This weekend and next, our Archdiocese is ordaining new transitional deacons and priests for our Church. It allows me to reflect on the priesthood today and its joys and challenges.
I’ve noticed as a Catholic parish priest, people generally respond to me in two, disparate ways. It is either in generosity and kindness or confrontational and possibly judgmental.
Wisdom — to borrow (and bend) a statement by F. Scott Fitzgerald — “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” It’s a truth that allows me, a parish priest, to persevere — and function — amid dark Church scandals and prideful demanding parishioners. I understand our Church’s troubled history and its divine mission, and I hold these two realities in ongoing tension.
Priests these days are trying to function as vessels of God, while also being “marked men.” Though we can never know the incredible horror of abuse by a predator priest, we can reach out and listen to the dark night of that victim.
Today, as in corrupt times past (think of the Borgia popes in the 1500s, the subject of a TV series from 2011 to 2018), we need modern prophets to purify the Church and clergy. Some of these heroes were disparaged and even persecuted, like John of the Cross in sixteenth-century Spain, who was thrown into jail by his own religious order. And some may be undercut again. But they nevertheless must speak out. It is important that your voices are heard by our Bishops who at times make their decisions with a blind eye and ear to the voices of their flock and even their priests.
We priests and Catholic officials must work sincerely, radically, to regain trust. Often we witness anger, vitriol and darkness — and we need to. Meanwhile, we priests must still function — take out the trash, say a heartfelt Mass and work for justice. As Pope Paul VI once said, “If you want peace, work for justice.”
I’m reminded of Pope John Paul II, who lived with vivid contradictions. In 1999, as the third millennium approached, he apologized for past Catholic errors regarding the “Galileo affair,” egregious sins against Reformation movements, and also for Holocaust era omissions — all while respecting our vibrant religious heritage. While the Catholic Church has birthed beauty like medieval Gregorian chant, Notre Dame in parish, and modernism’s Big Bang theory and genetics, we have also at times quelled some people’s cultures and very lives.
I accept that people today may see us negatively. I also know I am called to both atone for past sins and to cultivate beauty and harmony in the present, however humbly. More contradictions. I’m reminded that in the worst of times some of the greatest saints and prophets matured. Please pray for me and all priests as we welcome our newest into our Archdiocese.
God bless,