Wrestling

 

Most of the Catholic world, much less the remainder, is unaware of Mother Theresa’s every day grappling with her God.  She seemed to resolve the issue by activity, as a hurricane does, only doing mass reconstruction to the lattitudes and longtitudes where she struck.   

  

I attended a party Thursday evening with maybe 80 people where I did not know more than one or two people.  But in the course of the time I spent I met a classmate of one of my uncle’s.  Most of the crowd seemed well over 70-years-old.  There were at least 3 priests in attendence, at an age of 75-years.  I saw name tags of at least 3 others who did not show.

     

I met one guy who left the seminary the night before his ordination.  I spoke to a married priest whose public ministry was over after the age of 70.  And I spoke to one active  priest who made a comment about his own classmates, or people who he knew quite well from the seminary who had married. 

      

In 1960 ther were 53,796 priests who served 42 million Catholics.  Today the 66 million Catholics have 43,000 priests.   And most of them seem well over 60-years-old.  And you thought you were overworked when the company cut back and the work load remained the same.  The average priest at well over 60-years-old had ten times as many parishioners as the average Protestant pastor.  It was a lot harder to rescue that one lost sheep as the flock increased.  There were a lot of Catholic who discuss the issue of diminshing priests as if this was just another matter for talk radio, like public policy, bailouts, TARP, budget cuts.  If you knew any priests, you knew it was not just another issue.  The average priest in the U .S. was close to 65 years old.  When the  work load got too heavy, the normal response was to retire gracefully.  The greater response in love was service.  These older priest had served. 

 

The issue, the crisis, was about real people.  The central meaning of what human life was about was not the body but the soul.    

   

Since 1960, twenty thousand priests have left the active priesthood.  A priest I met yesterday said that the numbers reflect the challenge every young person of that age has in relationships.  “Just look at the statistics on divorce.”  What he knew from being in the seminary was that most priest were normal.  That was the beauty.  The story of priesthood in the last decade, in his case the last 2 generations, was not about sexual abuse.  It really was about how faithful the majority had always been.  To the rules.  The beauty had been in the humility to the rules.  Or you left. 

 

For the people who felt this was the most important aspect of their lives, the prohibition on all forms of sexual activity for single people, in all the lattitudes and longtitudes where the Roman Catholic Church struck, in mandated singleness for priests, was the challenge.  What does a 26-year-old really know, on the eve of ordination, on the eve of a wedding, about life or himself?  In a world where there were hurricanes each year?  At some point, a man realizes the basic human condition was loneliness.  A woman seems to discover that much sooner in life.   Why would God add this burden of loneliness as mandatory to any career?  That burden had never been mandatory in the first millennium. 

         

I knew one former priest quite well.  And since he left, he has done so many great things.  He told me last year of his own struggles.  He still believes in God.  He was just having trouble in his own life believing in Jesus.  That a human could come to earth and do all that was mentioned in the stories.  Or so he said.  I just listened.  I thought as he told his stories, if he really analyzed his life, he was angry at his God who had not allowed him to continue to do what he had loved to do all along.  If left on his own, he told me in confidence, he would not attend Mass.  He went because his wife did and she loved to go.  What I really heard him say was that being in church for him was like being a tycoon in a poor farm.  Since he told other stories about preaching once in a synogogue before Vatican II, it seemed to sound like a punishment to someone who had his fortune stolen by the rules which seemed so unfair.   He had been more than good at what he did. 

         

A man with a fire.  Just struggling himself these days where to share the warmth.  There were a lot of people at war with a God they believed in.  What to do with belief?  To give life meaning, a purpose beyond the mundane?  Meant to do great things.  Born with a personality that attracted a crowd.  A golden voice.  And a vision to go with it.  What these guys had done in their lifetime to spread the faith.  To create something here.  It is said that the religious do not burn out like health care professional, based on surveys.  At least it had been true in the past. 

          

Low morale is a major concern in the restructuring of an organization.  When workers, great workers, were asked to do more work.  With no increased pay.  A lot of people have heart attacks from stress, from being asked to more than the human body can manage.  As parishes have shrunk in numbers, the number of parishioners has grown.  Maybe in Rome the growing Catholic population is taken as a human sign of good management.   Ah, this business side of religion

            

To discuss a declining numbers of priests is to consider Detroit to be a thriving metropolitan area, even when population has fallen something like 50 percent in the last 50 years.  There is no decline in priests.  Recently.  The world had changed.  And there is a drought.  A long ongoing drought.  In the political world, leaders were expected to address hunger.  Does anyone ever judge the management of the institution church?  In the world of Wall Street, when numbers grew, you opened new stores.  You did not consolidate churches except in bad times.  These were bad times?  Ask the overworked priest.  Less and less priest ministered to individual real people.  When was the last priest invited over for dinner?  Don’t ask.  Most did not have time.   What they really needed was a union.  But compared to Europe, with their stable or really flat Catholic population, there was no priest shortage in North America.

   

While the Vatican was on a witch hunt for homosexual priests, the pool continued to be drained as to who was eligible in the first place.  Because the archbishops could not police their own force?  Most bishops had come from afar and did not know the local priests.  There were no real relationships.  Collegiality was never a reality.   And the pope had appointed the board of directors.  Who was gonna criticize him.  It was not Pope Benedict.  It was what just had happened in ivy towers.  But has he been away from Germany too long to see the real world?  In a sense, maybe the current pope, his predecessor, did not just recognize the nature of evil.

         

Why was celibacy not optional?  Was it really for a boss to tell his employee if he could be married?  No where else on earth did this happen.  Do only local priests see the need for reform?  Read the stories from Milwukee.  The Sunday Catholic sure did not have a vote on the matter.  (See http://www.milwalliance.org/pdf/NFPCThisWeek.pdf)

 

Where the greatest sin of the management of the church of John Paul II was the failure to respond to sexual abuse by priest, at a humonguous financial cost to funds which should have gone to corporal works of mercy, or to educate the next generation in what is a very academic religion, little attention week in and week out is addressed to this priesthood issue in the changing world.  Dysfunctional organizations that do not engage in open discussion with its own family, which work from positions of power and authority, rupture.  And the local parish priest can gain nothing by talking about this priesthood issue to lay people.   There was a pain in the eye of the man I recently mentioned this too, with nothing to gain to discuss it.  This priesthood issue.  There was a lot more to a fulfilling life than to complain, even when your entire life was about ministry and action about things that did not look right.   

       

The beauty was in the humility of these guys who were 75.  Their response.  To the world.  They grew up in the Great Depression.  They never expected another one.  A lot like the War to End All War.  It was never called World War I until sometime after 1940.  Now another generation was growing up as Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation had.  Neither generation ever knew the effect a great depression would have at the time.  Economic downturns had a way of teaching humility. 

         

I have one friend with two sons who grew up in the storm in the news from Boston, from Philadelphia, about abuse within the church.  He said his sons want absolutely nothing to do with the church.  This friend sent both sons to the Catholic high school that we attended.  For people who felt Catholicism was the most important aspect of their lives, the response of his sons in this case was more than disheartening.   I doubt they have heard these individual stories in the Curia.  The SNAP people seemed to have the enmity that is found in war.  But the Curia has focused on other issues, like changing the language of the Mass in the near future, ignorant of what has transpired in individual families in the United States, in Canada, in Ireland, in the English speaking Catholic world among young people about 20.  Maybe they should instal turnstiles and count the numbers who are attending Mass. 

    

Families that do not engage in true discussion are dysfunctional.  Each member goes its own way.  And so it goes with institutions.  Fewer people see the humanity of the priest personally.  And many times their humanity is what had inspired others.  It was why people joined Mother Theresa’s order in great number.  

 

With all the focus on right to life issues, no one dares ask about the right to spiritual life of the next generation.  It was the “why” question.  And either in ignorance or indifference, to see the world spiritual hunger, Catholic or non-Catholic, church leadership did not seem to care to address the “why” question.  The popes in the past never had to.  And the numbers kept increasing.  And either in ignorance or indifference, to see the world spiritual hunger, with temporal restraints on ministry as to who can minister, is to see a failure in leadership which will contine to affect the spiritual growth of the Roman Catholic Church.   Humans break down where over loaded.  And the church had lost some of its agility as a result of its aging priesthood.     

 

The pastor at the cathedral down the street sure is not going to address the “why” question.  Nor is going to mention this problem to his boss.  Like so many in positions of power, he went to the right schools.  Spend some time at Gregorian University, the pontifical university, and your future looked as secure as an investment banker on Wall Street.  Or did.  Look at those Curricula Vitae of the latest archbishop.   When you go to school in Rome, you tend to lose contact  with families back home, with the real English-speaking Catholic world. 

 

Obviously there is a struggle of those bishops, all bishop,  when they returned from Rome to teach moral issues to Catholics, much less to the rest of the world caught up in moral relativism.  With all the focus on right to life issues, no one dares ask about the right to spiritual life of the next generation.  

 

I was at this party because I knew one man who had helped to found a college in another land.  What would happen when the Greatest Generation was gone?  Who would continue to maintain what he and a woman and one other classmate had started?  At Jesuit universities the discussion was about maintaing a Jesuit identity which included every aspect of what it meant to be Roman Catholic.  The religious world is cognizant of what has happened over 200 years to Ivy League schools, to hospitals with religious affiliation.  There once was a Jewish hospital in my city because Jewish physicians could not get credentials to operate at other hospitals in town.  Certainly the last 7 years have taught that man’s inhumanity to man was an ongoing never ending struggle.  There had been a reason that a religious identity was found in institutions.  Care-giving institutions.  The places that motivated men and women, beyond money.  The struggle now was to find leaders who care about the care-givers. 

   

One of the bigger changes in the world of media, in elections, was the need for money.  A lot of people have been educated on how to raise money.  People in development and institutional advancement now made big money themselves.  Yet in the ever changing world, the leaders of institutions have never had less human contact.  Religious institutions too.  Along the way, the people who promoted themselves as leaders seemed to be a less affable.  The current president has lost all signs of humanity.  In a bipartisan way, let me say that this was why I could not for vote for Hillary Clinton.  It was as if leaders could be as mechanical as the CEOs that funded these campaigns and they did not have to be liked.  And it was as if local bishops, in their quest for power, were indifferent to the increase stress in the life of a priest.     

  

Did we have to wait for leaders who grew up in a church after Vatican II to come to grips with real time?  In a continent beyond Rome?  Where the issue was not perfect grammar of English to match the Latin, the Italian.  Did we have to wait for an overworked priest to be elected pope?

 

The beauty of John Paul II was that he had not spent a career in the Curia.  He should have been in touch with the real world beyond kairos time.  By distancing itself from the real world, the hierarchy has abandoned the hungry.  Or the message was “we will show you what spiritual hunger really is.”  Until your kids start doing what I did.  Unitl present day suffering reached a level of previous suffering. 

 

These days the pope seems a lot like Mother Theresa or a lot like Jacob in his struggle in the night with God.  Dealing with the spiritual direction, but not just his own.  Leaders have to deal with the spiritual direction of their followers.  Where are we being led?  How many are in fact leaders who plan for the number of followers behind? 

 

Pope Benedict eventually will have to wrestle with this issue and find the papal wrestling trunks.  Soon.  Or we would all have an affliction for the remainder of time.  For the time being, he had not appeared in public to show his wrestling skills.  People who knew him in Germany suggest he will surprise a few people.  He just never liked to make the spectacular entrance.