On Clericalism

by Russell Shaw

5/06/08

Display Full Article/Printer Friendly | Send to a Friend Imagine a man who wakes up in the morning with a headache, fever, and chills. The symptoms persist and are there when he goes to bed that night. Next day, it's the same thing again -- headache, fever, chills. This continues day after day, week after week, over and over. Finally the poor man starts to think: "I guess this is how people always feel. I just have to live with it."   The Catholic Church is something like that man. In the Church, the illness is called clericalism. We Catholics have suffered from it so long that most of us take it for granted. In fact, we're clericalists ourselves. "That's how it is," we say. And our symptoms persist.   They look like this: A pastor lords it over his people, consulting no one and habitually making unilateral decisions. His people are a passive, dispirited lot, quick to complain and slow to cooperate. A bishop routinely goes far beyond fundamental moral principles in talking about political issues. He advocates highly specific solutions to problems that admit of more than one legitimate view and makes no secret of his political partisanship. A carefully planned, highly touted diocesan vocations recruitment program aimed at attracting men to the priesthood turns out a flop. Its planners scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. Clericalism is operative in all these cases and many others. After all this time, you'd think people would have caught on and taken remedial steps. But even now, many haven't. "That's how it is," they say. And the symptoms persist.   But a cautionary note is in order upfront: There are real risks involved in criticizing clericalism.   One is the danger of giving aid and comfort to dissenters who want a revolution in the Church that will allow them to choose their own bishops and pastors and make other important decisions, up to and including decisions about doctrine. (If a teaching isn't "received," it's said -- that is, if people reject the teaching because it hampers their lifestyle or requires some sacrifice on their part -- then the teaching must be wrong.)   The American theologian Paul Lakeland contends that the "existential predicament" of the laity in today's Church is that "they are in chains." Lakeland writes in the framework of liberation theology, and what he says about the laity is an exercise in appallingly bad taste inasmuch as it likens the irritation of middle-class American Catholics to the plight of some of the poorest and most oppressed people on earth.   There's also a danger of devaluing priesthood and priests just when a clergy shortage leads some to look to supposed alternatives. A few months ago, the tiny Dutch province of the Dominicans issued a paper suggesting that in cases of need, a congregation could designate one of its lay members, man or woman as the case might be, to preside at the Eucharist.   The Dominican leadership in Rome moved to reprimand the Dutch. But this neo-congregationalism, which goes back to Rev. Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., and before him to the Protestant Reformation, could attract followers. Not only does it supply an answer, albeit an illusory one, to the priest shortage, it also opens the door to women priests -- or, more accurately, to women who want to act as if they were priests.   Against this background, those of us who speak of the evils of clericalism need to be careful not to undermine the dignity and sanctity of the ordained priesthood and obscure its radical, ontological difference from the baptismal priesthood of the faithful.   Clericalism, however, is not an affirmation of these sacred realities but a caricature. It fosters an ecclesiastical caste system in which clerics comprise the dominant elite, with lay people serving as a passive, inert mass of spear-carriers tasked with receiving clerical tutelage and doing what they're told. This upstairs-downstairs way of understanding relationships and roles in the Church extends even to the spiritual life: priests are called to be saints, lay people are called to satisfy the legalistic minimum of Christian life and scrape by into purgatory.   Even while absorbing these clericalist views, of course, the laity traditionally have entertained certain contrary perspectives. Think of the robust anticlericalism of Chaucer. Or consider a line in Edwin O'Connor's splendid pre-Vatican II novel The Edge of Sadness. "Probably in no other walk of life [besides the priesthood]," the priest-narrator remarks, "is a young man so often and so humbly approached by his elders and asked for his advice. Which, by the way, is almost always received gratefully and forgotten promptly."   So, where does Catholic clericalism come from?   At bottom, it comes from erroneous thinking about vocation. The fundamental, and profoundly mistaken, idea behind it does much to explain the apparent shortage of new vocations to the priesthood and religious life and the persistent failure of carefully planned programs to recruit them. (As I've remarked elsewhere, there's no shortage of vocations in the Catholic Church. What we have today is a shortage of vocational discernment, with accompanying disastrous results. But that's another story.)   The bad idea at the heart of clericalism equates "vocation" with "state in life." A state in life is a large, overall framework of commitment within which different people choose to live their Christians lives. State in life is one meaning of "vocation," but not the only one.   Starting from that mistake, bad thinking about vocation then makes the great leap of supposing that the only real vocation worthy of that name is the clerical state in life. Those whom God doesn't call to be priests (or, by extension, religious) -- the laity, that is -- may have a vocation in some weak, analogical sense, but they don't have the vocation that's the gold standard for everything else -- the vocation to be a priest. All other callings are evaluated by how well or poorly they approximate the clerical norm. Prev - Next >> Page 1 2 3