Of Leesburg Lawns, Gorgeous Prelates, and Minnie Jackson's Pie

 The Loudon County Courthouse in

Leesburg Virginia where the controversy

began between a Knights of Columbus’

sponsored crèche and several atheist

sponsored displays that spoofed religion

leading to an examination of whether

or not the American Tradition has

stamped us as a Christian Nation.   

We all know Patrick Henry for his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech given to the Virginia Convention in 1775 which swung Virginia into the independence camp of the burgeoning American revolution.  What many people don’t know about Henry is that he was a devout Christian.  Like other Virginia planters he was an Episcopalian but seems later in life to have preferred Presbyterianism which was closer to his Scots roots and evangelical soul.  He was strongly evangelical and while supporting religious tolerance (at least for Protestants) had little tolerance for those of no religious stripe.  (I have not been able to find any evidence of anti-Catholicism but there is something in the back of my memory that associates him with the level of anti-popery common among the Virginia frontier folk who were embracing the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodists revivals of the last decade of the eighteenth century.  I could be wrong on this point.)   He supported legislation that would have required each citizen to pay taxes for the support of the Church of his choice and he also supported legislation that would have paid teachers of religion from the public purse.  This seems to us today to suggest a political conservative but in fact until he saw the excesses of the French Revolution he was pretty radical politically—an extreme democrat who opposed the Constitution for being a threat to personal liberty.  He turned down Washington’s 1795 offer of being Secretary of State because the Federalist Government of Washington and Adams was too powerful for his vigilant concern over individual freedoms. I suppose today he would be a libertarian which makes his evangelical views appear all the more idiosyncratic.  Libertarianism ultimately leaves the door open for there to be no societal brakes on individual moral behavior and that is at odds with the evangelical agenda that believes that moral questions such as premarital and extramarital sex, homosexuality, use of recreational drugs, sale and use of alcohol, etc. need to be regulated if not criminalized.  Of course most of these current issues were not in Patrick Henry’s purview as the social parameters of the eighteenth century were far more restricted than ours but then, like now, there are always those who think that they government should stay out of their business but not necessarily yours or mine. While we cannot know for sure what Patrick Henry’s thoughts would be on the Christmas display on the Loudon County Courthouse lawn, his strong evangelical faith and his minimalist approach to government interference might indicate that he, probably like Sam Adams and Charles Carroll would be likely to support a Christian display on government property without endorsing any right for atheist groups to put up a display disparaging religion.  Again one cannot second guess in history so this is only a likely conjecture given his strong endorsement for government support of religious practice.  It is, I think, a reasonable surmise that John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and James Madison would oppose the idea that we are a “Christian Nation” while Patrick Henry, Charles Carroll, and Sam Adams may well have endorsed that position.  But we will never know, not at least this side of eternity.  Ms. Curtis’ claim that “there is no disputing” that we are a “Judeo-Christian Nation” is far from accurate.  It reflects the smug comforts of a Loudon County housewife whose Hilly Holbrook lifestyle affords her the time to blahg blahg blahg Junior League nonsense.  Go have a slice or two of Minnie Jackson’s pie, Hilly, and leave history to those whose profession it is.      
     And this brings me back to why I write this blog.  For one thing I hate to see our Catholic heritage—our real heritage, especially as American Catholics—dressed up in the rags of nineteenth century neo-Baroque ultramontanism and paraded out as if it was somehow or other the answer to the world’s hunger for The Way, The Truth, and the Life.  Frankly I think Cardinals in cappis magnis (that’s not a mistake, “in” takes the ablative case) and priests in pompomed caps make a travesty of authentic Catholicism.  The antiquarian liturgies sponsored in various Cathedrals by the Latin Mass Society reduce the Eucharistic Sacrifice to a pious Aida. The “canons” of Gricigliano in their self-aggrandizing pomposity are nothing less than an Alice-in-Wonderland charade.  And the whole clutch of retro Catholic zombies parade Mother Church like the naked emperor through the modern world.  Avery Dulles wrote that power was characteristic of the Church in the second millennium and service would be the distinguishing mark in the third. It is time that we make the paradigm shift that will conform us to the One who came not to be served but to serve.  Only a Church of service, scrubbed of the trappings of monarchy and aristocracy, can bear the witness of the new evangelization.

Rings and Things and Buttons and Bows

Cardinal Burke during a visit to Gricigliano.  The

Cardinal's train is twice the length of that of the Queen

Mother at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952.  Note

the page with the saturno at the extreme right.  Nice

touch. 

Yesterday I wrote about the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, a society of secular priests based in Gricigliano, Italy—just outside Florence.  The society was founded in 1990 by Gilles Wach and Philippe Mora.  Monsignor Wach is the “Prior General” of the Institute and Canon Mora is the Rector of their seminary.  The society has about 50 priests and some seventy seminarians—a very healthy ratio that bodes well for future growth.  The Priests of the institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest celebrate the “Extraordinary Form” of the Roman Rite, that is the Tridentine Mass as it was celebrated just before the Council with the 1962 edition of the Roman Missal issued under Pope John XXIII.  The Mass is celebrated in Latin and normally versus absidem—that is, facing the rear wall of the Church with the presider’s back to the congregation.  I say normally because there are churches, notably in Italy, where the principal altar is designed—and has been so for centuries—in such a way that the presider is required to face the congregation.  The four main basilicas in Rome are all such churches, with a confessio, a large open well, immediately in front of the altar that gives access to the crypt below and in the case of both Saint Peter’s and Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls, to the tomb of the Saint beneath the altar.   About eight years ago when the first Tridentine Mass since the Liturgical Reforms of 1970 was celebrated in a papal basilica, the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, many attendees complained that it was celebrated versus populum—facing the people. This struck arch-traditionalists as inauthentic but in fact at that altar, as at the other papal altars in the four archbasilicas, the Mass had always—even before the Council—been celebrated facing the congregation.  Indeed it was when the bishops were at the Second Vatican Council and saw Popes John XXIII and Paul VI celebrating facing the congregation at Saint Peter’s that the bishops came home to their various dioceses and began turning the altars to face the people.  Of course now some bishops want to turn them back.  Why are some so anxious to return to the old Liturgy?  I think the Canons of Gricigliano can give us a good clue what the drive is to reverse the liturgical renewal of the last five decades. 
      The rochets and mantelettas and buckled shoes of Gricigliano speak of a different age—an age when Church and State were wed—where Monarchy was King and Church was Queen.  It was an age where prelates were princes and the clergy had privilege.  One sees the revival of this in the protocols followed by the Gricigliano priests.  Canopies are slung above the thrones of visiting prelates.  Pages in knee breeches and buckled shoes—they do like those buckles—hold the prelates saturno (the domed and tasseled clergy hat).  Knees are bent to kiss pontifical rings.  Banners are hung with coats of arms.  It is a Disneyesque fantasy land where the sons of butchers and bakers can pretend they are princes and princesses.  And this is my objection to it—it is a fantasyland and our faith is not a matter of fantasy.  What culturally may have had an authenticity in the days of the Bourbons and the Habsburgs in our modern age trivializes the Gospel we proclaim.  Avery Dulles wrote that the function of papal primacy was seen in the first millennium to be about witness, in the second to be about power, and in the third millennium will be about service.  (Avery Dulles, S.J., The Catholicity of the Church, Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.  p. 136.)       As a historian I believe Dulles was spot on, but I don’t believe his insight is limited to the papacy.  I believe it is true of the Church itself.  And as Church we have just finished a thousand year reign of power.  We have finished an era in which the Church had great power in and over society.  We have finished an era in which the Church (or since the Reformation, the Churches) sat in the councils of Kings and Emperors, where the Church could dictate laws, where the Church stood above the law of the land in which she dwelt.  That power has been eroding since the French Revolution and now it is all but gone.  The inability of the Church to protect the unborn has frightened to madness those who simply cannot understand the sociological shift that has left the Church politically hollow.   Now the Church is being humiliated again as it finds itself ineffectual to stop same-sex marriage and the advance of gay rights.  Its doomed-to-failure battles only leaves it more exposed as a vacant shell of a once powerful Institution.  In these circumstances, the panicked strategy is “bring back the trappings of the power we once held.”  Bring back the long trains of scarlet silk and furred and hooded capes of prelates.  Bring back the silver buckles and watered silk.  Bring back the canopies and the pages.  They think that these talismans will restore the power the Church once had but instead it only makes the Church look ever more ridiculous, like a senile matron who in her dotage thinks she is the sought after debutante of the year.  Mother Theresa in her cotton sari had credibility even among the Hilary Clintons who disagreed passionately with her, but mincing priests in buckled shoes and pom-pomed hats are the very nemesis of  an authentic evangelization so needed today.   I am the first one to appreciate comedy and farce, but Gricigliano and its fairy-land Catholicism leave me appalled not amused. 

Let's Play Dressup--The Canons of Gricigliano

The Canons of Gricgliano process through their
property in Tuscany  

 The Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest is an Institute of Pontifical Right based in Gricigliano (Italy)  that was founded by Monsignor Gilles Wach and Canon Philippe Mora in 1990.  Monsignor Wach and Father Mora were both trained under the late Cardinal Giuseppe Siri, onetime Archbishop of Genoa and foe of all things Vatican II.  Some Catholic conspiratorialists believe that Siri was elected Pope in 1958 but forced by a cabal within the Sacred College to step aside for the “radical” John XXIII, an alleged Freemason, whose plot to destroy the Church bore fruit on the Second Vatican Council.  Cardinal Siri may have been a traditionalist but he was not a nut-case and neither is Monsignor Wach nor Father Mora.  Well, that actually is a matter of perspective.  The institute is a bit bizarre. 
     The Institute is technically an association of secular priests.  Its members are not religious—that is to say they do not have the vows of religion: poverty, chastity, or obedience.  They are of course, as are all priests, chaste.  (ok, as all priests are called to be and the [sexual] moral integrity of the priests of the Institute has never been called into question.)  They are, I presume, obedient as authority is a huge deal with them.  Poverty?   Well, frankly, they are not about poverty.  Nor must they be any more than is any other secular priest, or, for that matter, any disciple of Jesus Christ.  Anyone who is a disciple of Jesus is bound to set their heart on the Kingdom of God and not on those earthy treasures which “moths devour and rust destroys and thieves break in and steal” (Matt 6:19).  Supposedly their “rule of life” is based on that of secular canons.  I have never seen the “Regula” (rule) for the pious priests of Gricigliano but I am not sure how it is based on the “Rule” for secular canons as secular canons have never had a “Rule.”  (Religious canons usually follow the Rule of Saint Augustine.)  Secular canons are prelates, named by the local bishop, to officiate at his cathedral or a collegiate church within his diocese.  We don’t have secular canons here in the United States but they are standard in Europe where they have functioned in cathedrals and various major churches since the early Middle Ages.  Three  of the four archbasilias of Rome—Saint John Lateran,  Saint Peter’s, Saint Mary Major’s all have secular canons; the fourth—Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls, has an abbey of Benedictine Monks that functions in the same way.  (Actually, there is something in the back of my mind that says that Saint Paul’s may have canons as well, though this is most unusual arrangement.)  In any event, unless one joins the Institute of Christ, Sovereign Priest, one cannot just become a canon on one’s own initiative.  As it is a prelacy, one has to be named to it by either the Holy See or the bishop who has the right of nomination to the particular chapter to which the canons belong.   Joining an “order” of canons is somewhat like naming yourself a Monsignor.  I have known priests who have done that, by the way.  And these boys are into a lot of the same stuff as monsignors vis a vis dress up.  Like monsignors of old, they “neither toil nor spin, but not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these” (Matt 6:29). The “habit” of the Institute is based on the monsignoral Domestic Prelate costume before the reforms of Paul VI. They wear a choir cassock and rochet over which is worn a manteletta faced in blue.  Over the manteletta is worn a mozetta—black for the priests, blue for the superiors.  A black biretta with a blue pom-pom tops the costume.  The black cassock, manteletta, and mozetta are piped in blue.  A small silver pectoral cross is worn suspended from a blue and white ribbon around the neck.  Shoes are black and silver-buckled and I understand from the tailor shop behind Santa Maria Sopra Minerva where their supplies are bought in Rome, the stockings are blue.  It is a striking outfit.  Their ministry in the Church is restoring the splendor of pre-Vatican II Catholicism.  They celebrate Mass in the old Roman Rite and, to their credit, with all the pomp that was normally lacking in most parishes.  While I am no fan of the old liturgy, I will admit without reservation that when it was done correctly and well—which it rarely was—it was a thing of beauty much as Swan Lake or Semiramide  are things of beauty.  I saw Semiramide once, at the Lyric in Chicago.  Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne sang the leads.  Bless my soul, were I not a religious person, I might say that it was the most beautiful thing this side of heaven!!!   But I take the Liturgy too seriously to make it a theatre piece or even to swoon at it aesthetics though it should be marked by reverence and beauty.  The Mass presents us, brings us face to face, with the Saving Death and Glorious Resurrection of Christ and it is a profound confrontation with the challenge to reorient our lives once again to our baptismal commitment to enter into death with Christ, to be crucified with Christ, so that it is no longer we who live but Christ Jesus who lives in us.  Such Mystery can never be reduced to ritual, no matter how elegant, much less can we let it become theatre.  The confusion of pomp for reverence or gilded lilies for beauty detracts from the austere solemnity of the Mysterium Fidei even as arcane language makes a mockery of genuine prayer.  But that was the glory of the old liturgy, when done well it gently wafted us along on the breezes of pious tunes and aesthetic smells and left us untroubled in our souls about the Christ who is crucified still in the family that lost their home, in the alien who fears deportation, in the child trapped in the urban public school, in the Krone’s patient without insurance, and in countless others of the least of His brothers and sisters.  But you know, those blue-faced mantelletas look really sharp; I only hope that no moth devours them nor rust destroys the shoe buckles.    

Two Churches--To Serve or to Be Served

The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve
Matthew 20:28

I am anxious to move on to the subject of the Gregorian Reform but should finish exploring the need for Reform in the contemporary Church beforehand.  While I love the past and can regale myself—if not others—for hours with historical details, I firmly believe that history is not about the past.  Those interested in the past qua past are not historians but antiquarians.   History, on the other hand, employs the past as a means of discussing and understanding the present and constructing the future.   In the August 1  posting I made a claim that the conflicts over the “correct” interpretation of the Second Vatican Council have left us with a bifurcated Church,  with one branch looking backwards to a world of power and pomp and another looking forward into a new world and a new role for the church in the world.  Avery Dulles wrote in his book The Catholicity of the Church, (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1985.  p. 136):  
... papal primacy in the first millennium was envisaged principally as witness, and was closely linked to what had been called the apostolicity of the Church.  In the second millennium, until Vatican Council II, papal authority was understood as a matter of power, and was linked to the Church’s attribute of unity.  A more recent kind of theology, reflected in the documents of Vatican II, links papal primacy rather with service, and interprets it in relation to the catholicity of the Church.    
      It is an interesting observation and if there is a flaw in Dulles’ analysis it is that applies this three-millennia-schema to papal authority when in fact it actually fits the wider self-understanding not simply of the papacy but of the Church itself.  It was not only the papacy, but the Church itself that understood its apostolic mission to be kergymatic, that is to witness to the Gospel to the ends of the earth. That understanding of mission shifted as the first millennium gave way to the second, the very time of the Gregorian Reform of which we are soon to speak, and not only the papacy but the Church itself saw that its “mark” of unity required to have a universal dominion, i.e. a power that extended over all peoples of all times.  The transition was not a smooth one as well shall see—in fact well into the second millennium there were still voices such as Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi—who rejected the power model in favor of the witness model.  Nonetheless, the power model won out and the Church fitted its structures to accommodate it.  The papacy picked up the trappings of monarchy, the bishops forged alliances with the princes—indeed were often princes themselves.  The hierarchical nature of the Church became more evident as ecclesial power consolidated itself in the hands of prelates and indeed as the evangelical concept of authority gave way to the notion of “power” in ways that Jesus had explicitly condemned.  The liturgy too evolved in ways that emphasized power and hierarchy.  Ecclesial and social hierarchies mutually collaborated to reinforce each other’s dominance over the working and peasant classes and the Church became hopelessly (though at the time it was seen not as hopeless but as the ideal) entwined with the civil powers to create the ancien regime.  When that regime came tumbling down with the Bastille in 1789 (and the subsequent decade) the Church worked for its reestablishment, despising democracy, trumpeting absolutism and monarchy.  If you recall the various entries in this blog about “Americanism” you will remember that the Holy See really didn’t know how to deal with the unique situation of the American Church with its republican convictions in a world of monarchial Catholicism.   
     And so, according to Dulles, the time has come again to shift the paradigm—this time from power that guarantees the Church to be “one”   (though it never really did) to the catholicity of the Church marked by an upcoming millennium of service.  And here is where the conflict lies.  There are those who cannot let go of the “power” paradigm with its trappings of monarchy and lordly domination.  They love their Tridentine Mass which so clearly displays the hierarchy of persons in ecclesial society.  The Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest based at Gricigliano in Tuscany epitomizes this ecclesiology of obsolescent fantasy and the ostentatious displays of Cardinals Burke, Pell, and Castrillón Hoyos as they travel the world in their ermine trimmed cappae magnae keep alive the hope of those who believe in a world of kings and peasants and hope to see once again throne and altar united and Catholicism supreme throughout the world.  
      There is, on the other hand,  those who recall and regard as prophetic the speech by Bishop Emil deSmedt  in the first session of Vatican II calling for an end to “triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism”  There are those in the Church today who have a radical vision of a Church putting itself at the service of the poor.  Some, like Mother Teresa, embraced this new vision from a very conservative perspective.  Others, like Dorothy Day came at it from a very left field.  Some, like Archbishop Helder Camara or the American bishop, Bernard Topel just walked away from cumbersome pomp of their office and became witnesses to a truly apostolic Gospel.  Others, like the martyred Oscar Romero had been “party men” who found themselves surprisingly, even against their own expectations, converted to a radical Christianity.  Some were simply hard workers who pitched in and got things done like the four American churchwomen (Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, and Jean Donovan) martyred in El Salvador.  Some, like theologian Monika Hellwig,  left religious life in order to live the Gospel even more authentically than would have been possible as a religious.  Others—like Dulles himself—found that religious life and the institution of the Church gave them the better platform from which to make their contribution.   
       There are those who find this paradigm shift to be very difficult, indeed threatening, to accept and who do what they can to resist it.  Gamarelli’s stays in business supplying silver buckled shoes and purple stockings for those curial monsignori who are not about to give up the buttons and bows they’ve dreamed of since their seminary days.  Those members of the Roman Curia who are members of or have influence with the Congregation for Bishops try to insure that men named to the episcopacy today are not too inclined to the service model foretold by Dulles.  Certainly in the United States most bishops are quite friendly to be with and usually without much pretense,  but at the same time are corporation men through and through who will not effect any drastic social reformation within the Church or regarding the Church’s position in society.  But the wheels of history, while they do turn slowly, turn nonetheless and eventually one will come to the Chair of Peter who knows that humble service speaks the gospel more convincingly to our contemporary world than do the circumstances of pomp.  Dulles, I have no doubt, is right—service will mark the Church of the third millennium but we are only in the second decade of that epoch and there is much time to come.  The autocracy and the silk gowns alike will one day appear as ridiculous anachronisms  and the battles over models of the Church will be a historical footnote—at least until the paradigm must shift again. 

Roots of the Reformation XII: Clericalism—The Paving Stones of the Road to Reformation

Cardinal Dulles suggested that the Servant Model of Church
is the model for the next millenium.  Here a Franciscan friar
speaks with one of the homeless people near St. Francis
Church in New York City. St. Francis Friary was the home of
Father Mychal  Judge, OFM, the NYFD chaplain, the first
registered death of the 9/11 tragedy

 Clericalism leads to-and in turn falls victim to—one of the great Catholic heresies which is to confuse the Church with its Lord.  This is complicated by the Catholic tendency to limit, at least in practical understanding, the Church to its Institutional manifestation.  When Catholics say “The Church…” they tend to mean the hierarchical institution which externally governs the Church, but the Church itself is a far more complex, indeed mysterious, phenomenon.  When I say mysterious, I don’t mean puzzling but rather sacred, indeed numinous, reality.  The late Avery Dulles in his 1974 book  Models of the Church spoke of five key models by which the Church can be understood.  The first on he mentioned—and which he thought was grossly overused—is the institutional model.   This is the model in which am emphasis is place on hierarchy, magisterium, canon law, juridical authority, etc.  Oh, and clericalism!  How could I forget.  And it is this institutional model that most people mean when they talk about “the Church.”

Cardinal Dulles wrote that the Church is not only, or even fundamentally, an institution but it also has a sacramental character.  That is to say that the Church is a visible representation of the Invisible (to the human eye) Master who himself is the fundamental sacrament of God.  In other words, Jesus, the Church’s Lord, is himself the visible representation of the Invisible God and the Church, as the visible representation (re-presentation) of Christ, is a sign and means of God’s Grace in the world.  Moreover, the Church is also kerygmatic—that is to say the Church has a Divinely ordered mission to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom of God, the ongoing message of its Founder and Lord.  Dulles also calls the Church a communio—a covenantal bonding of the faithful into the One Body of Christ.  The Church is truly the physical Body of the Risen Christ—as truly (though obviously in a different mode) as is the Eucharist the physical Body of the Risen Christ.  Indeed the Catholic Tradition as found in Saint Augustine witnesses to the intrinsic unity between the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body of the Lord.  As Christ is one, the Eucharistic Body and the Ecclesial Body are one and the same, and it can be said that in certain respects each derives its authenticity as the Body of the Lord from the other.  Finally, the Church—and according to Dulles this may be the key model of Church for the next millennium—is Servant. 

  

Cardinal Burke, center, one of the prelates who represent 
the Institutional Model of Church.  Cardinal Burke has not
lately been seen speaking with the homeless outside
Gamarelli's--the Rome tailor shop specializing in retro
prelatial garb. 

Many people, especially those who hold positions of pompous power (Cardinals Burke, Pell, Castrillon Hoyos, and others who like parading around the world in cappae magnae) or even those who have powerless pomp (monsignors, the pezzi grossi of the Vatican Bureaucracy, members of the Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest) are having difficulty letting go of the institutional model and embracing the servant model.  Can’t say I blame them; washing the feet of disciples is dirty work; it’s much more fun to be bundled up in silk and fur, though I don’t think of that as a “guy thing.”  But the Servant Model is the model that can restore credibility to a Church that has squandered its moral leadership in these last three decades.   Ah, but the gift of hope tells us that someday soon (and very soon) the Gospel will prevail once more over Gamarelli’s catalogue. (Gamarelli is the “tailor to the popes” and papal wanna-be’s.  See blog entry of March 28^th 2011 for photo of Gamarelli’s window.)   But this is the problem with clericalism –it derives its energy from the institution of the Church and the power the institution has rather than deriving its authority from the Gospel and the authority the Gospel confers. 

It is frightening how much of the negative energy that “former Catholics” have towards the Church is rooted in clericalism.  I first noticed this about thirty years ago in Ireland where my relatives—all (at the time) Church-going Catholics—spoke venomously of their Parish Priest because of what they perceived to be (and I think correctly) his abuse of power.  The power of an Irish Parish Priest was something to be contended with even thirty years ago—he had veto over the public school teachers and administrators as well as many other decisions that technically pertained to local government.  Over the years the antagonism toward the clergy in general seems only to have increased.  This is not to say that many individual priests are not very popular with their parishioners.  Those priests who mix easily with the people, sit in the pub, go to the cattle shows, and visit the homes of the parishioners without expecting the best china and fancy tea cakes are well liked.  Let a priest put on airs, however, and the most devout Irish Catholics become passive aggressive in ways only the Irish can; while many more avoid confrontation and simply walk away from the Church and decided that  a “long lie” in bed on Sunday morning will do them as well as a sermon. 

The anti-clericialism in the United States manifests itself differently but is growing even faster.  The main reason that we have so few vocations today is due, primarily I believe, to the fact that the priesthood is no longer a respectable profession.  This is not due only to the sex-abuse crisis; in fact I believe there are other even deeper roots of the decline in respect for priests today.  Compared to the parishioners, the priest is no longer better educated—and indeed in suburban or wealthy city parishes, is often less educated than most of the people in the pews.  When he speaks, the priest speaks more of what he learned from books than what he has learned from life—his own and his parishioners.  He often seems hopelessly out of touch, indeed at times from another planet.  Poor preaching, that is to say, irrelevant prattling from the pulpit, is probably the number one reason Mass attendance is falling in the United States.  It is absolutely embarrassing to listen when a priest makes a fool of himself speaking of things about which he knows nothing or when he expects his educated parishioners believe pious stories of saints who fly through the air, hosts that bleed, or decapitated bishops who continue to preach as they carry their head to the cemetery.  Legends and myths have their place, but it is not in the pulpit.  On the other hand when there is sound scriptural preaching that reinforces doctrine and can be related to everyday life, people find a comfort and credibility in their pastors. 

The key to good pastoral personality, like the key to all deep spirituality, is self-knowledge.  By self-knowledge I mean that one, cleric or lay, needs to know oneself not for one’s role or for whatever sacraments one has received but to know oneself in the unfathomable sea of sin and grace.   One has to strip away all pretense, all external trappings, all peripheral roles and deal with one’s own self naked in God’s eyes and naked in one’s own.  One has to see all the warts and wrinkles and cellulite and discern who we might have been had it not been for our sinfulness, who we truly are, and who we might be yet in the sight of God and by his grace.  And there is nothing more foreign to the clerical psyche as the courage it takes to abandon—totally abandon—role and be naked for who one is and nothing more in the sight of God and one’s own sight.  This is why diocesan priests so rarely make good spiritual directors for the spiritual life does not begin until one has so confronted one’s truest self and has been sufficiently humbled to throw oneself on the Divine Mercy, pleading for grace.  Once you have done that you find it very difficult to piously parade around in birettas and surplices that look like they come from Victoria’s Secret.   Once you have stood naked before God and in your own eyes, you need not title, no robe, no ring or fancy hat.  You know who you are and you can be who God wants you to be for others.  How rich a Church we would be if more of our clergy did that and fewer were seduced by rank and privilege.