Our Lady of Perpetual Help Seminary Diocese of Marbel, Philippines

The Our Lady of Perpetual Help Seminary was established in the year 1962, under the patronage of the late bishop, Most Reverend Bishop Quentin Olwell, C.P. D.D., the first Prelate Ordinary of Marbel. The funds for building the seminary came from the Sweeney Family Estate of Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA, through the personal intervention of Rev. Stephen Sweeney, C.P.

Timothy Radcliffe

As the scandal of child sexual abuse and its cover-up swirls around the Church, some Catholics are considering their options as regards their very membership of the institution. Here a former Master of the Dominicans explains why the Church is stuck with him, whatever happens
Fresh revelations of sexual abuse by priests in Germany and Italy have provoked a tide of anger and disgust. I have received emails from people all around Europe asking how can they possibly remain in the Church? I was even sent a form with which to renounce my membership of the Church. Why stay?

First of all, why go? Some people feel that they can no longer remain associated with an institution that is so corrupt and dangerous for children. The suffering of so many children is indeed horrific. They must be our first concern. Nothing that I will write is intended in any way to lessen our horror at the evil of sexual abuse. But the statistics for the US, from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2004, suggest that Catholic clergy do not offend more than the married clergy of other Churches.

Some surveys even give a lower level of offence for Catholic priests. They are less likely to offend than lay school teachers, and perhaps half as likely as the general population. Celibacy does not push people to abuse children. It is simply untrue to imagine that leaving the Church for another denomination would make one’s children safer. We must face the terrible fact that the abuse of children is widespread in every part of society. To make the Church the scapegoat would be a cover-up.

But what about the cover-up within the Church? Have not our bishops been shockingly irresponsible in moving offenders around, not reporting them to the police and so perpetuating the abuse? Yes, sometimes. But the great majority of these cases go back to the 1960s and 1970s, when bishops often regarded sexual abuse as a sin rather than also a pathological condition, and when lawyers and psychologists often reassured them that it was safe to reassign priests after treatment. It is unjust to project backwards an awareness of the nature and seriousness of sexual abuse which simply did not exist then. It was only the rise of feminism in the late 1970s which, by shedding light on the violence of some men against women, alerted us to the terrible damage done to vulnerable children.

But what about the Vatican? Pope Benedict has taken a strong line in tackling this issue as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and since becoming Pope. Now the finger is pointed at him. It appears that some cases reported to the CDF under his watch were not dealt with. Isn’t the Pope’s credibility undermined? There are demonstrators in front of St Peter’s calling for his resignation. I am morally certain that he bears no blame here.

It is generally imagined that the Vatican is a vast and efficient organisation. In fact it is tiny. The CDF only employs 45 people, dealing with doctrinal and disciplinary issues for a Church which has 1.3 billion members, 17 per cent of the world’s population, and some 400,000 priests. When I dealt with the CDF as Master of the Dominican Order, it was obvious that they were struggling to cope. Documents slipped through the cracks. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger lamented to me that the staff was simply too small for the job.

People are furious with the Vatican’s failure to open up its files and offer a clear explanation of what happened. Why is it so secretive? Angry and hurt Catholics feel a right to transparent government. I agree. But we must, in justice, understand why the Vatican is so self-protective. There were more martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the previous centuries combined. Bishops and priests, Religious and laity were assassinated in Western Europe, in Soviet countries, in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Many Catholics still suffer imprisonment and death for their faith. Of course, the Vatican tends to stress confidentiality; this has been necessary to protect the Church from people who wish to destroy her. So it is understandable that the Vatican reacts aggressively to demands for transparency and will read legitimate requests for openness as a form of persecution. And some people in the media do, without any doubt, wish to damage the credibility of the Church.

But we owe a debt of gratitude to the press for its insistence that the Church face its failures. If it had not been for the media, then this shameful abuse might have remained unaddressed.

Confidentiality is also a consequence of the Church’s insistence on the right of everyone accused to keep their good name until they are proved to be guilty. This is very hard for our society to understand, whose media destroy people’s reputations without a thought.

Why go? If it is to find a safer haven, a less corrupt Church, then I think that you will be disappointed. I too long for more transparent government, more open debate, but the Church’s secrecy is understandable, and sometimes necessary. To understand is not always to condone, but necessary if we are to act justly.

Why stay? I must lay my cards on the table; even if the Church were obviously worse than other Churches, I still would not go. I am not a Catholic because our Church is the best, or even because I like Catholicism. I do love much about my Church but there are aspects of it which I dislike. I am not a Catholic because of a consumer option for an ecclesiastical Waitrose rather than Tesco, but because I believe that it embodies something which is essential to the Christian witness to the Resurrection, visible unity.

When Jesus died, his community fell apart. He had been betrayed, denied, and most of his disciples fled. It was chiefly the women who accompanied him to the end. On Easter Day, he appeared to the disciples. This was more than the physical resuscitation of a dead corpse.

In him God triumphed over all that destroys community: sin, cowardice, lies, misunderstanding, suffering and death. The Resurrection was made visible to the world in the astonishing sight of a community reborn. These cowards and deniers were gathered together again. They were not a reputable bunch, and shamefaced at what they had done, but once again they were one. The unity of the Church is a sign that all the forces that fragment and scatter are defeated in Christ.

All Christians are one in the Body of Christ. I have deepest respect and affection for Christians from other Churches who nurture and inspire me. But this unity in Christ needs some visible embodiment. Christianity is not a vague spirituality but a religion of incarnation, in which the deepest truths take the physical and sometimes institutional form. Historically this unity has found its focus in Peter, the Rock in Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the shepherd of the flock in John’s gospel.

From the beginning and throughout history, Peter has often been a wobbly rock, a source of scandal, corrupt, and yet this is the one – and his successors – whose task is to hold us together so that we may witness to Christ’s defeat on Easter Day of sin’s power to divide. And so the Church is stuck with me whatever happens. We may be embarrassed to admit that we are Catholics, but Jesus kept shameful company from the beginning. Source: http://thetablet.co.uk/article/14543

The Joy and Sorrow of Priesthood Today
Timothy Radcliffe, OP


I wish to talk about the joy and sorrow of priesthood today. When I met the Council of the National Conference of Priests to discuss my contribution to this Conference, I was told that many priests in England and Wales feel depressed and demoralized. How widespread this demoralization is I do not know. But regardless of how many priests are actually demoralized, there are many good reasons why we might be: the shortage of vocations, the lack of a clear priestly identity, the loss of respect for our vocation, the scandals of sexual abuse, the disappearance of the young from many parishes, disagreements with some statements by the Church and so on. So I wish to look at some of these issues, and ask how we can face them without being demoralized.

This is important because there is a deep contradiction between priesthood and depression. You can be a good and depressed banker or taxi driver, a gloomy but effective accountant or lawyer. But one cannot be a preacher of the gospel and be plunged in gloom. It makes no sense. We can only be credible bearers of the good news if we are fundamentally, if not always, joyful. I am not referring to a happy clappy jollity, going around slapping people on the back and telling them to be happy because Jesus loves them. That sort of thing does make me feel deeply depressed. But there is a deep joy that belongs to our vocation as priests.This joy is deeply linked with sorrow and even with anger. Our vocation summons us to share not just the passion of Christ, but also his passions, his joy and sorrow and anger. These are the passions of those who are alive with the gospel. So I wish to look at some of the issues that might indeed make us feel depressed, to see how we might face them with sorrow and joy and even anger rather than debilitating demoralization.

I shall begin by looking at the identity of the priest and see what are the challenges in living out that identity with the local community. Then tomorrow I shall look at some of the issues that might demoralize us in our relationship to the wider Church: our role of proclaiming Church teaching, the scandals which fill the papers, and so on.

I am deeply aware that I am not the ideal person to do this. I have lived outside Britain for the last ten years, and so I am not yet back in touch with the Church here. Also I am a religious priest, and though we face the same challenges, sometimes we do so differently. But I console myself by thinking of one of my brethren who gave a lecture in the United States. When he finished the lecture, the applause was rather tepid. He sat down and said to the man beside him: "It was not that bad, was it?" The man replied: "Don't worry about it. I don't blame you. I blame the people who invited you to speak."

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The Identity of the Priest

In The Changing Face of the Priesthood, Donald Cozzens writes: "At the core of the priest's crisis of soul is the search for his unfolding identity as an ordained servant of Jesus Christ. The issue of the priest's identity grips the roots of his soul." While some priests deny concern about their priestly identity, more concede that the issue hangs over their heads like a storm cloud, robbing them of the confidence they once knew, rendering them awkward and self-conscious in certain parish situations.

As we all know, before the Vatican Council the priest had a clear identity. He was a sacred cultic figure, who had status and respect just because he was ordained. He was precious because he celebrated Mass and consecrated the body and blood of the Lord, even if he was a dreadful pastor and preacher. That identity was put into question by the Council. There was a rediscovery of the common priesthood of the whole people of God, of the universal call to holiness, and of marriage as a sacred vocation. The priesthood was now seen above all in terms of service and leadership. Most priests were and are enthusiastic about this new identity. In theory at least, it has liberated us from a stifling clericalism; it offers an identity that much more Christ like and evangelical.

So what is the problem? Why is it that thirty years after the Council, so many priests are ill at ease and unclear as to who we are? I can think of at least four reasons.

The idea of the priest as servant and leader is beautiful, but the words tend to pull in opposite directions. Servants are not usually supposed to lead, like bossy butlers. I reminded of those French waiters who, with immense superiority, try to tell you what you should order from the menu. Remember the Irish bishop who announced at his consecration that he intended to serve the diocese with a rod of iron.

The image of the priest in modern theology is so idealized that none of us can live up to it. I read a lot in preparation for this lecture and I was horrified to discover that I had to be a brilliant preacher, an efficient administrator, a creative liturgical genius, a patient listener, an inspiring leader, a spiritual guru, good with the young and with the old. I became profoundly demoralized, and convinced that I was a bad priest who ought to apply for laicisation. You almost lost me!

A theology of service tends to focus upon what the priest does rather than who he is. This can lead to a utilitarian view of the priesthood. To be a good priest, one must work incessantly and be effective. But in this secularized world, with diminishing religious practice, priests will often find that we have achieved little and so must be failures.

The concept of ministry has expanded enormously. In the USA 80% of people who are ministers in the Church are lay, and 80% of these lay people are women. This has two effects. One is that the priest feels less special. Is all the sacrifice of celibacy and the stress worth it just to be one of these ministers, when most of the other ministers have all the pleasures of marriage? And secondly, the priesthood is the focus of much aggression by those who feel excluded from it, e.g. married men and women. So the priest as a minister may feel himself to be both devalued and yet envied, which is the worst of all situations - 'How dare you exclude me from this rather unimportant role that you have?'

So it is understandable that some priests, often younger men, are attracted by a return to ,the good old days, when the priest was a cultic figure with sacred hands. Other priests dread this as a return to clerical elitism, and delight in a theology of service, but some will admit that they are unsure as to who we are and what it means to be a priest today. Is there a way forward?

I believe that there is, and it is to be found in the Letter to the Hebrews, the only document of the New Testament that develops a theology of priesthood. There we have a vision of Christ the High Priest who is a sacred figure, who celebrates the heavenly cult. But his holiness does not separate him from other people but weds him to us. This offers us a profound vision of priesthood which I have not the time to develop here, but which carries us beyond the polarisation of those who see the priesthood in terms of service and those who are nostalgic for the priesthood as a sacred figure.

The Old Testament understanding of holiness implied the separation of the priest from all that was impure and imperfect.The high priest could not go near a corpse, and if you wanted to stop a rival becoming high priest then a nifty move was to bite off his ears! But in Hebrews we find this vision of holiness is turned upon its head. Christ's holiness is shown in his embrace of us in all our sinful imperfection. His holiness is displayed not by distance from us but by closeness. And the culmination of his sacred ministry was when he embraced death, that most impure thing, and became himself a corpse. Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his blood. 'Let us therefore then go to him outside the camp and bear the abuse he endured.' (Hebrews 12.12).

The gospels never speak directly of Christ as a priest, but we find this same theology of holiness. He embraces the untouchable, the lepers; he eats and drinks with sinners; he is sacrificial lamb who dies on the altar of the cross. So the whole people of God is a holy and priestly people, because it embodies Christ's embrace of us all in our messy lives, with all their weakness and failures. And the sacrament of that holiness is the Eucharist, in which Christ gave his body to us all, including to the disciples who would betray and deny him. The holiness of the Church is shown in its inclusion of sinners, not their exclusion. As James Joyce said of the Church: "Here comes everyone." It also offers us ordained ministers a vision of our priesthood which is utterly free of clericalist elitism, and which is founded upon our intimacy and identification with people in their struggles and failures.

Let me make a confession. As the time for me to be ordained drew near, I began to have terrible doubts as to whether I was called to be a priest. I had become deeply repelled by clericalism, and by any hint of priestly superiority. I dreaded the hypocrisy of it, because I knew that I was no better than anyone else. I only accepted ordination in obedience to my brethren. I could identify with St Augustine who wept when he was ordained a priest. The cynics thought that he was weeping because he had not been made a bishop, but in fact it was because he had no desire to be a priest at all. After my ordination I saw with horror my parent's parish priest advancing towards me. Only two years before he had commanded me to leave 'those heretical Dominicans' so that I might save my soul. Now he threw himself down before me and asked for a blessing from my sacred hands. I fled from the reception to my room, to recover my calm. I was only driven back because one of my German brothers followed me upstairs and tried to talk to me about Heidegger! That was even worse.

I finally came to love my priesthood in the confessional box. It was here that I discovered that ordination brings us close to people just when they feel farthest away from God. We are one with them, at their sides, as together we face human frailty, failure and sin, ours and theirs. The trouble with clericalism is not that it made the priest a sacred figure, but rather its understanding of the sacred was derived from the Old Testament rather than for the gospel.

One of the most sacred occasions at which I have ever taken part was the funeral of a man called Benedict, some twenty five years ago. I anointed him just before he died of AIDS, and his last request was that I bury him from Westminster Cathedral. Now that took some negotiation! At the funeral, the coffin was there at the centre of cathedral, and around were gather his friends, many of them also with AIDS. Here at the symbolic centre of Catholic life in Britain was the body of someone who represented so much exclusion, as having AIDS, being gay and dead. In this moment we can see the epiphany of God's radiant holiness.

This vision of the priesthood is essentially missionary, reaching out. It means that serving the Christian community cannot be the ministry of priests to the exclusion of all other ministries. However great the shortage of priests, the diocese must try to free some of us for other forms of outreach, so that those who would never come near a Church can be touched and welcomed. And when one's ministry is to a parish, then the parish community must be in some sense missionary, turned outwards.

This holiness of the priesthood does not mean that we are necessarily morally superior to anyone else. It is the opposite of elitist. It expresses the scandalous outreach of God to those who are on the edge. This implies a certain social dislocation for the ordained priest. We do not have a clear place in the social hierarchy. We are slippery figures who should be equally at home with Dukes or dustmen. We are to embody an inclusiveness that cannot be fully comprehensible to our present society, and summons it beyond all its inclusions and exclusions. I was a student in Paris when Cardinal Danielou died on the staircase on his way to visit a prostitute. The press aired all the expected innuendoes. But, as far as I could see, he was a holy man being a good priest. In way it was the perfect place for a Cardinal die.

It is even fitting that we dress in a rather odd way, and even occasionally wear skirts when other men gave up doing so five hundred years ago. It suggests that we sit askew to the ordinary structures. This reminds me of one of my American brethren. Like many Irish Americans, his Christian names included Mary. He was sounding off in the common room about the people being ordained priests these days, all these weirdoes, homosexuals and God knows what else. And one of the brethren answered him: "Come on. Your name is Mary and you are wearing a white skirt. What makes you think that you are so normal."

This is a dimension that must enter into our discussion about whether priests should be allowed to marry. I think that the arguments in favour of a married clergy are extremely strong, perhaps overwhelming. Perhaps the main regret that I would have is that a married priest might be more evidently part of the social system. There would be a pressure for him to have a lifestyle that clearly placed him somewhere in the social hierarchy, because of the education that his children got, and where they went on holiday and so on. It might be harder for him to represent the inclusivity of the Kingdom. This is not a knockdown argument for retaining celibacy, but it should be borne in mind. Does this vision of priesthood contribute to the debate about the ordination of women? If I may be evasive, I would just say that I was asked to address the topic of men who are depressed because they are priests, and not of women who are depressed because they are not!

I am suggesting that the ordained priest is called to embody in his life and being God's out reach to all of scattered humanity. This takes one beyond the dichotomy of those who see priesthood in terms of being and those who see it in terms of doing. All that we do as ordained priests should express and embody the holiness of God,s being in Christ, transforming the outsider into an insider, death into life, and sorrow into joy.

How is a priest to live this vocation, especially in the face of the crises of our Church and society? Today I will look at some of the challenges that we face in living this role in relationship to the local community. And tomorrow I will look at how we live it in solidarity with the wider Church, with all the crises that it is suffering at the moment.

When Michael Hollings felt called to the priesthood at the end of the war, he went to see the regimental chaplain, who was a Benedictine. The chaplain asked him why he wanted to be a priest. Michael replied: "To help people. He asked if I did not see Mass as being the centre of what a priest is. I simply said I did not, I wanted to help people, The chaplain was deeply shocked. My impression is that the spirituality of the diocesan priesthood is deeply grounded in the life of the laity. Bishop Untenor of the USA wrote that: "Diocesan priests belong to the community of the disciples of Jesus Christ. We face the same struggles as every lay person, and we live in the same world as they do."

It is, in the deepest sense, a lay spirituality, a spirituality with and for the laos, the people. I grew up thinking that the first class priest was a member of a religious order. There seemed to be a bit of a contradiction between the word 'secular' and the word 'Priest' - as if the secular priest did not fully make the grade. But if we accept the theology of Hebrews, then the priesthood is God's embrace of the secular, of what is lay. Our great high priest was in fact a lay person. Being a secular priest, thus expresses what is at the heart of all priesthood. Maybe it is we religious who are the sacerdotal odd balls whose priesthood needs to be explained. It is a bit late for me to discover this after thirty years as a Dominican priest!

If this spirituality is above all geared towards life with the laity, then it is here that secular priests, and often religious priests too, will experience our greatest joy but also our deepest pain and even demoralization. I will glance at just three sensitive areas: the difficulties of leadership, the frequent failure of parishes to be the communities that we dreamed of, and finally the pain of living our priestly life so close to so much human failure and tragedy.


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Leadership




Much modern theological literature talks about the priest as leader. I must confess to unease with this. First of all because, as I said earlier, I think that it sits uneasily with the idea of service. How can one fit together being a servant and a leader of the people of God? This tension can confuse our relationships with those with whom we collaborate. They are delighted with the idea that the priest is there to serve and may be a bit surprised that this usually means telling them what to do!

More fundamentally the word suggests to me the world of business management. The leader is expected to be competent and decisive, not showing his weakness or hesitations, taking bold decisions. Above all leadership is usually evaluated in terms of success and achievement, the meeting of goals. But priesthood is not about success and achievement. We often find that we have not achieved much. If we think of ourselves as leaders, then we will probably feel that we are failures. And our people, who often live and work in the world of business management, if they are lucky enough to have a job, do not come to us hoping to find in the parish the same values that they live in the office. Yet the word has become very popular in the Church, even in religious life. I am always being asked how long I was 'in leadership'. I usually reply: 'Never until now.'

But Hebrews may offer us a vision of leadership which is priestly, and which can offer us a relationship to the people which is neither domineering nor will make us feel failures. Jesus is the pioneer of our faith,"who opened the new and living way through the curtain, "(10.20). He goes before us into the presence of God. Jesus leads by going ahead, taking the first step.

Our leadership is shown in being those who are prepared to take the first step: in reaching out to those who are excluded and marginalized, in offering and asking for forgiveness. In the parable of the prodigal son, reconciliation is achieved because both the younger son and the father take the first step in different ways. The son takes the first step of coming home, and when the father sees him in the distance, he takes the first step of going to meet him.

The Pope has shown us what this means in his outreach to the Orthodox, to Jews and Muslims, taking the risk of rejection. He has taken the first step in asking for forgiveness for the sins of the Church, despite opposition within the Vatican. That is leadership. So for us to be leaders does not require that we be omni competent, decisive people who tell everyone else what to do. It does require that we dare to take the first step in going before people, whether to welcome those who may not want us, to invite people to do more than they ever believed possible, to forgive and to ask forgiveness. This can be lonely. True leadership, in this sense, can lead us to the solitude of the cross.

Perhaps in the universal ethos of the market, our leadership will be in daring to let fall the mask of competence, to face our own limitations and failures, and not be afraid of them. We can go before in facing our fragility without fear. Leadership above all means taking the first step into vulnerability. True leadership gives us the utter joy and freedom of dropping the heavy masks of being knowledgeable, strong macho people who would have been highly paid executives if only the Lord called us to BP instead of the priesthood!


Parish as community

Another areas in which we may have to face failure and demoralization is in the creation of the parish community. When I met the Council of the National Conference of Priests, one priest shared his frustration because so often the parish was seen as a petrol station rather than a genuine community. People popped in for a quick Mass rather than to gather around the altar as the people of God. Parishes are not always the beautiful communities that we read about in books of theology. The parish liturgical team has prepared a rich feast but many people just want elevenses, before going home for the real celebration of Sunday lunch. This is not surprising. In the modern city the territorial parish does not build upon any natural sense of community. The priest may see the parish as his principal community, but most people would put the parish far down their list of places in which they belong, after their homes, football clubs, the schools of their children and the places they work. This can give the parish priest the feeling that he is a failure. He has failed to gather the people around the altar; he has failed to build a Eucharistic community.

It is not my task to look at the future of the territorial parish and consider alternatives. I just want to make a simple point, which is that any community that we try to build here is always going to be somewhat of a failure, because the Kingdom has not come. Every Christian community, whether it is a parish, a Dominican priory or the Legion of Mary, is a faulted and fractured symbol of the community that we long for, the Kingdom. If a parish were too successful, then we might make the mistake of thinking that the Kingdom had come and that the parish priest was the Messiah.

The archetypal gathering of the Christian community was at the Last Supper. And think what a dismal failure that community was: one of the disciples sold Jesus, another went on to deny him, and the rest ran away. Jesus failed to gather them into a community on that last night, so we should not be surprised if we do no better than he did.What Jesus did was to offer the sacrament of community, the sign of the Kingdom that was to come as a gift in its own good time. If the parish is not a greatened dynamic community, then this may not be a sign of our personal failure at all. Sometimes we can do no more than enact signs of what is to come.

When I was a young Dominican student at Oxford, I went to the chaplaincy to see Michael Hollings.Unfortunately he sent me away with a flea in my ear because he did not like religious! Years later I came to know and admire him. Everywhere he went he kept an open house, at Oxford, Southall and Bayswater. Once he caught a burglar in the act of robbery and invited him to stay for tea. I knew that I could never cope with that sort of life, but I admired it as a sign of the Kingdom. It was not the Kingdom, at least I hope not! But it was a sign of the Kingdom that embraces everyone. We cannot build that community ourselves only gesture towards it. It will come as a gift and surprise.

In March I was in Cairo, and I went to visit a part of the city which tourists rarely see, Mukatan. It is the city of the rubbish collectors. There are some 300,000 of them, and they are mostly Christians. They go out in the morning to collect the city's rubbish and bring it back to Mukatan to sort through and see what there is to sell or recycle. It is the filthiest, smelliest and most depressing place I have ever seen. The people seem half dead. Even the children playing football in the street move lethargically, like old men. Behind this awful place there are high cliffs of stone. And a Polish artist has given his whole life to covering them with images of Christ in glory. When the rubbish collectors come home on their donkey carts with their piles of stinking bags, they can see on the rocks the transfiguration of Christ, and his resurrection and ascension. These images proclaim that they are not just rubbish collectors but citizens of the Kingdom, destined for glory. They are kept alive by signs.


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Facing sin and failure

The priest is the bearer of the good news. This is why demoralization so deeply undermines our vocation. Nobody will believe us if we look miserable. But the role of the priest is often to bring this good news to people whose lives are touched by despair and failure. Tony Philpot wrote that: "the diocesan priest deals, ex professo, with failure. There is, of course, his own failure, the knowledge of his own sinfulness. But there is also the fact that the Gospel is about the forgiveness of sins, and his vocation is to deal with the sins of his flock, Failure is the raw material on which he works. "

In our society, he must also be faced with all the ills and pain of a society in which the collapse of social structures and secularization means that many people confront a deep loss of meaning in their lives. How can we manage to go on being joyful bearers of good news when we see so many broken families, young people lost and on drugs and the triumph of a culture of trivialization?

Of course the primary way in which we do this is through celebrating the liturgical year. This is a story that includes suffering, failure, humiliation, sin and exile and which propels us beyond them to the Kingdom. Each year we are brought out of Egypt and make the journey towards the Promised Land. We begin in Advent and are carried through to Christmas, and from Lent to Easter, Pentecost and finally to the Feast of Christ the King. We share the demoralization of the Israelites in the desert, and of their descendants in Exile in Babylon, and are carried beyond it.Jesus says to the disciples at the Last Supper, "You have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you." (John 16.22). We live out annually a story that transforms sorrow into joy.

But that is not enough of an answer. Despite the annual cycle some priests still feel burdened and demoralized. The annual re-enactment does propel us towards the Promised Land, but just when we are about to enter and relax, there we start all over again.The year can feel like a liturgical snakes and ladders: we get to the Feast of Christ the King and then, woops, we go sliding all the way back to the beginning again. So, during this endless repetition, some glimpse of the end of the journey must break in now. Even now we must enjoy some foretaste of the joy and peace of the Kingdom. We have to live now so that the people of God get some hint of the end of the journey. We cannot wait until we are dead to become alive. Otherwise, why should the people believe that we are going anywhere? The rhythm of the liturgical year will feel like jam yesterday, jam tomorrow but never jam today.

So I believe that if priest is to be the bearers of good news, then we need to have a way of life in which evennow eternity breaks in. It is not enough just to survive now. We need to flourish. We each need to make a way of life that really offers us life, alive with the foretaste of eternity life. Otherwise we will be overwhelmed with the sorrow of this age, or succumb to its culture of trivialization. The earliest name for the Christian life was , 'The Way,' We need to show that it is a way somewhere, and not just a wandering around in circles in the desert.

The big question is how a priest may shape such a way of life. Some diocesan priests have said to me that it is easy for religious to talk about having a way of life, especially when they are not parish priests. We have a rule of life to follow; we live in communities, and we have more control over our lives than do priests who are at the beck and call of their parishioners and can never predict what dramas each day will produce. Other priests deny this and say that the priest can and must shape his time so that he can pray, relax and flourish. Other priests say that this would be possible if the bishop faced the crisis caused by the shortage of priests and bites the bullet. I would ask you to reflect now upon how you can shape your lives so that even now people can glimpse in them the first fruits of the new creation: freedom, peace and joy.

My intuition is that it must be possible to claim that freedom to shape a way of life that is really alive. You are, like Jesus, handed over into the hands of men and women. Like Jesus, you have taken the immense risk of giving yourself to the people freely. When Cardinal Bernadin was consecrated Archbishop of Chicago, he said to the people,: "For however many years I am given, I give myself to you. I offer you my service and leadership, my energies, my gifts, my mind, my heart, my strength,and, yes, my limitations. I offer you myself in faith, hope, and love."

This is a Eucharistic self-gift: ' This is my body, given for you,' Yet Jesus remained the freest person there has ever been, whose life was shaped by obedience to the Father. He gave himself into our hands, and yet he was never a passive puppet. He shaped his life, as indeed did Cardinal Bernadin. How can we find that Eucharistic freedom, so that we give our lives away, and still shape a way of life in which the light of the Kingdom can be glimpsed? That is the question I put to you.

We need to have a way of life that lets us rest sometimes, rest with God and also just rest with ourselves. We need to have moments when we can disappear and do nothing, weekly or monthly and also annually. And this is not primarily because if we are rested we shall be more efficient and effective priests. It is nothing to do with management.It is because the good news that we preach is that all human beings are summoned to rest with God and share his Sabbath. This is the gospel, that we are all citizens of the Kingdom in which we shall lounge around and waste our time with God for all eternity. The greatest dignity of human beings is that we are called to play with God for eternity, homo ludens. Who will ever believe us if we are never seen to rest now?

Most of us are compulsively busy and must be seen to be so. I am. If we are to be credible preachers we must not be afraid to be seen to be lazy sometimes. We must dare to put up a notice on the Church door saying: 'No Mass for the next three days. I am on holiday.' We must resist the demonic voice within us, accusing us of being bad priests. I admit that I am very bad at this. I spent much of my sabbatical being busy and above all making sure that I was seen to be busy. And if I play a quick game of Free Cell on the computer, I have mastered the art of flicking it off the screen if I hear anyone coming, so that next Sunday's sermon appears instead! This is the action of someone who is only on the way to believing in the gift of free salvation, unearned grace.

Finally, the joy of the Kingdom must break in now. It would take another couple of lectures to explore this joy so forgive me for being very brief. When Jesus was baptized, a voice was heard from heaven saying: "This is my beloved Son, in whom I delight." At the heart of the life of the Holy Trinity is God's sheer delight in God, the Father's joy in the Son, which is the Holy Spirit. Jesus the High Priest embraced us within that delight. We are taken up into Father's own pleasure in the Son. The holiness of God radiates this joy that God has in all that exists. When Jesus ate and drank with tax collectors and prostitutes, it was not a duty. It was utter delight in their company, in their very being. When he touched the untouchable, it was not a clinical gesture, but the hug of joy.

So it belongs to our priesthood that we rejoice in the very existence of people, with all their fumbling attempts to live and love, whether they are married or divorced or single, whether they are straight or gay, whether their lives are lived in accordance with Church teaching or not. The holiness of the priesthood is radiant with this joy. The Church should be a community in which people discover God' s delight in them. This is our ministry. And so our priesthood should make us passionate people, passionate in our delight, passionate in our sorrow at people's sufferings, and even angry at their oppression. If we delight in people then they will delight in us. We shall discover God's joy in us, offered by the most unexpected people, who may not even believe in him.

If joy is indeed at the heart of our priesthood, then we should be concerned for each other's happiness. The happiness of priests should be a primary concern of bishops and of the diocesan presbyterate. If we see that another priest is miserable, then it is not good enough to assume that he must deal with this alone. If we are ourselves plunged in gloom, we must not rely on some macho individualism to pull us through. The joy of the priest is not just his private concern, because it is an intrinsic part of the preaching of the gospel, and the manifestation of God's holiness.We must dare to seek it for each other.
Source:http://www.kbroszko.dominikanie.pl/andrew/timothy_priest.htm

The Filipino Priest in a Changing Society

by Horacio de la Costa, SJ

The Philippine priest of today must ask themselves the most basic questions, such as: Given the realities of the modern world, why must there be priests at all? Are priests necessary? Are they even useful? And if priests are necessary, or at least useful, what does it mean to be a priest?

The Philippine priests must ask these questions of themselves and answer them for themselves. What is the value, what is the necessity, what is the meaning of the priesthood in this land, among these people, at this moment in history? What is it that God wants his priests, to do in the Philippines of today? And what must they be, in order to what they must?

These are large questions, and all one can usefully undertake here is to suggest certain lines on inquiry.

The priest in the Philippines is generally regarded, and generally regards himself as a functionary. He was so from the beginning, as history clearly shows: an ecclesiastical functionary, and a civil functionary as well. He is so still: a functionary; someone empowered by lawful authority to perform official functions from which certain official consequences automatically result.

But if that all a priest is, a functionary, a kind of special notary public? Or is he – should be – something more? The priest is often called as a pastor, and his work, “pastoral.” If one recalls that ‘pastor’ is simply the Latin for shepherd, and if one recalls further what the Psalms say, and what Christ himself said about shepherds, does this not, perhaps suggest, that the priest is called to be not only a functionary, but a leader?

The question is, what kind of leader? Certainly, the parish priest of yesterday was not only official, but leader. He could not be otherwise. Often, he was the only man in his town with formal education. Not only did he dominate his town, but also in many cases – here in the Philippines at least – it was he, or a priest like himself, who had founded it, built it, and named it. The priest towered over his flock as his stone church towered over his bamboo-and-nipa town.

But is this the kind of leadership – a leadership, as it were, of obvious superiority – that the priest must exercise, indeed, that the priest can exercise today.

The Church is faced, bishops and priests together, with a supremely difficult task; a task, as the prophet Jeremiah says, of tearing down and building up; of tearing down in order to build up. They cannot be mere functionaries of an existing establishment, but leaders of a people toward a promised land; leaders not in the pursuit of or for the sake of power, but wholly in the spirit of humble and Christ-like service.