The conclusion of the Year for Priests called by the Holy Father a year ago ended a year of reflection across the Church on the unique gift given to it by Christ: a formal sharing in his own ministerial, salvific and sacramental mission which might also be described as sharing in the work of God. This is quite a radical idea, if we step back and contemplate it for a while, constituting as it does the belief that some among us have been called to explicitly carry out the work that God could really have reserved for Himself alone.
Starting from this point, we might begin to appreciate better the unique gift of the priesthood, which is always going to be a paradox: sinners who constantly labour for sainthood, their own and ours.
GK Chesterton once famously captured something of the remarkable truth of the Church and, in passing, the Sacrament of Holy Orders. Reflecting on the experience of having been selected for jury duty he wrote: “Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
Chesterton’s paradoxical description of the discovery of a solar system as a trifle in comparison to the profound mystery of establishing a Church is delightful, made all the more charming because it is true.
In recent years it has often seemed harder to appreciate his point and the nobility of the priesthood as abuse scandal has followed upon abuse scandal. One imagines that enormous damage has been done by a few. And yet not even the very real and shameful nature of the revelations is ultimately able to erase this fundamental truth: that for reasons that will never be known in this life, some are invited to participate in nothing less than the formal work of Jesus Christ and stand in his place for us and for our world. This astonishing truth bears great reflection.
One of the insights that biological fatherhood can offer is that the spiritual fatherhood of priestly life is a fatherhood just as real in every way and more. It is, in fact, a clearly superior order of fatherhood not dependant upon or limited by biological ties and formal family relationships. A biological father can say this without any sense of inferiority because he sees in the priesthood exactly the same work as his own, but writ on a much larger scale. Where a man seeks to serve his wife and children (one wonders, in passing, when the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ will be declared by invisible official authorities to be officially discriminatory – it doesn’t seem as far fetched as it did some years ago), a priest seeks to serve his parish. These are his spouse and children. Every priest is called to love this family with a spousal, fatherly tenderness and affection in exactly the same way a man loves his own family. Seen from this angle, priests are not called to be wimps but strong figures who not only serve but defend and protect, for they are also men. Ultimately, they are called to die, if necessary, for those they love.
As every parish priest will well know, loving one’s family can bring great suffering: calling those one loves to a new life which they often don’t want to hear because their gaze is dazzled by the counterfeits the world offers can be an occasion of great sorrow or sadness, offering the temptation of becoming disheartened. Fathers must embrace the Cross for their children.
The truth is that we Catholics in Australia usually don’t appreciate our priests and we often don’t behave as though they are really our older brothers. Often when we do, we do it in awkward and embarrassingly formal ways that undermine the point. It’s often dangerous in the Church to speak the truth but sometimes these things have just got to be said openly. Meanwhile, much of the truth about the priesthood has been obscured by astonishingly bad and simplistic thinking current in our society, which can readily be found in vacuous and vapid entertainment on television and elsewhere in our forms of popular entertainment. One example is the occasionally-heard assertion that only a married priest can understand the problems of married people. Try applying that logic to psychiatry and see where you get. In actual fact, the assertion that priests should be able to marry is really asking priests to marry twice, once to the Church and their parishes and once to their wives and children. In such situations it would be interesting in times of conflicting duties to see which wives would win out and what the losing parties would have to say about it. But this is a digression.
The Year for Priests has been an opportunity to re-energise a band of brothers who have been sometimes badly demoralised by recent scandals but it also offered the whole Church a chance to see the priesthood in a new light; to see the deep, noble and even chivalrous nature of its reality. It will probably take a long time yet for the re-moralisation that Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have clearly attempted for their brothers in recent decades who share in the Sacrament of Holy Orders to come to fruition but there are now great reasons for hope. It is increasingly evident, here in Perth and elsewhere, that men are hearing the call God chooses to give to them and are taking it seriously.
Pope Benedict’s deeply good Year for Priests underscored the vital nature of the sacamental and ministerial priesthood of the Church. Without this priesthood the Church effectively stops functioning as it was intended by Jesus when, on that day roughly speaking two millennia ago, he picked twelve ordinary men standing around to do the most important job in the world.