"Re-connecting" the priest and the people

If one were to suggest that many priests today are isolated - from the world in general, and from their Catholic people - this might cause some surprise. After all, the aggiornomento of the Second Vatican Council has opened the Church to the world as never before. But, if you reflect on the position of the priest in your own parish, you might find that he is now rather less familiar to his people than in the past. The simple test is to ask yourself about the extent of your contact with the priest. Do you meet him only at Church on Sunday? Or do you still meet the priest in the school, at the youth group, at the SVP meeting, etc. I suspect that most people no longer have what might be called a "day-to-day" type of contact with the priest; he is isolated. The experience of participation in a Youth 2000 prayer festival or a FAITH Summer Session, to choose two examples among others, provides the counter example. In both of these situations the presence of priests (and religious) is very visible, present in a very "day-to-day" sort of way.

A section of Frank Duff’s article The Priest must have Members is entitled “When the Priest is Isolated”, and it opens in this way:

Moreover, in certain circumstances, in fact in very many places today, the priest is isolated. It is a very easy thing to elbow the priest out and to keep him out, and that is the first step in all these schemes of de-Catholicising places - to get the priest away from the people. There are whole populations where a priest can only enter by deputy.

Frank Duff goes on to comment on this being the case in the then-Communist regimes of the Iron Curtain countries and in China, where priests were persecuted. He continues:

That danger to religion is latent everywhere. Its symptom will always be that pushing aside of the priest. A consecrated class must guard itself against becoming a separated class. In many places the clergy have virtually become a separated class.[1]

I think we can see Frank Duff’s analysis extending here from those areas where the Church is explicitly persecuted to those areas where it is secularisation in society that is marginalising the priest. His remarks are therefore pertinent to the situation of the Church today.

There are three ways in which the priest can “re-connect” with the people. The first of these is through priests acting as chaplains in different professional contexts. Examples of such contexts are school chaplaincy, hospital chaplaincy, prison chaplaincy, chaplaincy at seaports and airports and commercial or industrial chaplaincy[2]. Each of these shares common features:

1) the priest must achieve a formation in and knowledge of the professional context in which he is engaged, and therefore a status among those engaged in that profession

2) in his chaplaincy work the priest is brought into close contact with people, who may or may not be Catholics

3) often the work of the chaplaincy will involve collaboration with lay people who support the work of the priest in the chaplaincy, so that the priest is part of a team and works closely with lay people.

The temptation, however, is to say that the priest has no part to play in this sort of chaplaincy work, and to reserve it only to the lay faithful. Sometimes the shortage of priests is the reason cited for this position. This, though it may be well intentioned, only contributes to the isolation of the clergy of which Frank Duff speaks and, in a contemporary terminology, constitutes a kind of “internal secularisation” within the activity of the Church.

The second way in which priests can “re-connect” with lay people is through membership or collaboration with what Canon Law terms an “association of Christ’s faithful”:

In the Church there are associations distinct from institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life; in these associations the Christian faithful, whether clerics, lay persons, or clerics and lay persons together, strive in a common endeavor to foster a more perfect life, to promote public worship or Christian doctrine, or to exercise other works of the apostolate such as initiatives of evangelization, works of piety or charity, and those which animate the temporal order with a Christian spirit.[3]

The characteristic features of this type of collaboration of priests with the lay faithful are:

1) the ministry and activity of the priest takes part in the charism and apostolate of the association; the priest is inserted into the activity undertaken by the lay faithful who are members of the institute and closely connected to them in that activity

2) the priest gains a formation from the association, in accord with its charism and the contribution that the priest might make to living that charism; that formation might be provided by the lay officers of the association

3) the priest might live a life that is close in style to that of the lay faithful who are also members of the association; there might also be a degree of common life between the priest and the lay faithful in the association, the priest thereby being in close contact with lay members of the association.

The third way is similar in type to the first, and consists in priests acting as “ecclesiastical assistants” (ie as spiritual directors or chaplains) to associations of the lay faithful[4]. Features of this type of collaboration are:

1) the priest has a responsibility for the formation and encouragement of the spiritual life of the members of the association

2) whilst the priest will act in accord with the particular charism and rule of the association, and have a sympathy with that charism and rule, he will not generally have received a formation from the association

3) the priest has a degree of responsibility for directing the work of the members of the association, thought the extent of this varies from association to association.

All three of these models have the effect of bringing the priest into a closer contact with - and collaboration with - lay people in carrying out the mission of the Church.

[1] Frank Duff The Priest must have Members.
[2] cf. Code of Canon Law (1983) cc.564-572. Some of these professional areas have ecclesial associations that have the type of chaplaincy as their mission. Port Chaplaincy, for example, is provided by the Apostleship of the Sea.
[3] Code of Canon Law (1983) c.298.
[4] cf Code of Canon Law (1983) cc.317 (with regard to public associations of the faithful) and 324 (with regard to private associations of the faithful). In the former case, the ecclesiastical assistant is appointed by the relevant ecclesiastical authority; in the latter, the association may choose an ecclesiastical assistant who is then subject to confirmation by the ordinary.