Catholic Priesthood Through the Ages

In this Year for Priests, I can't recommend highly enough a resource from the EWTN archives. Fr. Charles Connor has got to be one of the treasures of the Church for his popularization of history. He turned his talents to the subject of the priesthood in the series Catholic Priesthood Through the Ages.

The series is designed to give priests and especially catholic laity a deeper insight into the scriptural, theological, historical and spiritual richness of the Sacrament of Holy Orders.

The are 13 Episodes available from the EWTN audio archive:

Episode 1: What is the priesthood?
Episode 2: The priesthood of Jesus Christ
Episode 3: The Priesthood in the Mind of St. Paul and the Early Church
Episode 4: The Fathers of the Church on the Priesthood
Episode 5: The Medeival, Reformation And Counter-Reformation Mind on the Priesthood
Episode 6: The Eucharist and the Priesthood
Episode 7: Prayer and Suffering: Essential Ingredients of the Priesthood
Episode 8: The Priest as Preacher of the Word
Episode 9: The Gift of Priestly Celibacy
Episode 10: Priesthood in the Third Millennium
Episode 11: Priestly Theology of Pope John Paul II – Part I
Episode 12: Priestly Theology of Pope John Paul II – Part II
Episode 13: The Blessed Virgin Mary And The Priesthood

I've listened to the whole series several times now, and probably will listen to it several more times before the Year for Priests comes to an end next year. Fr. Connor presents the views of Pope John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger (before he became Pope Benedict XVI), Archbishop Fulton Sheen, John Cardinal O'Conner, and others in this inspiring series. Each episode is approximately 27 minutes in length and is available as a 3.15 MB mp3 file.

Priests and Rest

I am not unsympathetic to priests who complain about not being able to get away from the demands of parish life. One part of me is amazed that so many members of the typical parish seem to be so needy that the pastor has to spend an inordinate amount of time tending to a small minority. Occasionally, a blogging priest will write a "day in the life" post, and it does make it appear that they are on-the-go through most of the typical day. If, of course, those days are truly typical.

The other side of the coin is that sometimes the pastor is not available. When our daughter Erin was born, we feared the possibility of a congenital heart defect, so we made arrangements with the Lutheran hospital chaplain to have her baptized immediately after her birth. "Good luck," he told us, "finding a Catholic priest on a Friday night." I have first-hand knowledge of a parish pro-life coordinator who wanted to get the pastor's permission to participate in the red-letter campaign from this past spring. Phone calls and personal trips to the rectory were fruitless. Even notes from the secretary to the pastor did not produce results. The pastor could not spare one minute to return a phone call from a parishioner trying to conduct parish business!

Fr. Peter Daly is a Maryland priest who writes a column syndicated by the Catholic News Service. He recently wrote that he finally had his first day off in four months. That sounds really bad, especially in light of this past Sunday's Gospel, in which Christ directed his disciples to take a day of rest. On a human level, these moments of rest and recuperation are necessary, and priests are certainly human. But what does a day off mean to a priest? Is it the same as a day of rest? What it seems to imply is a day in which Fr. Smith is just Mr. Smith. I find that troubling.

In the same column, Fr. Daly noted the results of a 2002 survey in which 18% of parish priests said they worked more than 80 hours a week, with the average at 63 hours. That's a lot of time on the job, but I have to wonder what is included as work. Is everything that they do as a priest included? If that is the case, then every hour of every week should be included, because the ordained man is a priest forever. Fr. Smith is always Fr. Smith, he never becomes just Mr. Smith (I'm not considering the possibility of laicization here).

A lay person like me might spend 45 hours a week working on the job. Is that to be compared against the 63 hour average for the parish priest? That's the time that I spend making a living as an engineer. That's not the sum total of my vocation, however. As a father, I have to spend time parenting my children. Do I get to include the time that I spend counseling, educating, entertaining, feeding, and transporting my kids? What about the long, boring meetings that I have to attend for school and extra-curricular activities? It's part of my vocational identity that the priest doesn't have to attend to. As a husband, I have spend time with my wife for the strength of our marriage and the good of the children and the community. Every minute of every day, I am a father and a husband. It would be unseemly for me to take a day off from being married.

But wait, as they say in the infomercials, there's more! I am also a believing member of the laity. I devote time to my full, conscious, and active participation in the liturgy. I catechize and volunteer and attend more meetings. I study and pray and try to discern and follow the will of God for my life. That all takes time, and I think that most priests think of Sunday as a "work day" because they celebrate multiple masses and deliver their big homily of the week.

I started this post by noting that I am not unsympathetic to over-worked priests, and I'm not. They need their periods of rest, and a chance to get away from the demands of a needy public. But when they speak of their duties (and privileges!) as a priest in the same way that I might speak of my responsibilities as an engineer, separate from my responsibilities as a father, husband, and lay person, then I think that maybe they've lost sight of what their vocation to the priesthood really means.

Our pastors should be able to get away from the parish more often than once every four months, but it saddens me to think that some of them might be counting or rationing the hours that they give to the sheep of their flock.

Prayers and Penance for Priests

In her broadcast for today (click here to listen), Sr. Ann Shields takes Sunday’s first reading from Jeremiah (“Woe to the shepherds. . .”) and uses it as a platform from which to encourage us to pray for our priests. It’s a message that I needed to hear. Yes, we have our Holy Hour every Monday evening with rosary, prayers for priests, and Benediction, but that gets to be so routine. Just as St. John Vianney did penance for the sheep of his flock, so we lay persons need to pray for and do penance for our pastors.

While I won’t be doing anything as dramatic as donning Fr. Brunner’s penance shirt shown at right (yes, Russ, I finally found a way to work it in – thanks for the image), I can put the suffering that I inflict upon myself during my training runs to good use. Maybe knowing that the suffering has been given meaning will strengthen me to endure the punishment.

Paying Attention

A while back, Fr. Kyle Schnippel noted on his blog that some priests do not like the award-winning film Fishers of Men. They object to the heroic presentation of the priest because, they say, it establishes unrealistic expectations. We priests, they say, just can't measure up. It’s a powerful film, and the trailer is embedded below.

I was reminded of Fr. Schnippels comment today when I happened upon an Ignatius Press advertisement promoting books for the Year for Priests. Among the titles were The Cure D’Ars Today by Fr. George Rutler (“this spiritual biography of St. John Vianney, the Cure of Ars, gives us new insights about the Cure’s life and message for today’s Church”), The Priest is Not His Own by Archbishop Fulton Sheen (“Sheen delves deeply into what he considers the main character of the priesthood, that of being a ‘holy victim’, to imitate Christ in His example of sacrifice, offering himself as a victim to make His Incarnation present in the world”), Theology of the Priesthood by Fr. Jean Galot, S.J. (“in this masterful work, Jean Galot, S.J. explains how the Jewish priesthood, the perfect priestly ministry of Jesus, and the role of the Twelve help us understand the ministerial priesthood”), and Christ, the Ideal of the Priest by Fr. Columba Marmion (“Marmion wrote this classic work on the priesthood to show the holiness that priests are called to, and how it can only be attained through close union with, and imitation of, Jesus Christ”).

When we speak of Jesus, we sometimes hear distinctions between a high Christology which emphasizes the divinity of Christ versus a low Christology which emphasizes the humanity of Christ. The Church teaches that Jesus is true God and true man – one divine person with two natures. Overemphasizing the divine nature runs the risk of forgetting the He was “a man like us in all things but sin.” Overemphasizing the human nature runs the risk of forgetting that He is the eternal Word, present at the creation and coeternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Through the Incarnation, we have the mystery of the hypostatic union. The right line to walk is not to split the difference, making Jesus a little less than God and a little more than man (i.e., a sort of demigod), but rather to embrace both the high Christology and the low Christology at the same time.

It seems to me that we can also speak of a high and low presbyterology (I think I just made the word up). The high presbyterology emphasizes the ontological change that transforms a man into an alter Christus. The low presbyterology emphasizes that the priest is still just a man. Just as in Christology, where the right answer is not either/or nor split-the-difference, so the right approach with respect to the priesthood has to be the simultaneous recognition of his mere humanity and the sacred character of the vocation to which he has been called.

There seems to be a low priesthood movement afoot. I see it in complaints that priests have no time for themselves and therefore need homes away from the rectory. I see it in calls for the repeal of priestly celibacy requirements. I see it in priests who prefer to dress in civilian clothes (aka “incognito”) when “off-duty.” In this Year for Priests, Pope Benedict XVI is encouraging priests to rediscover that they were not called to a job, but to a vocation. I suspect that many of those priests who did not like “Fishers of Men” are hoping that nobody is paying attention.


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So Long, St. Paul

One day, we're in the Jubilee Year of St. Paul, and the next, we're not. Just like that, it's over. Just like when the Jubilee Year of 2000 came to an end, suddenly, it was just another year.

That's not quite true now, though. Although we're leaving St. Paul behind, we're not really leaving him behind, and we're not entering into just another year. We're in the Year for Priests!

During the Year of St. Paul, the Catholic Church made a conscious effort to reclaim the Apostle to the Gentiles. Through the various intitiatives, conferences, Bible studies, and catechesis, Catholics have grown in the understanding and appreciation of St. Paul. What's that, you say? All of that stuff didn't happen at your parish? Well, surely you at least had a banner!

Maybe I'm being a little cheeky. Maybe the typical Catholic needed to pay careful attention (something we Catholics aren't always good at doing), or make a special effort to seek some of these things out, but at least some of us were affected, to varying degrees, by the Year of St. Paul. What we learned during this past year will stick with us. Our appetite has been whetted. And even if we are but a small fraction of the total Church, we can serve as salt to season the rest.

In closing the Pauline Year and opening the Year for Priests, Pope Benedict XVI invoked St. Paul as "a splendid model to imitate." "St. Paul is an example of a priest who was completely identified with his ministry, conscious of posessing a priceless treasure, that is, the message of salvation, but in an 'earthen vessel.'"

The Pope concluded with a theme that I suspect we will be hearing much of during the coming year: "The priest must belong totally to Christ and totally to the Church; to the latter he is called to dedicate himself with an undivided love, like a faithful husband to his bride."

Year of St. Paul for Priests

Last Friday, June 19, the Church under Pope Benedict XVI began the Year for Priests. The date was chosen as the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Vianney, the parish priest of Ars, France, and the patron saint of parish priests. However, we haven’t completed the Jubilee Year of St. Paul yet. The Jubilee year doesn’t end until June 29, when the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. There are ten days when the Year for Priests overlaps with the Year of St. Paul.

I regret that I didn’t really get into the Year of St. Paul until it was very nearly over. Once our parish Bible study on St. Paul and the sacraments started, I began searching out other material, some of which is appropriate for this overlap week. I want to try to keep more on top of things during this Year for Priests.

Pope Benedict XVI kicked off this Year for Priests with a letter encouraging priests to look to St. John Vianney as an example of a vocation to the priesthood lived to its fullest. His predecessor, Pope Benedict XV, wrote an encyclical letter of exhortation to priests, Humani generis redemptionem, in which he encouraged them to look to St. Paul as an example of what a faithful priest should be (see paragraphs 13-19). I hope to write more in future posts about both letters.

As long as we’re talking about the overlap between the Year of St. Paul and the Year for Priests, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that Dr. Scott Hahn posted at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology an article entitled Paul the Priest.

Also, give a listen to this episode of Fr. Charles Connor’s series, Catholic Priesthood Through the Ages, in which Fr. Connor discusses the priesthood in the mind of St. Paul and the early Church.