Michael W. Higgins is the distinguished professor of Catholic thought at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn.
Pope Francis talks to children during a meeting with Catholic priests and other Christian representatives in the cathedral of the capital, Rabat, Morocco, Sunday, March 31, 2019.The Associated Press
Although the Roman Catholic priesthood appears to be in an endless state of turmoil – diminishing numbers in some traditionally Catholic countries, allegations and indictments over sex abuse and plummeting social respectability – there is light at the end of the dark tunnel.
Today marks the beginning of the high holy days of the Catholic calendar – the Triduum – with Maundy Thursday traditionally celebrated as the moment when Jesus instituted the priesthood at the Last Supper.
There is an existential, indeed visceral, polarization in Catholicism – specifically in Europe and North America – between an understanding of priesthood rooted in the insights and teachings of the Second Vatican Council and a restorationist perspective that looks to traditional views of priesthood as a way out of our spiritual malaise.
And this polarization, arguably introduced by Pope John Paul II with his highly romanticized view of the priest as heroic warrior, is intensifying under Pope Francis – not because he subscribes to such an arcane view, but precisely because he wants to move beyond it.
I gave a lecture recently at a university chaplaincy and cultural centre in New York State and heard from the priest in charge, as well as from his well-educated congregation, that their bishop, fairly new to the diocese, revamped his local curia by replacing seasoned priests with new bucks keen on burnishing their cufflinks, undermining the collegial structures in place, ignoring important political and social networks outside the Catholic orbit and spending most of their time outside the diocese. This story is not unique; narratives of its replication abound.
In one sense, it is political: Francis-appointed bishops facing off against those appointed by the two previous pontiffs; but in another sense, it is more ecclesiological.
When you look at the cultural image of the priest – especially as mediated in film – you can see a paradigmatic shift of staggering proportions. Karl Malden’s social-justice crusader in On the Waterfront, Bing Crosby’s crooner in Going My Way and Gregory Peck’s valiant missionary in The Keys of the Kingdom all function within a conception of the priest as a figure set apart. But in such contemporary dramatizations as Sean Bean’s anguished parish priest in Broken, Brendan Gleeson’s priest as reluctant sacrifice in Calvary and Linus Roache’s conflicted gay clergyman in Priest, you discover a different conception of the priest as an imperfect vessel, like the rest of us.
In other words, we have moved from a vertical view of the priest to a horizontal one: from an exalted status to a shared one. We are all the walking wounded.
This is not to argue for a diminished role for the priest in Catholic life, but rather for a more deeply realistic and enhanced one. The static notion of the priesthood, with its muddied thinking around ontological differentiation and its increasingly desperate effort to recover a lost mystique encased in a ruinous nostalgia, must be replaced by a more fluid notion of priestly identity that rises out of its clerical entombment.
I believe we have a model for such a priesthood in the life of the late priest-psychologist Rev. Henri Nouwen (1932-1996). We see this in his ministry to countless thousands of students as a professor at Notre Dame, Yale, Harvard, Boston College and Regis College at the Toronto School of Theology. It’s also in his letters to numerous correspondents who were moved by his many books to write to him, and in his care for his L’Arche community in Richmond Hill, Ont., in the last decade of his life. Father Nouwen demonstrated a priestly ministry of connection, affective intimacy and spiritual interiority that spoke to his maturity as a struggling human being and, therefore, as an authentic priest.
Father Nouwen saw his priesthood not as an exotic species right out of Central Casting, wherein all ultimate spiritual authority is resident, but rather as a ministry grounded in his being a spiritual teacher, a sacramental friend, an anam cara or soul companion, as the Celts would say.
To that end, he was a conduit for that which the Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney called the “right to joy … that radiance of Catholicism [which creates] a tremendous sense of being, of the dimensions of reality, the shimmering edges of things … the benediction of it all.”
If that isn’t priestly, I don’t know what is. There is a light at the end of the dark tunnel if we but look in the right direction.