A PRIEST FOREVER?
Greeley, Andrew
A PRIEST FOREVER? The case for term limits Andrew Greeley W hen I was in the seminary in the early fifties (yes, Virginia, there was a time before 1960), the rector kept us busy during the...
...Who besides a bishop can claim to know the mind of God...
...ilt rintrr1...
...But the average priest lived at best twelve years after ordination...
...only ten or five—as it once did...
...Now they force them to bow down laying a gun on a back and leaning, or raising a pair of hands manacled behind a back, so pain creates obeisance...
...The case for term limits Andrew Greeley W hen I was in the seminary in the early fifties (yes, Virginia, there was a time before 1960), the rector kept us busy during the long, dark winters compiling a necrology of the deceased priests of the Archdiocese of Chicago...
...Tuberculosis and pneumonia carried away many of the young...
...Let's admit, for the sake of the argument, that an ordained man is a priest forever...
...I suspect that we could attract many more young men to the priesthood with the offer of a limited (renewable) term of service, and that most of them would find the life satisfying—if exhausting...
...Who could say that God does not give some men (and women) time-bound vocations...
...Karen Swenson In fact, it would appear that it does not...
...If the church is doing anything to help the married laity struggle through those four-times-as-many spiritual challenges to reconciliation, it is not evident...
...I've heard it argued that it shouldn't be easier for a priest to leave the active ministry than it is for laypeople to end their marriages...
...Some priests contend that this is a compromise solution rather than a radical abolition of compulsory celibacy—a solution about which they sign petitions (cheap grace, it has always seemed to me) and for which they vigorously campaign...
...To which I reply that forever is much longer when it is sixty years than when it is fifteen...
...I have never been able to understand why this seems so absurd to church leaders...
...As my colleague Teresa Sullivan remarked, "A marriage that lasts four times as long as it would have not so long ago requires more than four times as many reconciliations...
...A white van, whose important passenger wears khaki and gold braid, is followed by a motorcycle phalanx with more braid in sidecars...
...I am suggesting that the establishment of the possibility of a limited term of service in the priesthood makes a virtue of necessity (see my Priests: A Calling in Crisis, University of Chicago Press...
...We might not have to settle for the biretta-and-cassock crowd we are now attracting who think they can find a sacred identity in the priesthood (which wasn't to be had even fifty years ago when I washed up in a parish...
...Our theory—theological, spiritual, pastoral—has yet to catch up...
...The process is often cruel and humiliating...
...More to the point, my research evidence shows that priests are, on average, the happiest men in the country: happier about their lives and their work than doctors, lawyers, teachers, university professors, and even married Protestant clergy...
...Finally the cause of this parade in the beds of two baby-blue Chinese trucks—in each, ten men, Tibetans, are accompanied by Chinese soldiers...
...Still, it is bootless to argue with theologians, especially when they wear purple or crimson...
...We knew a few priests who had died young in the days before antibiotics became routine, not very long before the period of our "research...
...In an era of greatly increased life expectancy, such a modification of policy is not only for the benefit of the man departing the ministry but also for the people he might otherwise be forced to serve...
...Or if the constant and often seemingly unreasonable demands of those who pound on the rectory door or hassle him on the phone deprive him of his patience, sense of humor, and kindness, and make him a churlish, unpleasant person, it may be that he ought not to try to interact with people as much...
...When a man has served his term, we permit him, if he wishes, to go forth with our gratitude and blessing—and in the case of some, perhaps with a sigh of relief...
...Nowadays, many couples live to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary, and some of us priests live that long too...
...The hard-line anticelibacy ideology and the equally hard-line priest-forever ideology won't permit it...
...These, in ironed uniforms, stand, close as Saturday night dates, beside their captives—they'll execute them at the gutted temple outside town...
...I will not take them seriously until they have read Jackson Carroll's work on this subject for his Duke Divinity School research project...
...Even a lowly sociologist knows well enough what bad theology that is...
...Marriage is a commitment to another person...
...11 r htlZ n"i ;r c'n UM...
...One is a priest forever...
...We now permit priests to leave the active ministry and remain (or become again) good Catholics, albeit "reduced to the lay state"—as infelicitous a phrase as the canonists have ever devised...
...I've concluded that it may well imply a change in expectations about how long a man may serve in the ministry...
...Yet for those few priests who still try to recruit young vocations, would it not be helpful to say, "Try it...
...As recently as the 1920s, 5 percent of women died in child-birth...
...Ah, says my purple-buttoned interrogator, But the priesthood is a marriage to Jesus...
...In the present restorationist situation in the church, many leaders are satisfied with the middle-aged vocation with a biretta on his head, an ample cassock, and a conviction that he must teach the laity to obey him...
...Instead of thanking a man for the years he has generously given and wishing him well in his new ventures, we force him to debase him-self...
...I understand that there is not a chance in the world of this happening...
...Malnutrition seriously affected children growing up in the years between the wars, my generation...
...One not forced to bow has eyes spent as empty cartridges—the world has disappeared...
...The answer, I would later surmise, was that priests (and nuns) were swept away in the smallpox and typhoid epidemics of the late nineteenth century, and perhaps by the so-called Spanish influenza...
...Last glimpse of gold braid gone in a white car, we gawkers at death and danger, queasy with blood we've almost seen, go off to lunch...
...Beijing Street—conqueror's renaming—is, except for two policemen cramming rickshaws with ruffled canopies into an alley, empty for a breath before it's filled by a siren's inexorable howl...
...It is hard to see any Christian charity in this gratuitous punishment...
...A lifetime of celibacy can be daunting when it promises to stretch out for fifty years...
...Thus, if a priest can cope with large numbers of teenagers after he is forty, he either is the subject of a miracle of grace or a little strange...
...We found that hard to believe...
...I have been told that the notion of a limited-term vocation is theologically unsound...
...In this era when volunteering has become so popular, what would be wrong in inviting a young man to volunteer to be a priest for five years (or ten), renewable, so he could find out if he liked the work—with no obligation to remain in the active ministry if he did not like it...
...Does it follow that he must engage in the active ministry forever...
...Later, I would learn from demographic historians, that for most of human history, marriages would last on average about the same number of years before one of the partners died...
...You'll like it...
...The biggest single change in the human condition, far more important than the impact of automobiles, TVs, jets, computers, and the Internet, is a much longer life span...
...priesthood is a commitment to a role in the church...
...Lhasa lives inside a jaw snaggled with the broken teeth of mountains...
...Why oh why do we want to force such a person to remain in the active ministry under pain of humiliation...
...Clergy, not to say members of the hierarchy, seem to have a hard time realizing that this new longevity may constitute the most critical spiritual problem of our time (along with obesity...
...None of these enthusiasts shows any sign they are aware of the problems of marriage and family life among the Protestant clergy...
...I have often wondered what the implications of this pervasive transformation of life expectancy means for the priesthood...
...How could this be...
...I ll(1 u.'" BALOO Commonweal 19 July 16, 2004 The Voyeurs It's noon...
...A miserably unhappy priest is not an asset for his people or a good sacrament for the church...
...Commonweal 20 July 16, 2004...
...If we accept the notion of a limited-term vocation we might keep open the possibility of asking the man to help out on certain occasions, or even permit him to return to ministry at some future date, in both cases with honor and dignity...
...I wonder who said so...
...Another, with a ripple of smile, looks out, wolf-eyes ravening the mountains' rock...
...One of the findings of this clumsy study was that the average age of death of priests in the archdiocese had been thirty-six years old...
...much less so when it may last The Reverend Andrew Greeley marked his fiftieth anniversary as a priest on May 5. He is the author of The Catholic Revolution: New Wine in Old Wine Skins (University of California Press) and the novel, The Priestly Sins (Tor...
...If you don't want to join the Peace Corps, then give the priest corps a try...
...Or if a man in his forties finds the celibate calling intolerably lonely and wants a wife and family of his own, perhaps his vocation was only a limited one—for a certain number of years and not for life...
Vol. 131 • July 2004 • No. 13
