April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
To be a priest and not a manager
It has roots in a mantra I've heard constantly in the over 400 parishes I have visited in my last 12 years as an itinerant preacher: "I cannot wait to retire so I can be a priest again." One pastor who has a jail in his parish poignantly expressed it: "I went to the jail last Wednesday, the gates slammed shut behind me, I was locked in - and I cried. At last, I was free. All I had to be was a priest for the next few hours."
It is this consummate frustration in the hearts of so many such dedicated priests that I suggest is the 11th key factor. Such frustration is impossible to camouflage, and I believe discouragingly hits the hearts of young men.
How many young people would be attracted to a vocation as a physician if the near certitude was that they would spend most of their life worrying about the hospital parking, the garage roof, the clinic boiler and the nursing personnel, and only be able to exercise their medical skills for perhaps just a handful of patients in the course of a week?
How often do we hear people say: "Oh, don't bother the physician; he is too busy," when some, even minor, illness occurs? But it is almost an antiphon on the lips of people when it comes to priests and ailments of the spirit. Busy doing what? The answer is evident, and the lament from the hearts of priests - "for this I was ordained?" - need not be spoken to be heard.
When swamped with administrative responsibilities, the Apostles were wise enough to change the paradigm. I submit that it is time for us to imitate their wisdom in the arena of pastoring local communities.
Henri Nouwen, the late great Catholic writer, left one such example. At the "parish" of l'Arche Daybreak near Toronto, Canada, a community that includes people with physical and mental impairments, he was the pastor of spiritualities, and a layman, Nathan Ball, was the pastor of temporalities.
They worked together with a clear delineation of responsibilities and authority. Synagogues do the same. I have yet to meet a rabbi who was concerned with plowing the parking lot; that's the job of the synagogue president.
It has been over a century since the Church experienced the trauma of "lay trusteeism." It may be time to indeed learn from this experience, but discontinue throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The responsibility and authority - for responsibility without authority is a formula for disaster - over temporalities must be handed over.
Ideally, every local community should have a presbyteral spiritual leader. In the wake of reaping what we have sown, this is now becoming more and more problematic. But, until priests need not wish to retire or go to jail, efforts to attract the vocations needed to accomplish the ideal will have marginal success.
(Father Nahman served in the Albany Diocese as pastor in Schaghticoke, 1979-'88, and Johnsonville, 1992-'94, and as a member of the diocesan committees on Jewish-Catholic Dialogue and People with Developmental Disabilities.)
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