There is an important post at Rorate today. I’ve written on this topic also, but not for a while. It is critical that as many people review this and, if possible, get it in front of the eyes of bishops. Here’s an excerpt.
Abandoned Shepherds: Fear, Fatherhood, and the Crisis of Episcopal Support in the Contemporary Catholic Priesthood
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What, then, is the problem? The problem is that there exists, in too many dioceses and religious institutes, a significant gap between the framework the law provides and the lived reality that priests experience. The law speaks of brotherhood and fatherhood. Many priests experience managerialism and abandonment.
This gap is not, in most cases, the product of malice. It is the product of an institutional culture shaped by decades of crisis management; above all, by the catastrophe of clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up, which rightly demanded a radical change in how the Church handles allegations against clergy. The pendulum, however, has in many places swung so far that the presumption of innocence, the duty of pastoral support, and the obligation of canonical due process have been, in practice if not in law, subordinated to the imperatives of institutional self-protection and public relations management.
My canonical work has brought me into close contact with the process by which priests are reduced to the lay state. This is, in canonical terms, the most serious administrative, legal and penal consequence that can befall a priest: the loss of the clerical state, the permanent dissolution, in most cases, of all bonds of clerical obligation and privilege. It is, in the theological sense, a tragedy. Not necessarily a moral one; there are cases in which such a reduction is entirely just and necessary. But it remains always a tragedy, because it represents the end of what was meant to be a permanent configuration to Christ the Priest.
I have participated in such processes in cases where the necessity was clear: grave and persistent moral failure, incapacity for ministry, the abandonment of all priestly practice. In these cases, the reduction to the lay state, carried out according to the norms of Canon Law and the procedural requirements of the Dicastery for the Clergy, is an act of mercy for the priest himself and of justice for the People of God.
But I have also witnessed, with increasing frequency and increasing pain, the departure of priests who are not guilty of any grave moral failure. Young men, some of them with the oil of their ordination barely dry, who have quietly, without fanfare, sought and obtained laicisation not because they have sinned gravely, but because they have become disillusioned. And when I have had the opportunity to speak with them, what I have heard, again and again, is a version of the same story: “I was not supported… When I needed my bishop, he was not there… When I tried to do what I believed to be right, I was left to face the consequences alone… I cannot live like this for fifty years.” These are not men who lost their faith. They are, in many cases, men of genuine piety and pastoral zeal. They are men who were broken by institutional loneliness and by fear.
The Power of Fear
Now, the fear I am describing is not the salutary fear of the Lord, the timor Domini that is the beginning of wisdom. It is not the legitimate prudential caution that a wise priest exercises in navigating the complexities of pastoral life. It is something much more corrosive: a pervasive anxiety about institutional consequences that colours the exercise of priestly ministry at every level.
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