RITE AND REASON:Despite impressions there are many people who have had positive experiences of church, writes DONAL McKEOWN
LAST MONTH Bishop Philip Boyce and I launched a DVD In Praise of Priests. This recording contains five brief interviews from a cross-section of Irish lay people who reflect on the special contribution made by a particular priest to their lives.
My experience of the general response to this initiative is twofold: firstly, I am struck by the number of similar unheard stories that exist throughout our community and, secondly, there remains great public interest in the motivation behind following a priestly or religious vocation.
Both these responses are interrelated and are worthy of further comment.
There are just over 100 men studying for priesthood in Irish houses of formation at home and abroad. What problems and what solutions do these men identify?
Firstly, they see the coming together of two realities. On the one side, modern Ireland is riddled with shattered dreams, lost trust and a lot of self-loathing. And this meets an ongoing idealism in many young people to make a difference, to clean up the mess that an earlier generation had made.
There are still people out there with a reckless passion to speak of God’s love, compassion and healing to broken hearts.
Secondly, despite impressions to the contrary, there are still many people – young and old – who have positive experiences of church. These have developed a sense of belonging that is part of believing. They dare to dream that faith can promote that sense of a pilgrim community in a lonely and dangerous world.
Thirdly, many seminarians have walked many routes before they try the road less travelled.
Some will have tried to stay on the straight and narrow, while others will have had a conversion experience. In a world that offers to sell us more packaged magic solutions to existential problems, all have come to believe that there is more salvation in absolution than in the latest form of ablution for skin and hair.
They have become convinced that it is better to lead a good life than just look for the illusion of the “good life”.
Of course, new seminarians will face many internal pulls. Some will be told that the only way forward is backwards, that there was some ideal past that needs to be reconstructed. The biblical Exodus story shows escaping slaves yearning for the imagined security of Egypt. But certainty about God was a mark of the Pharisee, not of the apostle.
Others will hear that they have to be esoteric individualists. They risk ending up carping rather than creating, proclaiming themselves rather than the Gospel of Jesus, believing they have to be messiahs rather than missionaries, saviours rather than searchers.
Could I suggest some humble words of advice to those who consider being priests more than a generation after my time?
Firstly, there are many good guides to what a 21st-century church should look like.
Pope Benedict has spoken and written eloquently about the importance of love. The late pope John Paul II was clear that what Europe most needed was hope. This, as the late pope’s fellow Slav Vaclav Havel said, is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that everything makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
Secondly, don’t let anyone or anything knock Gospel idealism out of you. Be true to yourself as you follow Jesus, who kept his feet on the ground but his head in the air. Don’t vanish into a private world where rights are less important than privileges. That superiority – which afflicts all vocational professions – is called clericalism when it appears in clergy.
Thirdly, learn from the strengths of the past as well as from the mistakes. That is what is meant by a healthy sense of church tradition.
In every walk of life, there is always room for those who want to be part of the solution. Judge for yourself by reviewing the In Praise of Priests testimonies on http://www.catholicbishops.ie/features/1984
Bishop Donal McKeown is Auxiliary Bishop of Down and Connor Catholic diocese and chairs the council for vocations of the Irish Bishops’ Conference