Letter to Ann T. Clerikuhl continued. (And
the whining continues)
Remember
a long time ago when I told you that there were two flavors of priest —
diocesan priests and monks (though not all monks are priests)? Let me refresh
your memory. As early as two hundred and fifty years after Christ, men and a
few women were running off to the desert to get away from the sinful world and
the sometimes sinful Church. There developed two parallel wings of the church
which for a while bore the names, “the church of the bishops” and the “church
of the monks.”
There was a class of monks who called “gyrovagues” a Greek word meaning “those
who wander around in circles.” The Council of Chalcedon condemned them as didSt. Benedict (480-543), the organizer of western monasticism. In our times,
there are still gyrovagues wandering
about and to call a monk a gyrovague
is just about the worst thing you can call him. The most famous of the gyrovagues is quite possibly Rasputin,
the holy man who wandered into the court of Czar Nicholas II. Most of the monks
never quite abandoned the Church and always felt the need for the Holy
Eucharist, so theirs was a tense relationship. Gradually, through the work of
St. Benedict in the West and St. Basil (330-379) in the East, monks become an
integral part of the wider Church and monasteries eventually ordained enough
priests and deacons to serve their own liturgical needs.
Monks,
ordained or not, usually take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Benedictine monks take vows of obedience, conversion of life and stability. St.
Benedict thought this was the only way to combat the gyrovagues. This means that
a monk may not leave his community or even his cloister without the permission
of his abbot. This has the effect of creating lives of balanced prayer and
work. They eat, pray, sleep and work by carefully regulated schedule. It is
feasible that a monk who is living a very traditional life will never touch
money, never pay a bill, and never pay a cent in taxes. They own nothing and
need nothing. They tend to live into their 90’s, at least the ones I know do. They live in the fellowship of their
brothers, or sisters in the case of women monks, (nuns) for their whole long
lives.
The world has an irritating way of changing
and in the middle ages there was a need for a new kind of religious order.
Groups like Servites, Franciscans, and Dominicans didn’t live in monasteries.
They weren’t quite monks. These “brothers” (i.e. friars) and “sisters” lived in
priories and religious houses that were not as cloistered as monasteries. They
took on specific apostolates such as teaching, preaching, the care of the sick
and so on. Though they didn’t live in monasteries and left their religious
houses, they did so only under their strict vows of poverty, chastity and
obedience, as if they were monks. They were obedient to their superiors and
lived in the community. The variations on this semi-monastic theme are almost
innumerable in our times, but all seem to have poverty, chastity, obedience and
community in common. These variations on
the theme are what we call the religious orders.
Celibacy
is a monastic calling. Celibacy does not seem to have been the rule for
diocesan priests in the beginning and still is not among the diocesan clergy of
the Eastern Church. In the West, when the Roman Empire fell and the diocesan
system was under strain, the priests of the parish churches were often taken
from among the monks. Parishes didn’t
have daily mass in the east and still don’t. Monasteries did, so the western
church got used to daily Mass and unmarried clergy and so a kind of stability
and celibacy bled over into the diocesan presbyterate (priesthood.)
I, being a diocesan priest do not take vows
and may own property! I make a promise
of obedience to my bishop and his successor. I am incardinated into my diocese.
Incardinate is a Latin word meaning “to be attached” or “hinged in.” That means I can’t leave the diocese to work
without my bishop’s permission. I can’t even say a public Mass in the next
county over without a letter from my bishop saying I’m kosher. I make a promise
of celibacy and obedience, and so I am bound to stability, chastity and
obedience — like a monk — but by a promise, not a vow. I take no vow or promise of poverty and I
have no religious community beyond the parish I serve. Herein lays much of the
problem.
Since
the reforms that limited the pastorate, the supports and protections for the
diocesan priesthood are pretty much a thing of the past. Remember that in the
bad old days a pastor was expected to be available for the sacramental needs of
his parishioners, but who now are his parishioners? In times past a priest was not expected to
minister to the needs of the next parish over, and was actually prohibited from
doing so except in the case of an emergency.
The real situation now is that a priest is expected to serve all who
show up at his door, no matter how tenuous the relationship to the parish. I am
not writing these whiny epistles simply to vent, but to point out how radically
the situation has changed. If a priest wants to be a good priest he is expected
to work until he drops. I am not saying that is necessarily a bad thing. The
problem is that he is expected to exhaust himself for people with whom he has
no real pastoral relationship. Instead of helping, he often ends up merely
enabling.
A
lot of people think that if the community supports that sustained the diocesan
priesthood are gone, perhaps we should consider abolishing the expectation of
celibacy. In the Eastern Church the religious orders sustain communities of
unmarried monastic clergy but the parish clergy are married. Think long and
hard before abolishing celibacy. It will not result in a more available clergy.
Perhaps I’ve already mentioned this. I have
a good friend who is Greek Orthodox. He and his wife often invite me to family
functions. At first his extended family and in laws seemed shocked to see me. I
asked my friend if they thought I was there to steal them from Greek Orthodox
Church.
He said, “That’s not it, Father. It’s just
that the only time a Greek Orthodox priest visits a home it means that someone
is dying!”
This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not
totally. In the Roman Catholic Church it is common for a priest to visit his
parishioners in their homes, and it is almost expected. I am often invited to a home for dinner, in fact
so often that I can’t accept all the invitations. Imagine the situation if were
I a married man with children and announced to my wife, “Honey, I won’t be home
for Sunday dinner, I’ll be going over to the Smiths for Sunday dinner.” That
wouldn’t happen twice in a row. It is true that Eastern clergy visit their
parishioners, but it is usually with wife and children in tow, and it is a
fairly rare event, from what I understand.
In the Western Church with celibacy and
daily Mass and the whole deal, a priest could be radically available to his
parishioners. Marriage necessarily limits that availability. Marriage limits availability in another way.
In my ministry I served 30 years in some of the poorest and most dangerous
neighborhoods of the city. I was shot at, had a meat cleaver pulled on me,
endured death threats ,was robbed often, had my car broken into repeatedly and
did nonstop war with rodents and roaches, all while working three jobs.
Had I a wife and children I could not, in
good conscience, have done this. Since God stayed the hand of Abraham, we have
not expected to sacrifice our children. In addition, my current salary would
have to double at least to provide for a wife and children. Quite frankly, I would be far more interested
in financial remuneration than I am now. Have you ever heard a sermon preached
on 1 Timothy 5:17-16? (“The priests (presbyters/elders) who direct
the affairs of the church well are worthy of double honor, especially those
whose work is preaching and teaching, for Scripture says, ‘Do not muzzle an ox
while it is treading out the grain,’ and ‘The worker deserves his wages.’”)
We are horrified to think that a priest is
interested in money. The first Christians had no such scruples. In the bad old
days I was free not to worry about money. I didn’t need the stuff that much. I
didn’t have to worry about retirement or a wife. Now I have to provide for my
own retirement and a lot of people want me to have a wife and children to worry
about.
I am finally done whining. All this is to say that priests were never
radically available. They were radically available to a limited group to whom
they could speak the unpleasant truth with impunity. You can’t expect radical
availability from a pastor without a sense of obligation to certain norms of
conduct and religious observance. Suffice it to say the parish priesthood of
our faulty memories no longer exists and it probably never did.
Next week: the solution. (And maybe just a little more whining. It’s
so much fun.)
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