Fr Henry Charles

An enormous amount of research has been done in the US on the priesthood from every conceivable angle. Few people there dispute the fact that the American Church faces a staggering loss of priests as it moves into the 21st century.

The data sheds light on our own context. My experience and reading is that no significant institutional differences exist between our situation and theirs (or, for that matter, the situation in the West generally).

As the numbers have dropped, the average age has risen. Nearly 25 per cent of US diocesan priests are over 65, almost 60 per cent over 55, and only five per cent under 35.
Priests in religious orders and congregations are worse off than diocesan priests, with religious sisters being the worst off of all.

Analysts have concluded that no matter how energetic recruitment gets, how heroic the terms in which the priesthood or religious life is repackaged or “redescribed”, the most that can be expected is a levelling off in declining numbers, but no possibility of a return to the larger numbers of old, no possibility of catching up with the Catholic population, and no returning to the near clerical monopoly on Church leadership.

How does one account for the decline? Let me identify three reasons.

First, for some people, the situation stems from the laxity of the sixties, and its prevailing culture of permissiveness. Commitments demanding heroism and sacrifice suffered and have continued to do so.

A second reason, also cultural, was emphasised by Pope Benedict not too very long ago. The prevailing ethos of modern culture, he said, the ordinary air we breathe, is non-religious. In such an environment, “if it is difficult to believe, it is even more difficult to offer one’s life to the Lord to be his servant.”

For quite some time, I felt that the second reason was the key factor. I no longer think this to be exclusively the case. What I failed to note was that an absence of attractive power lay not only with a culture without religious reference, but with the institution of the priesthood itself.

Fewer aspirants were coming forward not only or simply due to a religious lack in the environment, but also due to implications of developments in Catholic theology regarding sexuality and marriage.

I do not recall seeing any account of the decline that took this latter connection into consideration, until Peter Steinfels’ recent book, A People Adrift, The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Steinfels in fact broadens the argument considerably, and I am very indebted to him for the insight.

The third reason is therefore theological. The claim here is that the decline also stems in significant part from the Church’s own teaching. Contemporary Catholicism has stressed the goodness of the world, and of the body, the call to holiness in everyday, secular activities, and the call to holiness in marriage and family.

In one sense there’s no new teaching here. It all arises from fundamental beliefs in the doctrines of creation and incarnation. The new element is the emphasis in a Catholicism previously dominated by a spirituality of escape from the world and from the flesh.

Brokenness in the world and the flesh has not, of course, disappeared, nor has the need for sacrifice and redemption. What’s different is the emphasis and the reconfiguration.

Christian attitudes to the body, sexuality, marriage, and celibacy are historically enormously complicated and easily oversimplified. The Church has defended the body and sexuality against all sorts of dualistic heresies that assumed a radical struggle between good and evil, in which good was identified with the spirit or soul, and evil with the body.

Marriage has been celebrated as a sacrament. Catholicism once incorporated erotic imagery into the liturgy (as on Holy Saturday, for instance) with a minimum of embarrassment.

At the same time there has been a strong suspicion of sexuality and the body throughout Christian history, sometimes rising to pitched hostility and aversion.
Celibacy itself has had a complex history, overlapping with the foregoing suspicion.

Marriage, sex, and family were the lot of the spiritually average—the C students. If they could rise to heroism, it was through heroic devotion or sacrifice on behalf of the faith, not through married life, and certainly not through sexual intimacy. Hagiography confirmed this, as the ranks of the saints still show, featuring a completely disproportionate number of religious.

Today it is contemporary culture that looks askance at celibacy, much as the Church once looked askance at sexuality. The Church today has come to recognise marriage and sexuality as paths to holiness no less authentic, demanding, and rewarding than that of the ordained or vowed celibate—and that has filtered down to ordinary Catholics. It has shaped the way vocation is imagined, how following Christ is viewed.

A new Catholic humanism has displaced the status of celibacy as the model of holiness. There’s no going back on this, and the priesthood today has to live with the displacement. Heroism has to be imagined in other ways, from within a common humanity rather than away from it, in isolation and false superiority.

In the light of the new emphases, though one sees this more clearly in the US, a new category of Catholic leadership has emerged—professional lay leadership.

Previously, it was priests who staffed the parishes, and religious who ran the schools. Lay people were volunteers, with the exception perhaps of the cook, the organist and the janitor.

Today lay involvement is also professional. Lay men and women exercise ministry, and do so from a sense of vocation or discipleship. They run religious programmes, parish liturgy and music, youth ministry, care for the sick and elderly, community and social justice programmes, prayer and Bible study groups, marriage preparation, and family support services, and a host of other pastoral activities.

There is also a growing lay presence and leadership in the (theological) academy, with Catholic lay men and women not only being faculty members but also becoming heads of faculty. They are writing the texts and doing the interpretation of the Church’s traditions for coming generations.

A further implication of the rise of these new vocations—a phenomenon in inverse relation to the decline among priests—is that the need for more priests is not simply a need for more priests numerically, but a need for a certain kind of priest leader.
Catholicism will more and more need priest leaders for a Church of lay leaders.

Collaborative ministry will be the norm, and the priest will have to be one who can collaborate. Church life today is an almost total reconfiguration of clerical-lay relations. Older patterns no longer fit; indeed, older patterns are less and less tolerated.

What about the future of vocations itself? The current posture is to refuse any rethinking of celibacy and to re-emphasise differences in responsibilities and way of life between priesthood and lay people.

It’s hard to see how a viable future for the priesthood is possible without re-thinking of the qualifications for ordination. Until then, the ordained ministry will be stretched to the limit, and communities will be without the Eucharist, as many of them now are, having to make do with what is (unfortunately) called “Sister’s Mass,” that is, a Eucharistic service.

Pope Benedict once remarked before he became pope that no community has a “right” to the Eucharist. This is true, of course, but the issue need not be put in terms of rights, simply in terms of access. The Church, one may say, has an obligation to make the Eucharist accessible to the baptised.

A community without Eucharistic celebration in a routine institutional way is an anomaly. Thus, as things stand, Eucharistic celebration in Church life in many places, including our own archdiocese, will continue to be not normative Catholic practice but an ongoing Catholic anomaly.

This article first appeared in the Trinidad Guardian, April 14. It is reproduced here courtesy Fr Charles and the Trinidad Guardian.