A mission to care for the clergy

A conference on the ongoing formation of priests - involving prayer, presentations, and small synod-style listening groups - is underway in the Vatican.

Feb 23, 2024

By Joseph Tulloch
Around a thousand individuals from sixty countries around the world have gathered in Rome for a conference on clerical formation. 

The conference on ongoing priest formation was held on February 6-10 with the theme Fan into a flame the gift of God that you possess (2 Tim 1:6). The beauty of being disciples today: a singular, integral, communitarian, and missionary formation”. The conference was organised by the Vatican’s Dicasteries for the Clergy, Evangelisation, and Eastern Churches.

Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik, Prefect of the Dicastery for the clergy, opened the conference by recalling the moment Pope Francis appointed him to his current role.

“On that day,” he said, “a bishop friend of mine told me: ‘Now you are responsible for ensuring that all the priests in the world are happy.’”

These, Cardinal Heung-sik said, are “words that I have never been able to forget, and that constantly accompany me in this service of mine.”

It was this remark, the Korean prelate said, that had led him to organize the conference.

Many priests today, he noted, are “tired and discouraged, caught off guard by the challenges of today's society and the burdens they carry.” Thus, he said, “the importance of providing priests with the necessary support and accompaniment, and thus the need for ongoing formation, has increasingly come to the forefront.”

“We said from the beginning of the preparations,” Cardinal Heung-sik told participants, “that you are not coming here simply to learn, but as builders and protagonists. Each and every one of you is an expert and brings experience.”

The Cardinal quoted the Italian priest and activist Fr Oreste Benzi, who once said: "There is no one so rich that they do not need to receive, no one so poor that they have nothing to give."

For this reason, Cardinal Heung-sik said, the conference would be following, “as much as possible, a workshop-style, participatory, and synodal approach.”

Formation for cultural intelligence
Cardinal Tagle, Prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation, which is co-sponsoring the conference, also offered a few words before proceedings got underway.

He stressed, firstly, that priests must not think that their formation ends once they have been ordained. Rather, he said, it is precisely “because we are ordained to the service of God and the Church, that we need to be continuously formed.”

Secondly, Cardinal Tagle said, priests need ongoing education to overcome the “tendency to absolutize and glorify one’s culture.” Ordained ministers, he said, must learn “the cultural intelligence to appreciate one’s culture” but also to “admit the brokenness of one’s culture” and “affirm the good elements in other cultures.”

Finally, noting that many priests are close to people who suffer, or are indeed greatly suffering themselves, Cardinal Tagle called for clerical formation that addresses “wounds and pains that could easily lead to vindictiveness, cynicism, and hatred.”

We need our priests and they need ongoing formation
Regina Lynch, executive president of the Pontifical Foundation Aid to the Church in Need, which sponsored the event noted that “today priestly service to the faithful is even more demanding.”

Speaking to Vatican News after the conference, Lynch said, “Service to the faithful has always been a challenge for priests. In today’s secularised Western world, it has become even more demanding. They have to face extreme conditions, huge distances, sometimes living in war situations, living in inner cities where there is so much demand on their time. I think it is easy for priests to end up having a burnout if they do not have the proper support.” “We need our priests, and they need to be in good shape, not just physically, but also mentally and spiritually. And this is where the ongoing formation of priests is extremely important,” she added.

The president of Aid to the Church in Need shared her opinion that the five-day conference gave the priests a chance to talk with other priests from all over the world about best practices. “The positive aspects of this is that they can learn what works from one another, but also share the challenges of being a priest today,” she said. /''Lynch underlined that there was “a great atmosphere” and added, “Now the priests will go back to their countries to be formators of ongoing formation for their fellow priests.”--Vatican News