David QuinnCurrent difficulties are based on a false distinction, writes David Quinn
Fr Timothy Radcliffe is a former Master of the Dominican order worldwide. Writing to his Order when Master, he referred to the generation gap that exists among some Dominicans. He addressed his comments mainly to priests of his own generation, the generation that would have come of age in the 1960s and 1970s, the generation that was reacting against the often authoritarian, overly clerical Church of their youth.
He wrote: “Often there is…a tension between generations of brethren. Some young people who come to the order these days value highly the tradition and the visible signs of Dominican identity: studying St Thomas, the traditional songs or anthems of the order, wearing the habit, celebrating our saints. Often brethren of a previous generation are puzzled by this desire for a clear and visible Dominican identity. For them the adventure had been to leave behind old forms that seemed to stand between us and preaching the Gospel…Occasionally this can lead to a certain misunderstanding, even a mutual suspicion.”
He wrote these words in 1999.
Liberal
Fr Radcliffe is well liked by Catholics of a liberal persuasion and his words are highly relevant in the context of the controversies surrounding St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Those controversies fall into two categories. The first relates to incidents, real and imagined, of sexual misconduct on the part of some seminarians, and the second to what seminarians are being taught and how they are being formed. It is the second category I am more concerned about in this article.
It has been interesting to see over the last 10 days or so who has sprung to the defence of Maynooth. It has almost invariably been those who are on the liberal wing of the Church, including members of the Association of Catholic Priests. They worry that many of those coming forward today to train as priests are too ‘rigid’ and too unsuited to ministry in the modern world.
That word ‘rigid’ is an interesting one. We have heard of students being told not to return to this or that seminary because they are too ‘rigid’. What does the word mean? If it means someone who is too rules-bound, too interested in delivering the sacraments and then retreating to the sacristy, too interested in wearing the right liturgical garb, who has no real people-skills, then that is one thing. But if it means someone who is simply orthodox in their theology and pious and traditional in their spiritual and devotional life, for example, that they like to kneel at the consecration and pray the rosary, then that is quite another.
In fact, the desire to root out ‘rigid’ students from a seminary comes to seem less like a necessary culling of the student population and more like a persecution by those whose image of the priesthood became locked into place in the 1970s and allows for no other image.
It was this kind of thing that Fr Radcliffe surely had in mind when he wrote those words in 1999.
There is absolutely no doubt that some of those leaping to the defence of Maynooth in recent days would regard the young Dominicans who “value highly the tradition and the visible signs of Dominican identity” as being too ‘rigid’ and therefore unsuitable to the priesthood.
If so, then it is no wonder vocations and ordination are so low here in Ireland because we are actively deterring those of an orthodox or traditional bent from joining the priesthood in the name of an alternative vision of the priesthood and of the Church that is hardly above criticism and has hardly been a roaring success.
Attitude
Those who denounce as ‘rigid’ seminarians who are merely orthodox and who like to pray the rosary should learn a little from the more genuinely tolerant attitude of Fr Radcliffe.
I believe some of the tensions between some of the 1970s generations of priests and some of the younger generation of priests comes from an entirely false distinction that is sometimes made between priests who are doctrinally orthodox and those who are more ‘pastoral’. It is entirely possible to be both.
Karol Wojtyla, the future St John Paul II, was an excellent example of someone who was a very pastoral priest, dynamic and full of evangelical zeal, and someone who was also thoroughly orthodox. But I daresay he would be condemned as ‘rigid’ and dismissed from some seminaries because of his orthodoxy if he was around today. So might Pope Francis for that matter. After all, he has said the door to women’s ordination is ‘closed’.
The idea that you cannot be both pastoral and orthodox is actually deeply harmful on several grounds. First of all, it means that some excellent young men are finding their desire to become priests thwarted. Even more importantly, separating the two is not good pastoral practice.
Good pastoral practice must be rooted in the truth. It must lead people into right living. For instance, the priest who is indifferent as to whether a couple is married or cohabiting is not leading them into right living as Jesus would have it. Obviously the priest should not condemn the cohabiting couple, but he ought to encourage them to marry or is he not being pastoral in the proper sense.
Some of Christ’s teachings are hard, the one about divorce for instance, but nonetheless they must be taught with due sensitivity. If not, then we have the strange situation of certain priests believing themselves to be wiser and more compassionate and more pastoral than Jesus himself.
We also hear that the ‘rigid’ seminarians reject the Second Vatican Council. Maybe some do. On the other hand, some of the defenders of Maynooth want changes that were never encouraged by that Council, for example, women priests or root and branch changes to the Church’s teachings about family, marriage and sex.
How many seminarians really reject what Vatican II really had to say about ecumenism, liturgy, freedom of conscience and religion, Church/State relations and so on? Very few, I’m sure. But many of those who claim the mandate of Vatican II for changes Vatican II never came close to endorsing are really the ones betraying it.
A good seminary should aim to produce priests who are excellent pastors, who believe in and understand the fundamental teachings of their Church, who can communicate those teachings effectively in a modern idiom, and who have a proper evangelical zeal to promote and live the Gospel.
Any seminary which has this as its aim and does it well, will begin to fill up again. Those which do not, will only wither and die.