A world without priests
I find it difficult to talk about the topic of priesthood in the context of our world – broken between the dying modernity and the birth of its child: nothingness – because it is overwhelming in its importance. The insignificant priest that prays, reads, services the Holly Mass, this creature of God that appears so elusive to the eyes of our radically secular, nay – atheistic, culture is in fact the pillar of our world.
This appears as a gross and unjust exaggeration, but it is often the case that what is true appears perplexing: God exists, and yet He hides Himself so well; Creation happened in six days, but we can trace the light back billions of years; man is more than an animal, and yet he is related to the whole of feral nature. The truth is often in plain sight, hiding from us, at least from our eyes, even from our thoughts. It speaks however in a unique voice to our hearts: yes, there is a Good; indeed, the Creation happened supra-naturally (for otherwise how can we explain the ever present feeling of homesickness when we are in our homes?); and of course man is not a beast, just look in his eyes and see his tormented soul whispering to you – “brother”, “sister”.
So it is too in the case of the priest: his role is at first invisible, then ignored, and finally denied its importance. It was not always so. This perspective on the office of priesthood, a view which extends itself to the monastic way of life as well, has become progressively popular across the Western nations since the Renaissance (when humanism began to grow outside Christian thought, thus becoming increasingly centred on man at the exclusion of God) and the Reformation (when instead of reforming the Church, man broke it further for the same reasons for why it accused Her clergy – power, power, power), gaining significant momentum during the 18th century of the Enlightenment and throughout the 19th century of Revolutions, before collapsing into its complete form of beastly atheism in form of the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Before then, scepticism, even mockery of priests and of the Christian faith in general was subtle, or at least polite. During the 19th century, the ideas of today’s default position towards priests were formed. Nietzsche, Marx, Comte, are some of the names from that time which were followed by many during the 20th century, culminating with the most recent circle of public intellectuals who attack God, His Church, and those who serve Him: the new atheists.
The result of nearly five hundred years of growing atheistic sentiment and thinking, which oscillated between vile hatred and open hostility (e.g. the national socialist and communist regimes of the last century) to blasphemous mockery (e.g. Nietzsche’s thinking and many of today’s entertainment productions) and cheap polemics (e.g. the new atheists’ arguments), the result of all of this is that the role of the priest – the pillar of our world – has been rendered suspicious, silly, useless, even dangerous. But this is all a grave mistake: the priest appears to be doing nothing (and indeed, in our atheistic culture, prayer and serving God is doing nothing) when he does all that is essential so that the world itself may do nothing.
Culture is the result of the way we live as individuals and as a collective. More specifically, the values which underpin our thoughts and actions, and the ideals towards which we direct our hearts, minds, and hands create culture. Culture however has many tangible things – it is not merely an abstraction, a ghost that changes from century to century until it fades away into an invisible mist. If culture was only intangible, we couldn’t speak of past peoples or we couldn’t learn anything about them: culture is thus also made of art, literature, and architecture: paintings and songs reflect the inner mood that dominates a few decades or maybe a few centuries but these creations puncture time (perhaps) permanently, leaving a mark for all ages. This is why we can speak of artistic currents or movements that belong to certain centuries – but they speak to us, here, too; traversing space-time through art, literature, and architecture we enter in contact with the general views and believes of peoples who lived in the past and they communicate with us in the future.
Therefore, culture is the result of today’s dominant way of life which leaves a very lasting print on time-space, and this cultural print is then a point of contact with the past and future generations. What will we leave behind then? Architecturally, we live behind devastating ugliness: this is the trademark of our age – horrible, in-human, profanely shaped buildings in which the person is annihilated, and the faceless individual (this economic, political, biological, ideological asset) is produced. This ugliness comes from a public rejection of God; but a public rejection is nothing but the sum of the majority’s private rejections. Therefore, this ugliness reflects the general absence of man’s acknowledgement of God. Of course, there are beautiful buildings – but they are not the norm, and they are often religious in spirit, not secular. We often hear complaints that the houses of “the olden days” were more attractive to live in, that “nobody builds like this anymore”, referring to the old cathedrals and gardens. Huts and cabins are fetishised by an escapism that comes from man’s enslavement to the aesthetic of this age. Cement, glass towers, cubic apartment buildings, nauseating villas, giant boxes in which hordes of people enter to spend their seconds on plastic and poison, billboards, these are the architectural hallmarks of our culture, and they are all sinister.
Our art – again, that which is mainstream and therefore culturally representative – is not art at all. It expresses nothing at best and demonic tendencies at worst. Pain and suffering have been deprived of their glory, of their function to bring man closer to God and they are now abyssal, desperate, deathless. Most music is dumb and hyper-sexualised, or the harmony of sound is violated, thereby disturbing the soul of man yet again. Films are mostly the opposite of what they should be (a medium to bring man closer to God through an exercise in contemplation). Literature is non-existent: the bookstores are empty of contemporary literature. Even in fashion one can see that something is lacking, something vital is missing; the shapes and colours are standardised and thus unnatural, the world of man is pale, its energy is hectic or absent. Yes, something is missing from our culture: the presence of God.
Moreover, there are aspects of our culture which are not aesthetic in nature, but physically violent and hellish. For example, the prevalent indifference to human life as indicated by the staggering amount of abortions and, more recently, by assisted suicides (if the extremely high rate of unassisted suicide was not enough). There is also a good sense of fatalism mixed with hedonism – all rooted in the root of our culture: nihilism.
In the middle of all of this stands the priest. With all his weaknesses and sins, here is a man that is the true representative of the eternal counterculture: the man who chose, as much as he could, to serve the one whom the world rejects: God. In doing so, the priest reminds everyone of the real foundation of this world and of the healthy source for a way of life that liberates rather than enslaves. Therefore, an important role of the priest in our age is to remind us of God, by his mere presence.
The priest is a servant of God (first) and of the Church (second). By implication, he is (or should be) the centre of the community, becoming also a servant of the people (third). These roles are connected by the religious way of life. All people should live to some extent a religious life – but priests try to live it to a fuller extent. What fruits can result from their dedication to serving Christ and His Church?
Spiritual leadership – the main form of leadership the world needs today – is the result of a religious life. At Mass, the Gospel is read and preached (applied to today’s spiritual problems and needs). A priest does that. At confession, man after man and woman after woman repent and seek advice to vanquish sin going forward. A priest is there to hear the most painful wounds of the heart – and, through penance and advice, to help these wounds heal. Confession is almost unheard of in our culture: we don’t have to apologise for “who we are”, as humility and love of God are seen as oddities. But the priest is there to reignite these two important aspects in our lives. How fortunate we are that there are still brave men who answer the beautiful vocation of priesthood.
This great vocation is by its nature not narrow at all: it enables those who answer it, when they surrender to God’s grace, to yield fruits in all of their callings that are linked to their ministry: some are great thinkers, others are contemplatives, some are good administrators, others become excellent teachers and so on. A priest – and indeed, a monk or a nun – is not just that: his office enriches his entire personhood and, as a result, he becomes a focal point in the community. We have this civilisation, which we are now quickly burning away, because of the Church. In Her halls and monasteries, the Church produced important theologians, philosophers, scientists, artists, saints – who are the greatest ontologists and the true existentialists – and even politicians. For example, human rights – this concept that the human being is universally invaluable – is a Christian concept developed by the Church of Christ, bringing to man the only form of equality: that before God.
Without priests, we don’t have a civilisation that is humane. We can have totalitarianism, global slavery, technological dominance, and any sort of system in which man is a thing. No pagan religion places man in the same place as Christianity: as a central participant in God’s creation, above all other beings, as a child of God whom God calls home and to whom God provided the Way home through His sacrifice. But man becomes a thing when he inhibits or seeks to eradicate his primordial instinct of the heart to worship and pray. The priest is there to teach man how to worship God and how to pray to God. Because of this, the priest is there to help form a humane community: without prayer, there can be no humane communities.
The presence of the priest is the presence of silence, which invites solitude, which enables prayer, which calls on God. Without priests, we are scattered around strange altars. The priests, these servants of Christ, show us the right altar under the Cross. They lay the path for us, the path towards purity and tranquillity of the soul, towards the voice and wisdom of God. And they do so by being servants, not rulers. Our culture invites us to “take charge of our lives”, to become “whoever or whatever we want”, to do “whatever we feel like doing, to pursue our dreams” – the priest does none of this: his life is in the hands of God, he does what God wants him to do, he does not pursue his dreams but the will of God. Through obedience to God comes true and complete freedom.
What about the examples of sinful, false, or superficial priests? The heart of man is a mystery that God will reveal and judge. No unrepented sin will remain without justice from God. These men exist, for sure. Through them, the devil casts a dark shadow on the image of priesthood and of the Church – but only on the image, not on the real office of priesthood or the essence of the Church: Christ Himself.
When we find ourselves doubting the need for priests let’s remember people like Father Marie-Eugen of the Child Jesus. He was a priest, “a priest for eternity”, as he wrote. Let’s take such examples as the ground from which we form our understanding of priesthood, from such men who dedicate their lives to loving God and to serving the Church and their communities. A world without priests is not a humane world. Christ left the world for only two days and look at it! We need priests as we need oxygen and food.