that look upon a brother as an enemy to struggle against, unjust though this be. The complaint that priests are cut off from the world is unjustified. Firstly, because they are set apart, as Christ set apart His apostles, precisely in order to be sent into the world. That ordinary people understood what sacramental ordination added to these men apart, was so obvious until recent times that even common sayings whether in received speech or in dialect bore witness to it. These adages distinguish between the man and his priesthood, and avoid offending the priesthood even when designed to offend the man. They keep the man separate from the cloth, taken as a sign of the priesthood, and from “what he ministers,” namely the sacred. Secondly, historically, there is no support for the idea that the clergy have been separate from the world in the sense complained of by the innovators. Both what are called the secular clergy, and the regular clergy, are within the world, though separated from it. The most triumphant demonstration that the clergy’s separateness does not cut them off from the world lies in the fact that it was the regular clergy, those more separated from the world, the men in the cloisters, who exercised not only the most powerful religious but the most powerful civil effects in the world around. They shaped civilization for centuries, even gave birth to it, since they were the ones who produced the structures of culture, and of social life, from agriculture to poetry, from architecture to philosophy, from music to theology. To take a misused image and to give it its legitimate meaning, the clergy are the yeast that made the dough rise, but they do not become the dough. Chemists are well aware that enzymes contain something antagonistic to the substances they cause to ferment. 24. Acts 13:2. “Set apart for me Saul and Barnabas.”
|
