2009- The Year the Priesthood Makes a Solid Comeback!

Pope plans 'Year for Priests' to restore clear sense of priestly mission
June 12, 2009

In proclaiming a special Year for Priests, Pope Benedict XVI has the goal of "rebuilding in the priest a strong spiritual identity, faithful to his original mission," writes Sandro Magister of Espresso. The noted Vatican-watcher says that Pope Benedict sees an urgent need to cleanse the priesthood from corruption and to restore a clear model for 21st-century ministry. Espresso calls attention to-- and reprints-- an unusually blunt speech by Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues, the secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education, detailing serious problems in the training of young priests...

And it has even taken the first steps, to judge from the speech given by its secretary, Jean-Louis Bruguès, to the rectors of pontifical seminaries who met in Rome in recent days.

Archbishop Bruguès, 66, a Dominican, was bishop of Angers until 2007. In addition to being secretary of the congregation for Catholic education, he is vice president of the pontifical work for ecclesiastical vocations and a member of the commission for the formation of candidates for the priesthood. He is also an academic at the St. Thomas Aquinas pontifical academy.

His speech to seminary rectors doesn't use any curial language at all. It is unusually frank. In no uncertain terms, it describes and denounces the failures following the council, in Europe in particular, including the astonishing ignorance on elementary points of doctrine that is found today in young men entering the seminary.

This ignorance is so significant that one of the remedies recommended by Archbishop Bruguès is the dedication of an entire year at the seminary to the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Catechism "ad parochos" was another of the milestones of the Tridentine reform. Four centuries later, we're there again.

Here is the speech of the secretary of the congregation for Catholic education to the rectors of the pontifical seminaries, published by "L'Osservatore Romano" on June 3, 2009:



Formation for the priesthood, between secularism and models of the Church

by Jean-Louis Bruguès


It is always risky to explain a social situation on the basis of a single interpretation. Nonetheless, some keys open more doors than others do. I have long been convinced of the fact that secularization has become a key word for thinking about our societies today, but also about our Church.

Secularization represents a historical process that is very old, having emerged in France in the middle of the 18th century before spreading to all modern societies. Nevertheless, the secularization of society varies greatly from one country to another.

In France and Belgium, for example, it tends to prohibit signs of religious membership in public, and to push faith back into the private sphere. The same tendency can be seen, but with much less strength, in Spain, Portugal, and Great Britain. In the United States, however, secularization harmonizes easily with the public expression of religious convictions: we saw this also during the last presidential election.

Over the past decade, an extremely interesting discussion has emerged among the specialists. Until it began, it seemed that it had to be taken for granted that European-style secularization constituted the rule and model, while the American kind constituted the exception. Now, however, there are many - Jürgen Habermas, for example - who think that the opposite is true, and that the religions will play a new social role in postmodern Europe as well.


STARTING OVER FROM THE CATECHISM


Regardless of the form it has taken, secularization has provoked a collapse of Christian culture in our countries. The young men who come to our seminaries know little or nothing about Catholic doctrine, about the history and customs of the Church. This generalized lack of education forces us to carry out important revisions in the practice followed until now. I will mention two of these.

First of all, it seems indispensable to me to provide these young men with a period - a year or more - of initial formation, of "recovery," catechetical and cultural at the same time. These programs can be designed in various ways, based on the specific needs of each country. Personally, I am thinking of an entire year dedicated to assimilating the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which presents itself as a very complete compendium.

In the second place, our formation programs should be reviewed. The young men who come to the seminary know that they are ignorant. They are humble, and eager to assimilate the message of the Church. Working with them brings excellent results. Their lack of education has this positive aspect: they no longer drag behind them the negative prejudices of their older brothers. Fortunately, therefore, we find ourselves working with a "tabula rasa." That is why I am in favor of a comprehensive, organic theological formation that is focused on the essential.

This implies, on the part of those responsible for instruction and formation, the discontinuation of an initial formation marked by a critical spirit - as was the case for my generation, for which the discovery of the Bible and doctrine was contaminated by a systematic spirit of criticism - and of the temptation of premature specialization: precisely because these young men lack the necessary cultural background.

Allow me to share with you a few questions that occur to me at this moment. It is absolutely reasonable to want to give future priests a complete, top-level formation. Like an attentive mother, the Church wants the best for its future priests. For this reason, the number of courses has been multiplied, but to the point of weighing down programs in a way that is, in my view, exaggerated. You have probably perceived the risk of discouragement in many of your seminarians. I ask: is an encyclopedic perspective appropriate for these young men who have received no basic Christian formation? Has this perspective not, perhaps, provoked a fragmentation of formation, an accumulation of courses and an excessively historicizing outlook? Is it truly necessary, for example, to give young men who have never learned the catechism an in-depth formation in the human sciences, or in the techniques of communication?

I would advise choosing depth over breadth, synthesis over dispersion in details, architecture over decoration. Similar reasons lead me to believe that learning metaphysics, as demanding as this is, represents the absolutely indispensable preliminary phase for the study of theology. Those who come to us have often received a solid scientific and technical formation - which is a good thing - but their lack of general culture does not permit them to undertake theology confidently.


TWO GENERATIONS, TWO MODELS OF CHURCH


On many occasions, I have spoken about generations: about my own, about the one before me, about the future generations. This is, for me, the crucial pont of the present situation. Of course, the passage from one generation to another has always posed adjustment problems, but the one we are living through now is absolutely exceptional.

The theme of secularization should help us to understand better, even here. This secularization saw unprecedented acceleration during the 1960's. For the men of my generation, and even more for those who preceded me, who were often born and raised in a Christian environment, it constituted an essential discovery, the great adventure of their lives. They therefore came to interpret the "openness to the world" called for by Vatican Council II as a conversion to secularization.

In this way, in fact, we have experienced or even fostered an extremely powerful self-secularization in most of the Western Churches.

The examples are many. Believers are ready to exert themselves in the service of peace, justice, and humanitarian causes, but do they believe in eternal life? Our Churches have carried out an immense effort to renew catechesis, but does not this catechesis itself tend to overlook the ultimate realities? For the most part, our Churches have embarked upon the ethical debates of the moment, at the urging of public opinion, but how much do they talk about sin, grace, and the divinized life? Our Churches have successfully deployed massive resources in order to improve the participation of the faithful in the liturgy, but has not the liturgy for the most part lost the sense of the sacred? Can anyone deny that our generation, possibly without realizing it, dreamed of a "Church of the pure," a faith purified of any religious manifestation, warning against any manifestation of popular devotion like processions, pilgrimages, etc.?

The collision with the secularization of our societies has profoundly transformed our Churches. We could advance the hypothesis that we have passed from a Church of "belonging," in which the faith was determined by the community of birth, to a Church of "conviction," in which the faith is defined as a personal and courageous choice, often in opposition with the group of origin. This passage has been accompanied by startling numeric variations. Attendance has visibly diminished in the churches, in the courses of catechesis, but also in the seminaries. Years ago, Cardinal Lustiger nonetheless demonstrated, setting out the figures, that in France the relationship between the number of priests and that of practicing Catholics had always remained the same.

Our seminarians, like our young priests, also belong to this Church of "conviction." They don't so much come from rural areas anymore, but rather from the cities, especially from the university cities. They often grow up in divided or "split" families, which leaves them with scars and, sometimes, a sort of emotional immaturity. The social environment to which they belong no longer supports them: they have chosen to be priests out of conviction, and have therefore renounced any social ambition (what I am saying is not true everywhere; I know African communities in which families or villages still nurture the vocations that have arisen within them). For this reason, they offer better-defined profiles, stronger individuality, and more courageous temperaments. In this regard, they have the right to our full esteem.

The difficulty to which I would like to draw your attention therefore goes beyond the boundaries of a simple generational conflict. My generation, I insist, has equated openness to the world with conversion to secularization, and has experienced a certain fascination regarding it. But although the younger men were born in secularization as their natural environment and drank it together with their mother's milk, they still seek to distance themselves from it, and defend their identity and their differences.


EMBRACE THE WORLD, OR OPPOSE IT?


There now exists within the European Churches, and perhaps within the American Church as well, a line of division, sometimes of fracture, between a current of "composition" and a current of "contestation."

The first leads us to observe that secularization includes values with a strong Christian influence, like equality, freedom, solidarity, responsibility, and that it should be possible to come to terms with this current and identify areas of cooperation.

The second current, on the contrary, calls for keeping distance. It maintains that the differences or points of opposition, above all in the field of ethics, will become increasingly pronounced. It therefore proposes an alternative to the dominant model, and accepts the minority opposition role.

The first current emerged mainly during the period following the council; it provided the ideological framework for the interpretations of Vatican II that were imposed at the end of the 1960's and in the following decade.

Things were reversed beginning in the 1980's, above all - but not exclusively - under the influence of John Paul II. The current of "composition" has aged, but its proponents still hold key positions in the Church. The current of the alternative model has become much stronger, but it has not yet become dominant. This would explain the tensions at the moment in many of the Churches on our continent.

It would not be difficult for me to provide examples illustrating the contrast I have just described.

Today the Catholic universities fall along this dividing line. Some of them play the card of adaptation and cooperation with secularized society, at the cost of finding themselves forced to take a critical distance from this or that aspect of Catholic doctrine or morality. Others, of more recent inspiration, emphasize the confession of the faith and active participation in evangelization. The same applies to the Catholic schools.

And the same could be said, to return to the topic of this meeting, in regard to the typical profile of those who knock on the doors of our seminaries or religious houses.

Candidates of the first tendency have become increasingly rare, to the great displeasure of the priests of the older generations. The candidates of the second tendency have now become more numerous than the others, but they hesitate to cross the threshold of our seminaries, because often they do not find what they are looking for there.

They are concerned about identity (and are sometimes mockingly described as "identitarians"): the Christian identity - how should we distinguish ourselves from those who do not share our faith? - and the identity of the priest, while the identity of the monk and the religious is easier to perceive.

How can harmony be fostered between educators, who often belong to the first current, and the young people who identify with the second? Will the educators continue to cling to criteria of admission and selection that date back to their own time, but no longer correspond to the aspirations of the young? I was told the story of a French seminary in which adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament had been banned for a good twenty years or so, because it was seen as too devotional: the new seminarians had to struggle for a number of years to have it reinstated, while some of the professors preferred to resign in the face of something that they judged as a "return to the past"; by giving in to the requests of the younger men, they had the impression that they were renouncing what they had fought for their entire lives.

In the dioceses in which I have been bishop, I have experienced similar difficulties when older priests - or even whole parish communities - have had great difficulty in responding to the aspirations of the young priests who were sent to them.

I understand the difficulties that you encounter in your ministry as seminary rectors. More than the passage from one generation to another, you must ensure a smooth transition from one interpretation of Vatican Council II to another, and possibly from one ecclesial model to another. Your position is delicate, but it is absolutely essential for the Church.