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Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Priesting in a new world
By Fr Brendan Hoban
A RELIC of the Curé (parish priest) of Ars is coming to Knock.
The Curé (or St John Vianney) was a parish priest in Ars, near Lyons in France, who was renowned for his piety – particularly for spending long hours in the confessional. He struggled to reach the academic standards in the seminary and, for some years, there was a doubt about whether he would ever be ordained.
However, after ordination and an appointment to Ars, he became famous throughout France and the Christian world. At one point the number of pilgrims coming to Ars had reached 20,000 a year.
A simple, gentle, patient and cheerful man, he was canonised in 1905 and proposed as given the title ‘Patron Saint of Parish Priests’. He’s in the news again because last June, when Pope Benedict opened ‘The Year of Priests’, he again proposed John Vianney as a model for priesthood. Hence, the decision to celebrate the Year of the Priest by bringing his relics to Knock and other venues.
I must admit my heart sank when I heard that the Curé of Ars was re-proposed as a model for priests in 2009. While I have nothing but admiration for the saintly Curé, what worked as a model for priesthood in 1905 hardly responds to the needs of our vastly different context for priesting in the 21st century.
It seems starkly obvious that dusting off a century-old model and refurbishing it for modern times wouldn’t work with the old Ford Model T and won’t work with the gentle Curé. What, in God’s name, is Pope Benedict thinking? Why have we to look back to the 19th century for an answer to every question posed in the 21st? To put it another way, if the Curé of Ars is the answer, we need to ask ourselves whether we have located the right questions about priesthoopd today.
One of the most astute commentators on priesthood today, Donald Cozzens, has described the last few decades as “a dark night of the soul” for Catholic priests.We know what he means. For my own part I never remember a time when priests were at a lower ebb: sad, fearful, disappointed, disillusioned, angry, despairing, almost adrift in the enveloping darkness. Adding the Curé to the mix as a model for priesthood today is almost seen as copper-fastening a growing conviction that the deeper the crisis the more our leaders seem to take refuge in some weird parallel universe.
It’s no fun being a priest today. We are caught in a kind of stereo world, and are not quite sure where the sounds are coming from or even sometimes what they mean. On the one hand we listen to ‘the signs of the times’ and respond to the needs of his people, including openness to lay involvement and sensitivity to people’s experiences and needs; and, on the other hand, we operate a hierarchical and patriarchal system of implicit control. Trying to ride the same horse going in different directions.
We are expected to be approachable, sensitive, caring and available, inspiring leaders, competent administrators, good organisers, able preachers, involved with schools, organisations, committees, visiting the housebound, kind to the old, concerned about the young, sensitive to everyone and to be available to everyone all the time.
On top of that we have to deal with a series of complex pastoral situations, expected to respond to the complicated needs of people in the world today while at the same time implementing a series of often impractical norms and regulations from bishops who are at a safe distance from parish life and officials in Rome who never worked a day in a parish in their lives. And then if the priest doesn’t get it right a self-appointed nest of aggressive reactionary ultra-conservative Catholics are at hand to point out the errors of our ways or report us to our bishop and to Rome.
Who, in his right mind, would want to find himself trying to respond to such competing and conflicting expectations? And with little or no appreciation of or training for such complex and demanding work. And, at the same time, to be forever on duty – living over the shop, as it were – and often living isolated and lonely lives, while colleagues leave for more satisfying climes and bishops and popes lob advice at us from the far distance. Is it any wonder we have few vocations? Isn’t the big wonder not that so many have left the priesthood but that so many of us are still hanging in there? Is it any wonder that so many of us are tired, tired, tired?
On top of all of that priests have become bad news. Unfairly and discouragingly, though understandably, all priests have had to bear the burden and the stigma of the clerical child sexual abuse scandals, in a way for example that teachers haven’t to bear vocational responsibility for the failures of an equivalent tiny minority of their colleagues. And, of course, as the priest is the easiest clerical target to get on the public radar, we are now endlessly humiliated and disparaged in the media and, if the truth be told, the butts of endless jokes about our sexual lives.
Priests – many of them suffering from overwork, lack of energy, confusion and burnout with little sense of support in or understanding of their plight – are now beginning to wonder is there anyone left on their side anymore.
Last Sunday as I bought an item in a shop the owner took my money, gave me the change and then handed me €20 and said, “You’re having a hard time of it, buy something for yourself”. The sudden gesture of disinterested kindness left me speechless and afterwards as I examined my own attitude to it I was struck by how much it meant to me and how vulnerable I was.
To tell you the truth I don’t think Pope Benedict has any idea about what’s happening to priests in the world: that we’re struggling to pastor our people in a complex and difficult world where old answers make no sense to new questions; that we find ourselves in a place we’ve never been before and we wonder, sometimes fearfully, about when or if we will emerge from the bleakness; that we’re disappearing and will be effectively gone in 20 years, unless the priesthood is reimaged and re-invented for a different world; that we need to examine issues like the ordination of women, celibacy and priesthood; and that encouraging us to be like the Curé of Ars seems like a last straw that might break many a camel’s back. And many a priest’s spirit.
I don’t expect to be in Knock for the relics of the Curé of Ars. The implications are just too depressing to contemplate.
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