The priesthood is too important to leave frozen in time
The Catholic priesthood is in trouble. The number of candidates in the seminaries, theologates, and novitiates simply can’t keep pace with the deaths, departures, and simple ageing of the current priesthood. Instantly, I can hear the cries of outrage from those who tabulate such things that there are marked differences between the first world and the rest of the planet. Vocations to the priesthood and the religious life are flourishing in parts of Latin America, South Korea, India, and most of Africa.
Only the decadent and secular West, its allies, subordinates, cultural and economic colonies and admiring ‘wannabes’ is experiencing a so-called crisis.
Thanks to the labours of Popes St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, many would argue a real restoration is afoot, if somewhat tepid and less than fully ardent in ultraliberal if not anti-Catholic jurisdictions. I am far from convinced by all these claims.
Although such evidence is more anecdotal than scientific, several seminary rectors have told me stories to the contrary.
One president of a major Catholic university and seminary in Africa bemoaned the immaturity of the majority of his seminarians. Eager to climb the social and economic ladder, pious to a fault and keen on all the trappings and dignities of an older model of priesthood, their numbers are no guarantee of quality.
Rigour
Similarly, an Indian physicist and Jesuit rector lamented the decline in academic rigour of the now-packed Jesuit houses of formation in his country.
Both of these wise and in no way radical clerics confided these views to me when I sat on the Board of the International Federation of Catholic Universities some five years ago.
More recently, however, their alarm found echoes in two developments on the North American scene. One liturgy professor told me that he was resigning because, in his words, “the inmates now run the place”.
The inmates are traditionalist seminarians keen on recovering the clerical accoutrements of a different era, anti-intellectual, more preoccupied with their cinctures and surplices than with modernity never mind post-modernity.
Sexuality
Another rector told me that he worried over the psycho-sexual maturity of his charges, given that they were regularly spooked by discussions around sexuality, specifically gay sexuality.
Again, these are anecdotal, although not narrowly regional, perhaps alternate voices, but not to be discounted for all that. I would argue indeed drawn from countless conversations and not a few investigations that the current body of seminarians is largely conservative, drawn to a romanticised vision of the priesthood, inclined to believe in the ontological superiority of the clerical state, persuaded that the recovered glory of the priestly state following several decades of deteriorating reputation is now well and truly advanced, and deeply distrustful of an older clergy that they judge got things dangerously wrong.
The problems around a revivified presbyterate do not lie, in the end, in any kind of recovery, restoration, or revival.
Rather, a purified, attractive, heroic and credible priesthood can only be reconstituted once the Church looks seriously at the massive deficiencies of the current model, the structural hurdles that make a meaningful pastoral witness crushingly impossible, the inadequacies of the current seminary curriculum, the constraints and demoralisation generated by an inflexible system built on an earlier historical template, and the growing polarisation between older post-conciliar priests and the new Roman breed of clerics.
Pope Francis and his two immediate predecessors have bravely called for the elimination of priestly careerism and the culture of clericalism. They have named the problem. Time now to address it. Time now to consider the rehabilitation of the creative and bold post-war experiment in France, the Priest Worker Movement, time now to consider ripping clericalism out of the presbyterate.
The priesthood is too important to leave frozen in time, a nostalgic plaything, an institution with a permanently fixed identity.