Priesthood and Revolution

What I want to do in this paper is to examine the meaning of the christian ministry. What exactly is the point of having clergy about the place? It is a question that has to be raised because, on the face of it, there are very strong and often overwhelming reasons for not having them about the place. It is hard to believe that those catholic priests who ran away from Cuba after the fall of Batista and raised an outcry about persecution simply because they had not been allowed to take their wealth with them--it is hard to believe that it mattered very much whether they stayed or went. Certainly until recent years it was a fairly safe bet that in any revolution situation the clergy would behave as the obedient servants of the established power, and there had to be very good reasons for not eliminating them.

In recent times, however there has been some change. Fidel Castro remarked the other day that at the very time when some marxists were becoming ecclesiastical, a lot of religious people were becoming revolutionary. Admittedly Castro was simply picking up the nearest stick to belabour the Russian party; nevertheless he did pick up this stick, a thing he could hardly have done twenty years ago. The change, however has been to some extent masked for the following reason. Throughout the nineteenth century and later, the usual pattern was for the higher clergy to be solidly behind the ruling classes, while the lower parochial clergy and the religious occasionally took the opposite side: whether because of their closeness to the people of because of a more cosmopolitan outlook. Such was the case, for example, in Spain in the thirties. In our own time what looks like a very similar division has in fact got a different basis. It is now much more a matter of age-group. The older clergy have been unable to adjust to a rapid change that has taken place in the church as a whole and retain what was the normal outlook of the time when they were trained. The clergy who were born in the thirties or later have much less difficulty, but precisely because of their age are unlikely to be in amongst the higher clergy. The difference in thinking of the two groups is not any longer based on a class structure within the church--a factor which it has become almost impossible to take seriously in our time. And we need not suppose that as the new clergy move to higher jobs they will perpetuate views (or modifications of views) that have been traditionally associated with such positions.

Another important change belonging to our time is this: during the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was frequently necessary to eliminate the clergy by shooting them. An exception was the Irish revolution. and this may have something to do with its failure to bring forth the Ireland of James Connolly run by the Irish people. In our time the clerical population is minimised not by murder but by birth control: fewer and fewer people conceive of being priests. This development is in some ways fortunate and in some ways not. Fortunate in so far as it is due to increasing clarity, unfortunate in so far as it is due to muddle. The first reason why people do not want to be priests any more is that they see fairly clearly what it is like to lead the life of Fr x and Mgr Y and they do not want to spend their own lives in that style—it seems to involve too many dishonesties. to much silliness, too little of the warmth of human relationships. and a certain amount of sheer hypocrisy. but above all it all seems to no purpose. Apart from playing an elaborate but decreasingly popular game what can a priest say he has done with his life? Of course less reputable motives creep in too. The social status of the clergy isn't what it was—-it is true they still can preempt an inordinate amount of communications space, especially on television. but people take them decreasingly seriously. All this seems good. It is obviously right that people should be critical of the version of priesthood that is available in our suburbs.

The bad part seems to be the muddle. The second reason why people do not want to be priests is that they are deeply unclear about what priests are and what they are for. They know what they are not for. They know they are not for playing golf, preaching contentless sermons. pottering about the parish doing inefficiently what a social worker can do better, and asserting their 'authority' by impeding people who want to do something about the state of the church. They know all this, but there is no very clear idea. of what priests are supposed to be doing. Now in fact the kind of general transformation that has been taking place in the thinking of the church since the council does provide us with some kind of clue to the nature of the priesthood. If this clue is followed up there will perhaps be rather fewer priests about the place but they will be people who know what they are supposed to be doing.

One ought to say right at the start that there cannot simply be a theory of the christian priesthood; this is because nobody is really sure about the relationship between what we now call priests and what we now call bishops. When we nowadays read the new testament we find mention of episkopoi—-a word which by corruption has become our word bishop. but which literally means supervisor or overseer. and we find mention of presbuteroi-—a word which has been corrupted into priest, and which originally meant, literally, elder. This would look like our bishop and priest it it were not for the confining fact that the terms seem more or less interchangeable. There is also the word ‘apostle’. which the new testament does not confine to the twelve immediate followers of Christ, but seems to use somewhat in the sense of our 'missionary' or pioneer. Somehow, out of all this contusion, there arose the system of the monarchical bishop surrounded by his assistants, the priests. but it is by no means clear to what extent this particular form of the institution is indispensable in the church. Some of the ancient celtic monasteries were inhabited almost exclusively by bishops, and indeed to the present day some Irish parish priests are unsure whether they are popes or not.

I do not want to enter here into what would be a very complex discussion about the details of the hierarchical structure of the church; I want to discuss the general question of the christian ministry:-why there is a ministry at all, however it may be distributed amongst various grades. It is a belief of all catholic churches that there is a sacrament of order—that is to say that the order of the church. her structure is sacramental. Order, priesthood, is not primarily something that I have but something that the church has, in which I participate. One of the major problems for the church in our day is that the sacrament of order is suffering from the same obscurity, confusion and mystification that used to (and to some extent still does) envelop the sacrament of the eucharist. The various liturgical reforms that have taken place during and since the council have for the most part had it as their aim to show forth the eucharist for what it is and always has been: for centuries Its real nature was obscured by the inappropriate form which it took; now it is rather easier to recognise it for what it is. A somewhat similar reform is required with the sacrament of order: we need a form of the christian ministry which will reveal it for what it really is. Well, what is it?

In what follows I shall speak about 'priests' or 'ministers' without begging any questions about the relationship between bishops and priests. The christian priesthood is, of course, primarily the priesthood of Christ; what we are concerned about is not some ecclesiastical substitute for the priesthood of Christ, but the ways in which this priesthood is sacramentally shared by his body the church.

We may begin with this question: Is the priest a special kind of christian, or is he an ordinary christian with a special kind of job to do? Does ordination, or consecration, make a difference to the kind of christian you are, or does it make a difference to the kind of tasks you perform? In the answer to this question lies in the difference between what we may call the conservative and the progressive attitude to the priesthood. It is not difficult to see that each of these attitudes corresponds to a general political outlook; the conservative is modelled on the status society of a feudal world, the progressive view is modelled on a functional democratic society. In the feudal society, or at least in the schematic picture of it, each man occupied a definite niche, he had a certain status, and part of the purpose of the state was to supply the instituionalised violence necessary to keep people in their proper niches. From the fact that you occupied a certain niche it followed that you had certain duties and certain rights. You did one of the jobs that were thought necessary to the maintenance of the society. It is one man's vocation to be a plumber and another's to be a soldier or a doctor. In a somewhat similar way, the conservative sees the church as containing a certain number of niches, laity, deacons, priests, bishops, etc., which are filled by people with vocations to belong to them; to be, let us say, a priest is to have a certain status in the community, from which follow certain duties--saying mass, visiting the sick, directing people's moral life and so on, and also certain rights and privileges. The basic principle of the status-society is that a man has certain things to do because he has a certain status.