Evolving priestly ministry

Sep 16, 2016

By Eric Hodgens
Church ministry is changing. The laity is replacing clergy partly because it is necessary; partly because it is right.

In Asia, Africa and Latin America — the front line in community building, catechising and liturgy development were in the hands of the laity; this has been the case for a long time.

In the West, many parishes’ secretary/managers are running parish bureaucracy. Pastoral workers are coordinating sacramental preparation, liturgy planning, liturgical music, discussion programmes, prayer groups and visiting of the sick. They are also the ones developing new forms of outreach.

Catholic education is a vast, lay enterprise in many instances.

Hospitals, prisons, schools, colleges and universities have lay chaplains who are more specifically trained for the task than the priests they have replaced.

Catholic tertiary institutions are producing graduates in theology, scripture, church history, church music and liturgy.

Planning liturgy calls for specialist sub-groups such as music, liturgy design, liturgical art and environment, celebrant training and sacramental candidate preparation. Leaders of these groups are getting specialist training more than seminarians are.

The role of the priest has changed. Once he did all the ministering; hopefully now he leads and coordinates it – sometimes well, sometimes badly. And all this started long before Vatican II with lay movements such as the Young Christian Workers (YCW). It grew and changed over the years of Vatican II and in the 50 years since.

Since the mid-1970s, this trend has been reinforced by the steady drop in the number of available priests. Bishops have tried to redress the problem in the West by importing overseas priests. This strategy has largely failed.

More to the point, language is central to leading liturgy and preaching. Sensitivity to local culture is central to effective pastoral care. Unfamiliarity with these is a hindrance.

Seminary training has in recent times been heavy on questionable fields of study and certainly light on praxis. Studies weighted towards doctrine and morals and lighter on history and scripture need re-balancing. Pastoral practice needs to be taught and evaluated by extended on-the-job training.

As with many venerable institutions in the Church, the seminaries are struggling to keep up. And that is so quite apart from the shallowing of talent due to a drought of recruitment. Clericalism, which was central to the old seminary system, is self-defeating.

There are four characteristics of institutions I would highlight:

-- All institutions evolve;
-- Practice precedes the formulation of structures and the codification of rules;
-- Factions form and contend — dominate and decline;
-- Power, once gained, yields only under pressure.

This applies to the Church, too. Theology explains, but does not create, practice. You have to be careful using old theology to oppose newly developing praxis. Today’s bioethics debates illustrate this problem.

The Jesus movement evolved into variously structured communities; then to a fully-fledged Church; then, under Constantine, to an established arm of the state. Its originally loosely structured organisation evolved to synagogue-like presbyteral leadership and then to one-man episcopal control. The bishop became sole ruler and the celebrant-in-chief of its liturgy — for life.

Scholastic sacramental theology developed a rationalisation of this praxis. It asserted that ordination caused an intrinsic change — an ontological change — in the recipient, setting him apart from the rest of the Church’s membership. Later the imposition of celibacy as a pre-requisite for ordination in the Roman Rite reinforced the exclusiveness of the clergy.

These were all evolutionary changes with the objective of reenforcing the power of the clergy.

Will this exclusivism succeed? --Global Pulse