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by Fr. Owen O’Sullivan
from The Furrow 54 (2003) no1,
pp. 37 - 42; republished here with the necessary permissions.
Owen O’Sullivan is an Irish Capuchin priest
based in Belfast. His address is 81 Lagmore Grove, Stewartstown Road, Belfast
BT17 OTD. E-mail owen.osullivan@btopenworld.com.
If asked what a priest does, or what he is for, most
laypeople would answer, I think, ‘He says Mass, gives people the
sacraments, and conducts funerals.’ Priesthood is identified in many minds
with what is only one aspect of it - the cultic. The kingly and the prophetic
aspects are not often seen, whether by laypeople or even by priests themselves,
as part of the picture. In the Bible, the prophets were people who
‘forth-told’ the present rather than foretold the future. But the
Church is seen by default as a ‘non-prophet’ organization.
PROPHECY IS RESPECTED
People are looking for prophecy; they recognize and
respect it when they find it. Here are a few examples from the contemporary
world: Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian
historian; T. S. Eliot, the American poet; Carlo Rubbia, the Italian director
of the European Centre for Nuclear Research, and winner of the 1992 Nobel prize
for physics; Nelson Mandela, the South African statesman and agent of
reconciliation; Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition to dictatorship
in Myanmar (Burma); Albert Einstein, German scientist and winner of the Nobel
prize for physics. In Ireland, too, there are laypeople who have taken on a
prophetic role and earned national respect. People like John Hume, Seamus
Mallon and Tom Hyland of the East Timor campaign come to mind.
There are also in Ireland priests who have exercised
a similar function, such as: Alec Reid and Denis Faul in the Northern Ireland
peace process; Aidan Troy in the Holy Cross Girls School controversy in
Ardoyne, Belfast; Bishop Willie Walsh regarding Travellers; the Franciscans in
Merchants’ Quay, Dublin, regarding the drug problem; Peter McVerry in
relation to the poor; the Vincentians in Dublin with refugees.
(It is worth mentioning in passing that while clergy
often see the media as anti-Church, priests who are prophetic, such as those
above, receive favourable attention in the media, and have helped rescue the
priesthood from sinking even lower in public esteem.)
What is noticeable about those just listed is that
they are prophetic more in action than in word. The term ‘prophet’
need not necessarily conjure up the image of a fiery orator, angrily, and
perhaps arrogantly, denouncing the evils of others. The work of truth and of
justice, which are at the heart of prophecy, can proceed quietly, even without
words.
But overall the proportion of priest-prophets is
small. By and large we do not come across as a prophetic body of men. Why have
we been so passive in the face of.the mishandling of the sex abuse problem by
bishops and religious superiors? Why are so few prophetic clerical voices - of
any denomination - heard on sectarianism in Northern Ireland, despite its human
cost of 3,500 killed, 30,000 injured and families and communities traumatized?
Why are so few engaged in action against sectarianism? Why are so few involved,
beyond token gestures, in ecumenism?
If people could say, ‘A priest will always speak
the truth, no matter what it costs’, that would be great, but could it be
said? Have we numbed ourselves into accepting the role of a safe pair of hands,
or of toeing the party line, or of not ruffling feathers, or of not making
risky career moves? Has fear so stultified our imagination that we no longer
even see the truth for ourselves, much less have the courage to speak it to
others?
People want priests to speak the truth, to drop the
ecclesiastical political correctness, the PR stances, the compromises, the
hiding behind structures whether bureaucratic or mental. People do not want
apparatchiks; they want priests to be men of courage, who stand and say what
they believe to be true.
UNTRUTH IN THE CHURCH
There is much untruth in the Church. There is
hypocrisy and humbug at all levels. There is pretended loyalty, outward
profession of the official line accompanied by inner denial; there is the
corrupting power of fear. Which is better: honest dissent or pretended assent?
We need priests (and people) who are honest. Truth is the bedrock of
credibility. Examples of those who tell the truth are Donal Dorr, in
‘Sexual Abuse and Spiritual Abuse’ (The Furrow, October 2000)
and Carry Wills, in his Papal Sins: Structures of Deceit (London: DLT,
2000). Wills’s ‘papal’ sins are all our sins, those of
intellectual dishonesty driven by fear.
‘If change is to come, it will come from the
margins ... it was the desert, not the temple, that gave us the prophets’
(Wendell Berry). That is a despairing comment on priests, the ministers of the
temple. Can things really be that bad? Are we prophetic leaders of a
faith-community or are we bureaucratic functionaries of an ecclesiastical
corporation? Prophets of Christ Incarnate or bureaucrats of Christianity
Incorporated? - to adapt the phrase of Aidan Matthews.
The prophet is one who is able to find meaning in a
world of confusion which many find meaningless. A prophet is the one who tells
- and does - the truth when all around are people who are telling, believing
and doing what is not true.
A prophet is one who has vision, perceptiveness and
awareness, who can see through lies, pretence and sham and we are surrounded by
such in the Church and in the world. The prophet has imagination when others
are dulled by routine or fixed patterns of thought. The prophet has honesty,
especially intellectual honesty, to face difficult questions with an open (not
an empty) mind, to be able to say, ‘I was wrong’ and make a fresh
start, to be able to stand apart, if that is what the truth calls him to do.
The prophet has the courage to look the truth in the face, recognize it for
what it is and call it by name, acknowledging that all truth is God’s
truth however it is mediated.
SPECIFICS
A basic question is this: are we priests of the
Catholic Church speaking and doing the truth? Do we believe what we say?
The truth around birth control: has Humanae
vitae been received by the Church? The available evidence suggests that
this question must be faced. I believe that those who say otherwise are engaged
in wishful thinking or are not being honest.
The truth about the ordination of women:
official statements imply that the matter is closed. Are we excluding the
possibility that the Holy Spirit might not have spoken the last word on the
topic?
The truth about clerical celibacy: this
question, and the previous one, touch the power-structures of the Church. The
arguments for change on celibacy seem to have won the intellectual battle and
are reinforced by the evidence on the ground. The insistence on maintaining the
present law is imploding the present model of Church. Yet the issue is fudged,
not faced. Why? Are we allowing the demands of the power-structures to have
priority over those of the Gospel?
The truth about beatification: is it not true
that the beatification of John XXIII and Pius IX was a political balancing act?
Pio Nono was beatified so as to keep on board those who regarded Vatican II,
Pope John’s council, as the fons et origo omnium malorum in the Church
since Pius XII. They didn’t want to see John XXIII beatified, so Pius IX
was beatified with him to keep them happy, even though some of his behaviour
was unchristian. Did Pius IX really live a life of heroic virtue, a model of
the Christian life for others to follow? Beatification says he did, and that is
playing games of ecclesiastical politics with the truth.
The truth about the sex abuse scandals: have
we heard the victims’ story? What does that story say to us about the
relationships of power that exist(ed?) between priests and people? We no longer
deny the fact of such scandals but we are still ignorant of their extent. Are
we still in denial about the responsibility for them, and about their
significance? How ironic that, while the Irish bishops met in Maynooth without
the presence of the victims’ representatives, the first reading of the
Mass of the fifth Sunday of Easter (28th April) should have been about the
setting up by the apostles of a commission of seven people, all drawn from the
victims’ community, to look into their particular grievance! Have we taken
on board the lessons to be learned, or are we still in the mould of
deny-delay-dissemble when we should have moved to
admit-accept-adjust?
The truth about the population explosion: the
world’s population is increasing at a rate of one and a half million a
week, that is, by the population of Germany each year. If the world had
followed Catholic teaching on family planning, it would be more, perhaps much
more. Can humane living conditions be provided for such rapid growth? Can a
planet of limited resources cope? Environmental writer Edward Abbey states,
‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’
Pope Paul VI recognized the reality of the population explosion in his first
encyclical, Ecclesiam suam (n. 15). The official voice of the Church
today seems to respond with a call to ‘increase and multiply’.
The truth about Christian anti-Semitism: we
effectively deny it by acknowledging that, yes, individual Catholics were
guilty of it, but not the Church as such. Is the history of World War II being
revised so as to exaggerate Catholic opposition to Hitler? Some in the Church
cast it in the role of victim in that period, by, for example, canonizing Edith
Stein, even though she was killed, not because she was Catholic by religion,
but because she was Jewish by race.
The truth in the Church’s internal
processes: for example, is it true to say, as a Church document does, that,
‘The laity plays an integral part in decision-making in the Catholic
Church’? I believe that statement is untrue. Did the people who made it
believe it to be true? If they know the Church as it is, it is hard to imagine
that they did, so why did they make it? And what of our obsessive secrecy and
exclusion of women?
The truth about the Church’s doctrine being
unchanging: consider, for example, the following teaching on slavery:
‘Servitude itself, considered in itself and absolutely, is by no means
repugnant to the natural and divine law, and there can be present very many
just titles for servitude, as can be seen by consulting the approved
theologians and intcrpreters of the canons ...’ (from Instruction no.
1293 of the Holy Office, (the predecessor to the CDF), in reply to
questions from the Vicar Apostolic among the Galla (of Ethiopia), on 20 June
1866).
The truth about condoms: AIDS killed 90,000
people in Zambia in 1999, almost all in the 15-49 age group; one-fifth of the
adult population there is HIV-positive. In Zimbabwe, 600 people die each week
from AIDS. In South Africa, about 4 million people are infected, about 20% of
the population. In Botswana it is 35%, Zimbabwe and Swaziland 25%, Lesotho 23%,
Namibia 20%, while Malawi, Mozambique and Kenya vary from 10 to 16%. In Africa
as a whole, on average, 5,500 funerals take place each day as a result of
AIDS.
The best way of preventing this problem is by
chastity before marriage and fidelity in it. Condoms do not provide what is
called ‘safe sex’. At best they make it safer, or, in the context of
an AIDS pandemic such as Southern Africa’s, less dangerous. Condoms could
also make sex more dangerous, if they have the effect of giving a user the
impression that, as long as he uses a condom, he has no danger to fear and can
happily be promiscuous. But, weighing up the balance of argument in a situation
such as the above where sex is freely sought and freely given, the use of
condoms is at least the lesser of two evils. It may be, in some cases, the more
responsible thing to do. But if one partner in a marriage is HIV positive and
the other is not, then I believe it would be morally wrong of the couple not to
use a condom. Are we losing the good for the sake of the better?
The official position is that the use of condoms is
always immoral. I wonder what later generations will think of that when they
read of the 5,500 people dying every day of AIDS in Africa alone. That’s
the equivalent of eighteen fully-laden jumbo jets crashing daily with no
survivors. It is almost the equivalent of two 11 Septembers daily. I think
those generations will wonder, not only about our sense of responsibility, or
our humanity, but even our sanity. They will wonder, too, about the silence of
those who disagreed with official teaching but said nothing.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Truthfulness is the bedrock of credibility. Our
credibility today is low. Is that because we are untruthful? Prophets speak the
truth whether or not people want to hear it. At their best they do so, not with
pride, not with posturing or with an agenda of self-aggrandisement, but with
humility, honesty and courage. And they do it more in action than in
words.
We are aware of the continued sharp decline in
vocations to the priesthood. Is this in part because the priest is seen as a
passive figure without a clearly-defined personal character, a Church
bureaucrat who goes through the motions without necessarily believing them?
Where priests are prophetic figures that is not the case. If priests are seen
as party loyalists more than real individuals, any call they make to the public
is not likely to meet with a hearing.
Jesus was closer to the prophet than to any other
Hebrew religious figure. He said, ‘The truth will make you free’
(John 8:32).
CONCLUSION
It seems to me that, in the Church, we have
subordinated truth to power-games.
We have politicized it.
We have put the
institution above the message it exists to serve.
We have put the
structures above the gospel.
We have allowed power-structures to become
self-serving rather than gospel- or people-serving.
We believe in
Churchianity more than in Christianity.
The Church has preempted the role of the Holy Spirit.
Although we say officially that the Church is a means to an end, what we do in
practice shows that we have made it (or at least the present model) an end in
itself. We have succumbed to the temptation that Jesus rejected in the desert,
the temptation to play the game of power and control instead of proclaiming the
truth. The result is demoralization and a loss of trust and credibility. People
no longer respect the Church or listen to it. Few wish to become priests. Are
we teaching and doing things which, not only others do not believe, but we do
not believe either? People listen to those who speak the truth. Have priests
the courage to do that?
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