Is it harder being a priest today?
Bill Toner SJ : : At Irish wedding receptions, up to very recent times, the bride and groom and the important family guests sat at only one side of the long top table. The priest celebrant was usually placed at the very end of the table, beside the bride’s father, who was then the priest’s sole conversation partner for the meal. I recall one particular wedding when the father of the bride, with a few drinks taken, turned to me and said, “It must be f***ing awful being a priest”. I overcame the temptation to say that the only awful part was to be parked beside the father of the bride for the duration.
I don’t find it awful being a priest, but it is more complicated than it was when I joined the Jesuits in the early 1960s. In those days the task of the priest was basically to save people from hell. The first exercise in the Jesuit retreat manual (composed about 1530) is to imagine how the Three Divine Persons looked down upon the earth, filled with human persons all going down to hell. The sacrament of penance (confession) was the main weapon in the priest’s armoury, since it absolved the sins that caused people to end up in hell. The Irish Catholic children of my childhood grew up with vivid images of the fires of hell that might be in store for them. I can remember that as a small boy my parents found me crying in bed because I could not remember my sins. I think my older sister was making her first confession at the time and had all her past sins carefully catalogued. Boys are not as well organised.
In the 1960s some priests started to go ‘soft’ and talk more about the mercy of God, and say things like, “Yes, there is a hell, but there is probably nobody in it”. There had in fact been a gradual but worldwide human reaction against cruelty over a number of centuries. The torture of the rack was abandoned about 1627, keel-hauling of sailors about 1670, and the burning of ‘witches’ about 1711. Hanging of criminals declined sharply in the 1950s. Corporal punishment in schools gradually went out of fashion in the 1970s. Christians then began to find it unbelievable that God was less merciful than humans, and that he would commit souls to everlasting fire for a single sin. Indeed, one hears it said nowadays that to face children with the prospect of eternal hellfire is a form of child abuse.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the watering down of the traditional belief in hell, especially since Vatican II, made the task of the priest less clear-cut. Trying to help people find their way to heaven does not hold quite the same urgency as trying to save them from hellfire. In 2010 Pope Benedict XVI gave an important sermon on “The Essential Tasks of the Priest” (available on the internet). Though it touches on salvation, nowhere does it directly mention the task of saving people from hell. The sermon comes across as rather bland, possibly because we are programmed to save people from bad things rather than to ensure that they enjoy good things. The lack of any mention of hell in the Pope’s sermon underlined the change that had taken place since the days of the pulpit-thumping priest threatening damnation at the parish mission.
This shift in priorities has led priests into a variety of beliefs and behaviours With the sharp decrease in the number of priests (perhaps partly due to a perceived decline in the urgency of the priest’s task!) most of the remaining active priests are in constant demand for the ordinary duties expected of them in the parish, – saying Mass and preparing a homily for it, visiting the sick, preparing children for the sacraments and administering them, and officiating at Funerals and Weddings. Many of them hardly have time or energy to search for deeper meaning in their work. Undoubtedly, a few hold on to the traditional belief of eternal punishment for sinners.
There are also many priests who are almost fully engaged in study and research, writing theological documents and giving lectures. Whatever their special area of study, it can be presumed that they have to concern themselves at times with the changing understanding of salvation, but they are also the best equipped to cope with some of these deeper questions without it becoming a personal crisis.
Other priests took particular note of the document of Vatican II The Church in the Modern World in which the Church took explicit responsibility for its role in the larger world, not just the sphere of religious belief and practice. The document focused on culture, economics, politics, peace and war, and marriage and family. The mission of the Church was seen as concerned not only with the eternal salvation of souls, but also in playing a greater part in solving the problems that plague the modern world, such as poverty, hunger, sickness, homelessness, lack of education, and war. Of course it would be wrong to say that the Church had not previously concerned itself with these matters, since Jesus placed care for sick, hungry and marginalised people at the forefront of the duties of his followers. This was particularly evident in the early Christian Church. However, over time, a degree of separation grew in the Church between ‘religious’ activity and ‘social’ activity, and it was not until the 1970s that a more formal link was established between ‘faith’ and ‘justice’. Up to then, the Church saw its role in this area as helping the needy by works of charity, rather than involving itself in systemic or political dimensions of social problems. At any rate, after Gaudium et Spes a number of priests seemed to find more meaning in their lives by immersing themselves directly in social and semi-political activity and in speaking out, often at great personal risk, about social issues. For some, this shift of emphasis sometimes led to an identity crisis – were they priests or social workers? Or in some sense both.
But many priests, and I include myself in this number, tried to reconstruct for themselves the rather crude exchange-based model proposed over centuries for the Christian life. This had presented a God whose main message seemed to be, “If you are good I will reward you with eternal bliss; if you are bad I will consign you to hellfire for all eternity”. In ordinary life, few people would freely accept such a hazardous kind of bargain. In fact, life doesn’t have to be constructed in terms of bargains at all. The essence of our relationship with God is that we are part of God’s family. “You are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God… Christ himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord “(Eph. 2,19).
Most households or families don’t operate on the basis of bargains, at least not nowadays. The main outcome of living in a family is mutual love, and in most cases it is unconditional love. As a rule, adult children don’t abandon their parents when they become infirm. Most parents don’t disown their children when they get into trouble; they no longer consign their unmarried pregnant daughters to Magdalen homes. The same model of unconditional love is at the heart of Christianity. Jesus made it clear that the essence of a good life was to love God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind, and with all our strength, and to love our neighbour as ourself (Mark 12,28). And conversely the Bible is full of God’s promises to love us with a similar unconditional love: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten son…” (John 3,16). “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be whiter than snow” (Is. 1,18).
However, God has given us the wonderful, and yet dangerous gift of freedom. We are not forced to love God with all our heart, or to love our neighbour as ourselves. God is inviting us to the heavenly banquet, which is somehow the mysterious outcome of loving God with all our heart and extending this love to our fellow human beings. The alternative to accepting this invitation may be death as described in the Old Testament: “For I am a passing guest… That I may know gladness, before I depart and be no more” (Ps 39,12). Many people would not regard this as a terrible outcome, though St. Paul, for one, felt differently: “If for this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men the most miserable” (1 Cor 15,19).
As I understand it now, the main role of the priest is to help people to find God, both in their inner selves and in their world; and with the strength this gives them, and by the grace of God, to live good lives, crowned by an infinitely better life beyond the grave, a life promised to us by Christ and made possible by the offering of his life for us on the cross. The priest himself is called to play a part in making this world a better place, where justice and love are the guiding values; it is difficult for people to live the Ten Commandments in a world marred by hatred, corruption, poverty and violence. There has to be a continuity between the Kingdom of God on earth and the Kingdom of God in heaven.
Needless to say, priests labour in vain unless they try to work in partnership with God, and deepen their personal relationship with Christ. As St Paul said, “I have planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase” (1 Cor. 3-6). And, increasingly, priests must reject the role of ‘lord of the manor’ that the faithful may project onto them, tacitly giving them permission to work, and to make decisions, alone. They must acknowledge the common priesthood of all believers, male and female, and see in the lay people who work alongside them “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people…” (1 Pet 2,9).
