THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN!!!

This is how our bishops are trained?  No wonder they're a bunch of dancing monkeys!!!  Back in the days before Vatican II, Cardinal Spellman was notorious for calling on one priest or another to get up at a dinner and sing a song and then, to thank him for his performance, name him a Monsignor.  There is no objection to people having fun and using their talents, but this system is teaching the NACers to be song-and-dance suck-ups to the system and it reinforces the emasculation of the clergy with the scalpel of the Church's smothering institutionalism.  It would be much healthier to see the seminarians trained to mix as adults among adults with the rich benefactors flown over for the annual "Rector's Dinner" than to teach them to perform at the command of the hierarchy for the pleasure of the powerful.   sick, sick, sick--time for change.  Give us priests who are men and not monkeys. 

Need for Change

A good friend of mine some years back retired as archdeacon of a diocese in a major Protestant denomination here in the United States.  Among his responsibility as archdeacon had been the pastoral care of the clergy and their families—a pastor to pastors as it were.  And he told me—with some discouragement—that he estimated that about 75% of his clergy were “burned out.”   There were reasons for that.  First of all, the other various helping professions—medicine, counseling, teaching—all experience high burn-out rates.  Secondly, he found that many of his clergy were under-paid and thus had come to under-value themselves and their contribution.  This is a rather “worldly” scale of value, but we must admit that we are not immune to it just because we are in the Church.  Moreover, clergy are considered to be on 24-hour call and it is very difficult to establish good boundaries to protect family life and its demands—or one’s need for personal time for prayer and study—from the demands, legitimate or otherwise, of one’s congregants.  Yet another contribution is that a generation and more ago clergy were highly respected as a profession—today they are not.  This is not just because of the sexual abuse crisis though that has been a factor, but as the standards of professional conduct have risen in the other professions, perhaps they have not risen proportionately in the clergy.   Indeed, in an increasingly secular society, clergy are often looked down as “Mulcahys” –after the good-hearted but buffoon priest from Mash. 
I think the situation is even more complicated for Catholic clergy.  Donald Cozzens in his 2000 book The Changing Face of the Priesthood identifies various pathologies that result from the current structures of rectory living.  Cozzens maintains that the low salary and institutional living to which most priests are subject create an unhealthy psychological dependency on hierarchical authority that retards the personal development of the priest who cannot establish a sense of his own personhood apart from the Institutional Church.  This dependency has left men vulnerable to all sorts of abuses of power that have deeply scarred them.  They have had to live in rectories with rageaholic pastors, be subject to ridiculous curfews, made to feel that they were living in someone else’s (the pastors—or the housekeeper’s) home, not having their privacy respected, and otherwise treated as less than mature adults. This has left those  priests so victimized with anger and depression.  Furthermore, the difficulty in securing a personal residence and economic security for an eventual retirement often makes the future look bleakly like a continuation of a depressing present.    
There are other issues.  Many priests seem to be unable to develop healthy adult-adult relationships.  Mandatory celibacy, if not treated healthily during the formation process of the seminarian and young priest, does seem to retard normal affective development, leading not only to predatory behavior in those so pre-disposed, but to an inability of many otherwise “normal” priests to relate with trust, warmth and appropriate affection to one’s peers.  Note: I am not saying this of all clergy but of those whose spiritual and character formation in the seminary was not healthy.  Unfortunately this was not uncommon and is still not uncommon in many seminaries where formators themselves did not have a healthy psycho-sexual development.  Arrested emotional development is permitted to pass as chastity whereas genuine chastity is love-filled and compassionate. 
In the years before and immediately after World War II the priest was often, along with the doctor and the lawyer, one of the few people in the parish with a college education.   With the GI Bill and the consequent rise of the Catholic population from working class into the professional classes, the priest today is often less educated than his parishioners.  This has not only deprived the priest of that edge over his parishioners, but has made his preaching an opportunity to reveal his ignorance rather than display his erudition.  Too many sermons today are bland at best and often simply inane.  Seminary education has often not progressed enough over the last fifty years to give the priest the secular knowledge he needs to know to converse intelligibly about the faith with his more educated listeners.  This problem is not all one-sided.  The de-emphasis on—and even ignorance of—the liberal arts, and particularly on philosophy and theology, in today’s colleges and universities where his parishioners have been “educated” have made the challenge even greater for the priest to be able to explain the relevance of our Christian faith to contemporary listeners.  I put “educated” in quotes because without philosophy there simply is no education, only ignorance fortified by scientific facts.   In other words, physics without metaphysics builds technocrats, not men and women capable of critical thought.  
Burnout does not mean that a person is totally dysfunctional.  A priest or minister can be “burned out” as they walk through the duties of funerals and visits to the sick and marriage preparation and even the liturgy and preaching.  Burnout does, however, severely diminish the quality of work that a person does and it deprives the person of the enjoyment he or she finds in their work.  What do we do to rescue the clergy from burnout?  As with a physical malady such as cancer or heart disease, there is no one answer that fits all.  Each case is unique and requires and individual analysis and treatment.  For many there is a need for psychological counseling to remedy not only the hurts and disappointments experienced in ministry, but to go back and address the flaws in initial formation.  I think there is invariably a need for good spiritual direction to give them more substantial grounding in the spiritual life than the piety that passes for “priestly spirituality” in many seminaries.  There is a need for most to have a gentle re-introduction to the intellectual life, encouraged to read and discuss current theological works that will stimulate thought and energize the priest once again for mission.   And I think there is a need to re-integrate them into community—both the network of presbyteral friendships but also—and equally as important—into a web of diverse friendships that include Catholic laity, non-Catholics, and non-believers where they can be not just “Father X” but their truest and most authentic selves.  Beneath the priest must be the authentic person.  This has too often been ignored in seminary formation where the concern has been to strip down the individualism of the candidate and replace it with a role-identity that makes him no more than the priest he is ordained to be.  Beneath the collar, under the soutane, is nothingness.  The individual is a priest, and no more and no less.  But such a priest is no longer the person God created him to be and there is no nature left on which grace can build.  We don’t need these cookie cutter priests: we need honest, sincere, mature human persons who can bring their unique gifts to the service of the Gospel.  Jesus, in his paschal mystery did not renounce his distinct humanity but allowed it to be transformed into the Resurrected One.  We in our baptism are called, not to be erased into the image of Christ but to be conformed to the image of Christ.  And so too the priest—to grow into an alter Christus that incorporates that person whom God has created, Christ has redeemed, and the Holy Spirit is sanctifying.  ( By the way—for you silly neo-trads: would you learn the difference between “altar” and “alter” and use each appropriately.  I am tired of seeing your blogs talk about the need to return to only alter boys serving Mass or to hear how the priest is an altar Christus.  Geeze Louise, if you want the Latin to come back please learn it; in the meantime you can consider the female altar servers as alter boys.)    

Celibacy--Today's Situation

The Changing Face of the
Priesthood by Father Donald
Cozzens--certainly worth the

read

Professor Daniel Maguire of Marquette University wrote today in the New York Times “Letters” that   “The root of the problem (clerical sex abuse) is mandatory celibacy. There is a reason religions with a married clergy have no comparable problem — not that they are problem-free. Celibacy is not a bona fide occupational qualification for ministry.” I am a bit surprised at this because Dr. Maguire is usually better nuanced in his observations.  In the first place his claim that religions (or at least other Christian Churches) with a married clergy have no comparable problem.  I am not sure what parallel universe that Professor Maguire lives in, or perhaps it is just the rarified air of his ivory tower—and theologians have the more rarified air of all academics, allowing angels to have danced on the heads of pins for centuries—but he needs to talk with any Episcopalian or Lutheran Bishop or meet with the officials of any presbytery in the country to know that the problem of clerical sex abuse is not unique to celibate clergy.  On the other hand, he may want to visit a few Buddhist temples and inquire why their celibate monks (seem, at least to) stay out of the limelight in this disheartening problem.  Don’t misunderstand me, I am not defending mandatory celibacy. To the contrary:  I think it is sick.  Not  because it has to do with sex, but because—and here is where Maguire is on to something though he misdiagnosed it—celibacy and sex abuse (whether of minors or vulnerable adults) does have a common root.  Power. 

      The most common motivational issue behind sexual abuse is the need of one person to dominate another who is in a position of inferior power.  An adult incapable of healthy peer relationships seeks to control or otherwise dominate a person whose youth and naiveté leaves him (or her) vulnerable.  An employer or a person higher up the power chain in a corporation or an institution (for example the United States Military) has a need to flex power by exercising control over a subordinate, and what control is more total than demanding sexual favors.  Even in what might appear—and the operative word is appear—to be a healthy peer relationship, one person often has a need to dominate the other. 

      Celibacy too is about power and the need to dominate.  In 2000 Father Donald Cozzens of the Cleveland diocese published a book that “hit the nail on the head,” The Changing Face of the Priesthood.  This is one of the most insightful, indeed I think it is the single most insightful, analysis of the issues facing the Catholic Church in North America.  It deals with far more than celibacy or the sex-abuse crisis.  I think it is particularly insightful on reasons for the vocation crisis in the Church today and why parents, unlike fifty years ago, do not want their children to be priests or nuns.  It deals with how the abuse of power is structuralized in the Catholic Church. 

     In the last several posts, I have shown that celibacy historically was used to protect Church property against alienation to the families of priests in the medieval period.  That is not an issue today. Today I would suggest that celibacy is a key factor in creating a psychological dependency of the clergy on the hierarchy.  The priest is never allowed to achieve a full social maturity.  He is required to live in Church-owned housing.  With housing provided, he is paid a less than professional salary—enough to live on but not enough to give him any independence.  While some priests are able to supplement this dependency-income with family money or are canny enough to successfully transform their resources into something of a fortune sufficient to let them buy a home and have an income sufficient for independence, most clergy remain for their entire lives dependent on their diocese or religious community for housing, meals, automobile, and an income just sufficient for clothing and relatively modest vacations.  Such dependency creates a relationship with the Institutional Church and its representatives not unlike that of the abuse victim afraid to break the ties with his abuser.  Where can he go?  What choices does he have?  He comes to see himself as powerless over his life and life choices.  Who will have him if the abuser (or in this case, the Institution) turns him out?  The abuser (or the Institution) is someone that everyone esteems.  While he, the abused (or the priest) finds himself unhappy with the situation, it must be him and not the situation since the abuser (Institution) is so highly respected that they can do nothing wrong.  Or perhaps the victim (the priest) feels “honored” to be the recipient of the reflected glory and power of the abuser (Institution).  And there are rewards.  Just as an abuser might take his victim for a nice vacation, buy him or her some clothes, even a car, or give him access to money or a career.  So too the priest has the hopes of being sent on for higher studies, given a better parish, maybe even being made a monsignor, or—dare he think it?—a bishop! 

      This is not to say that that there are not good priests, sincere priests,—there are, hundreds, even thousands.   There are many men who have found an interior freedom that lets them function effectively in a dysfunctional institution.  They give generous service to others and have found strategies to maintain their own emotional and spiritual health despite the unhealthiness of the system in which they work.  On the other hand, many good priests have come to realize just how dysfunctional the system is and for their own welfare have chosen to find other vocational paths.  And, tragically, the Church has more than a significant share of men who have drunk the clerical Kool-Aid and live not in the freedom of the Gospel but in enthrallment to an Institution that is in dire need of Reform.  More on this in the next posting.