Pope Benedict challenges ‘miserable’ priests
Guest Commentary
By Msgr. David I. Fulton
The editors of the Enquirer and the Star must have been asleep at their desks. They missed a great potential headline: “Pope Calls Clergy Miserable Human Beings.” But these are the pope’s very words in his homily at the chrism Mass of April 13.
The context of these words, of course, clarifies their meaning. The context makes it clear that Pope Benedict isn’t calling priests — himself included — bad guys; but he certainly isn’t calling priests good-in-themselves guys. He is challenging priests, weak and sinful men, to the awareness that the capacity to stand upright before the Lord and to preside at the community’s worship is not the result of their gift to God, but the result of God’s gift to them. It is the result of God’s gift of himself to his community in the Lord Jesus’ life death and resurrection/ascension, whereby each member of the community — priests and non-priests — becomes his, and creation can return to the creator.
The meaning of miserable is important here as well. To be miserable does not mean to be a hopelessly disgusting moral slug. Derived from the Latin miserere, it describes a person who is in need of and capable of receiving pity or compassion. And the difference between pity and compassion is important here. One pities another who is regarded as an inferior; one has compassion on another who is regarded as somehow equal.
Calling priests miserable is strong language, but it is not entirely off the mark. We priests are certainly men in need of compassionate help. This is not only because of the debris of pride and sensuality that we (like the rest of the children of Adam) have left in our wake; it is not only because of our expectations to have front seats in our temples, places of honor at banquets, titles of respect in the marketplace; it is not only because we are overwhelmed and bewildered by the sacred power with which we have been entrusted and which we usually aren’t very good at using.
We priests are miserable, front-line, because we consider ourselves, front-line, to be priests. And this is a monumental mistake.
Go to a priest’s ordination or anniversary or funeral, and you will doubtless hear quotes from and comments on two verses from the Letter to the Hebrews: “For every high priest, being taken from among men, is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, that he may offer both gifts and sacrifices for sins” (5:1), and “You are a priest forever according to the Order of Melchizedek” (5:5). The first of these verses doesn’t refer to me and men like me. It refers to the priests of the Old Testament, not the new. It proposes the inadequacy (and thus the necessity of repetition) of sacrifices under the Old Law.
The second verse refers uniquely to Jesus the High Priest, and not to us “priests.” It maintains that there is but one priest, Jesus. The early Church acknowledged this, and avoided using the term “priest” to refer to fellows like me. The present pope acknowledges this, too. Although he uses the term “priesthood of the Church” and although he understands that he and I share in a “sacerdotium,” he also understands that he and I are not, front-line, priests: only Jesus is, front-line, a priest.
If I am not, front-line, to call myself a priest, then what am I? Pope Benedict offers a direction to answer this.
- I am a person whose hand is held by Jesus the compassionate One, offering me assurance in spite of the forces of sin and death that swirl around and within me.
- I am a person who is offered the hand friendship by Jesus; and being a friend of Jesus, the pope avers, lies at the core of what a “priest” is.
- I am a person who holds out my hand in compassion and in friendship (and not in pitying, grasping manipulation) to members of the Body of Christ, in grateful imitation of what the Lord Jesus has done for me.
- I am, above all, one who can speak and, in privileged moments, act not simply in the name of Jesus, but in the person of Jesus. Here’s how the Pope puts it: “The mystery of the priesthood of the Church lies in the fact that we miserable human beings, by virtue of the sacrament [of Orders] can speak with his ‘I’: in persona Christi. He wishes to exercise his priesthood through us.”
Pope Benedict’s encyclical, Deus caritas est, brought me back to the Comedia of Dante who speaks of the power of love that moves the sun and the other stars. Benedict’s chrism Mass homily has brought me to remember Heraclitean Fire by the priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who offers consolation to all Christians, particularly to us priests who strive to be Christians writ large. Here is how Hopkins concludes his poem:
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Msgr. Fulton is pastor of Our Lady of Victories Parish, Baptistown.
Editor’s note: The church celebrates the feast of the Sacred Heart on June 23. It is also the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests. The theme of this day of prayer is “I have called you friends” (Jn 15:15), concentrating on the mystery of friendship with Jesus Christ.
To commemorate this day, Bishop Paul G. Bootkoski encourages the priests and faithful of the diocese to re-read and to meditate upon Pope Benedict XVI’s chrism Mass homily delivered Holy Thursday. To read the pope’s homily, visit the website.
As we prepare for the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests, The Catholic Spirit wishes to express its appreciation, love and support for our priests. On June 23, at 3 p.m., we encourage everyone to stop what they are doing and spend a quiet moment praying in thanksgiving for our priests and contemplating the gift of priesthood.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law