Decades ago, a pastor returned to the rectory, discouraged. He lamented that some people treat their dogs better than their priests. As every pastor knows, the priest had a point. He was faithful, irascible, ornery, and seldom apologized. In other words, an ordinary guy. He was not unlike many priests with a choleric temperament.
People who are bipolar suffer from manic/depressive extremes. An analogous bipolar view of the priesthood has been with us for centuries. Priests are like many conspicuous people. You love ‘em or hate ‘em. But the “saint or sinner” and “love or hate” view of the priesthood has overheated over the last several decades.
Church documents recognize the dignity of the priesthood. A bishop is a successor of the Apostles. The priest participates in the Orders of his bishop. He is “in the person of Christ the Head of the Church.” In Jesus, he offers Mass and celebrates the Sacraments. Regardless of his spiritual state, he forgives sins with certainty. He is a witness to Jesus. He holds a sublime and exalted office. His soul carries the indelible character of the priesthood for eternity.
The Scriptures reveal the weaknesses of the clergy. All the Apostles fled after the arrest of Jesus in the Garden. (As one wag put it, the first collegial act of the body of bishops.) John alone returned and joined Mary at the foot of the Cross. Peter, the first of the Apostles, denied Jesus three times. Judas betrayed Him. Saint Paul—and many saints after him—warned of the sins of bishops.
The medieval poet Chaucer held up monks as examples of hypocrisy. His Canterbury Tales descriptions weren’t schismatic, just realistic. Saint Thomas More humorously wrote in his “Utopia”: “There are very few priests in Utopia…” explaining, “but they are of exceeding holiness.”
This historical bipolar priesthood is acute in our time. Many people deify priests and view them as god-like models of holiness. The laity often approach the clergy as if they are oracles of wisdom. (Indeed, priests who live sinful double lives expertly disguise their vice to maintain this narcissistic supply.) But when events reveal the sins and weaknesses of priests, the balloon of respect bursts, and the laity quickly (and in extreme cases, correctly) scorn the priests as scoundrels.
The simmering abuse cover-up narrative places great weight on the “sinner” and “subhuman” view of the priesthood. Most priests (ordained for several years) know variations of the same story: Many disagreements in pastoral encounters—or the ordinary flaws of priestly character—justify hatred of the priest. Need evidence and a closing argument? “Priests abuse children.” QED.
The bipolar view of the priesthood extends to the higher clergy. During the years of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, faithful Catholics tended to hang on to their every word. Every phrase was a notable quotable. But in recent years, chaotic, ambiguous teachings and vindictive actions have led many traditional and faithful Catholics to dismiss news from the Vatican with disdain.
Sound bites can contribute to the bipolar view. Some slogans are true. Pope John Paul II spoke of the “culture of death.” Then-Cardinal Ratzinger lamented the “dictatorship of relativism.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the 1993 papal encyclical, “The Splendor of the Truth,” presented remedies. The divide was clear. Faithful Catholics took refuge in the papacy. Others went the way of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Contemporary ambiguous papal soundbites (such as “accompaniment”) shattered the clarity of the divide. The most recent slogan: Those who oppose migration reveal their “fanaticism of indifference.” Like previous papal soundbites, the phrase is memorable. But unlike the clarity of the papal assertions of John Paul and Benedict, the Vatican slogans are ambiguous. The new sound bites fail to distinguish between the plethora of motives, types, and causes of immigration, so-called climate change, and LGBTQ ideology.
Incoherence in teaching the faith has contributed to a multi-polar priesthood. High-ranking Church officials flout Church teaching with LGBTQ activism and the ordination of women. The sheep—including priests on the front lines—scatter. Vatican intimidation silences faithful bishops. Among priests, another “elephant in the room” is Vatican dissent from Catholic teaching. Very few are willing to say the emperor has no clothes.
A result of the multi-polar priesthood is the confusion of prophetic witness. It is safe to indict those who oppose unrestricted immigration, “accompany” LGBTQ activists, promote female ordination, and take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. But faithful ecclesiastical pushback is mostly absent.
Priests sense the “tyranny of ecclesiastical political correctness” (to coin a phrase). The uncertain teachings emanating from the Vatican paralyze evangelization and demoralize the faithful. The papacy and the Vatican bureaucracy no longer have our backs. Consequently, we rarely have the wits or the confidence to impart the hot-button teachings of God’s law, thus risking the salvation of souls.
Occasionally, a daring voice cries out from the wilderness. Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, recently asserted:
The Pope has no authority from Christ to bully and intimidate good bishops modeled on Christ the Good Shepherd who, in accordance with the episcopal ideal of Vatican II, sanctify, teach and lead the flock of God in the name of Christ, just because false friends denounce these good bishops to Francis as enemies of the Pope, while heretical and immoral bishops can do whatever they want or who bother the Church of Christ every day with some other stupidity.
Priests represent the cross-section of an increasingly confused culture. Priests, bishops, and popes are not gods. They are mere men, the subject of Chaucer’s epic poems or Dante’s Inferno. Few are saints. All are sinners. But these weak and sinful men are not subhuman, either. Their teaching is forever bipolar: faithful to Christ or unfaithful.
Saint Paul’s indelicate remarks always apply: “Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8). Walk away from any given priest to protect your faith. But never walk away from Jesus and His Catholic Church.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Wonderful in painting an encouraging portrait by jpii & b16….
While the present occupant of Peter’s chair seems to relish in denigrating the priest today
“Shatter[ing] the clarity of the divide” is significant. It speaks to a unique ability to cause a bipolar reaction in the priest’s intellect.
Fr Pokorsky aims at the perpetrator of exacerbating bipolarism among the
faithful. And among priests, who are confused about teaching calling it ‘multi-polarism’, priests indicting the left or right yet rarely offering faithful pushback. Priests today, more than under the previous two pontificates present a crosscut of views.
Accidental floundering doesn’t achieve the effect of bipolar inconsistency within the priest’s mind, men educated and versed in the faith. It requires keen intelligence to ‘shatter the clarity of the divide’, the reason being that the divide is grounded on comprehensive principles. Principles that in order to be mitigated require intellectual subtlety if not always accuracy. Fr Pokorsky ends with the right counsel, “Walk away from any given priest to protect your faith. ‘Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed’”. That means any given priest.
Hoping and trusting, a bit, that Cardinal Muller’s papal invitation to the 2023 Synod is more than calculated window dressing. Maybe he’ll even get a photo op with Pope Francis, right after Fr. Jiminy Cricket Martin, (SJ of course).
Recalling, here and yet again, that St. John Paul II saw all of this coming, as the seminarians of the late 20th Century migrated up the food chain into bishoprics and cardinalates. So, this from Veritatis Splendor, VS (despite the notice that the Synod is apparently enabled to become “magisterial”):
“This is the first time, in fact, that the MAGISTERIUM of the Church [caps added] has set forth in detail the fundamental elements of this [moral absolutes] teaching, and presented the principles for the pastoral discernment necessary in practical and cultural situations which are complex and even crucial” (VS, n. 115).
Butt, to hell with the (philosophical) non-demonstrable first principle of non-contradiction!
Oh, wait, instead, we hear from Ressourcement (!) of quite different paving stones: “The road to hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lampposts that light the path” (John Chrysostom).
There is only one Head of the Church: Christ. The Pope is not the head of the Church.
He is only the Vicar of Christ 🙄
The favorite movie of my late wife, who led me to the Church, was The Nun’s Story, which I watch on occasion thinking of her. I marvel at the scenes of how the novices confessed every small vanity and venial sin. And now we have a church where the promotion of mortal sin is treated as a sacred duty in the frequently warped minds of many laity, clergy, and high prelates.
Priests are not placed on a pedestal as much as they are a means to an end. Committing a life to a denial of sin requires dedicated and collaborative efforts. However one judges the endless Vatican II debate, it is hard to deny it encouraged a culture of secular appeasing optimism about the human condition that could not help but reassure Catholics intent on not taking their sins seriously anymore. It is not by accident that confession lines have all but disappeared, and homilies are almost always of the Mr. Rogers neighborhood variety. And we now have a Pope who can’t associate the seriousness of sins of the flesh and the abortion holocaust he claims to care about. Everyone in the Church uses each other, and the “faith community” all goes home after their watered down liturgy while our Pope venomously insults those who actually desire a more sacred liturgy.
Do I sound cynical? I’m not. I’m bipolar too. My closest friend is a saintly missionary priest in India who never tires in his dedication to his people. He spends his Christmas day traveling to seven different villages on a moped on horrible roads to say Mass. That’s an easy day for him.
We have met 6 young priests in the last few years.
They all seem quite sincere, properly devout, traditional by inclination and much more genuinely congenial than their elders. One regards these gone young men with a bit of wonder and even awe that they would give over their entire lives to priesthood in a Church in such turmoil.
To us they are heroic; brave souls running into a burning edifice with a love of Hod on their hearts and a true thirst for the salvation of souls.
They look to the future with patience and humility and some of them may even tell you that biology will eliminate the scourge of flighty hippie flower power priests of the previous generations.
These men are not sexual perverts and the priesthood is no longer a hiding place for wanton homosexuals. The public disdain for the priesthood has ironically purged it of the scurrilous perverted louses. The Holy Spirit is indeed at work in the Church through these young men.
Thank you young Fathers; we pray everyday that you will be enflamed with the Holy Spirit God and protected by Michael the Archangel.
I believe a viewpoint that seeks to “accommodate modern man” is fundamentally flawed to begin with. Sadly, since V2, it’s all the rage. When the world, the flesh and devil are no longer the enemies of the Church, the vows of chastity, obedience and poverty are no longer appreciated or even needed. Many NO priests now no longer take the vow of poverty. When I was being educated in the NO seminary in Boston for the Maronite Rite in 1989-93, the priests there pitched in on a yacht that they would occasion during breaks. That was a bit of shocker for me. I suspect they discarded their priestly attire for beach wear because, as far as I knew, none of the seminarians were invited. Mind you, I would have not been cordial to an invitation. I find it odd to treat a vocation as a job choice or career path. Father cites the Ratzinger Report in the body of his article. In the same book, Ratzinger describes an identity crisis of unheralded proportions at all levels in the church following V2. More than 50,000 professed abandoned their vocations in the 5-years following “the council”. We’re still in the midst of the crisis as is clearly evidenced by the continuous decline and the obvious management of decline as most recently “parish families” attest. As Pope Francis starts the synod on the Feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, I don’t get the feeling that like his namesake, PF will “rebuild His church”. In fact, the synod seems to be more of the same banal and lifeless garbage that V2 heralded and might even be the impetus for the rebuilding of the Church more in the image of man, than God. (sigh)
Okay, I am picky, but Fr. Pokorsky needs to check out the definition of flaunt. He clearly meant flout, I hope.
The error is serious enough that no, you are not picky. This makes it sound as if the Church is in favor of perversion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VdMdboymT8
Yes, you are correct. We should have caught it. Thank you!
It could mean lgbt etc. being flaunted as Church teaching. Which is what they’re attempring to pull off and themselves doing.
‘ High-ranking Church officials flout Church teaching with LGBTQ activism and the ordination of women. ‘
‘ High-ranking Church officials flaunt Church teaching with LGBTQ activism and the ordination of women. ‘
Francis I has assumed a messianic posture postulating moral doctrines he claims are consistent with Vincent of Lerins on development. That is neither demonstrably consistent in method, nor in substance. Fr Pokorsky suggests this is known by clergy specifically hierarchy though few ‘are willing’ to speak out. From this writer’s perspective that’s due to a false sense of legitimate authority that is rarely addressed, except for Cardinal Gerhard Muller who recently admonished Pope Francis for doing exactly what a pope can only do unlawfully.
Card Muller said with confidant authority that His Holiness cannot [lawfully] remove bishops from office for their legitimate defense of the faith. Muller, initially most circumspect regarding Francis I and the Chair of Peter, has at last come forward speaking from his lengthy experience and knowledge of the limits of papal authority. Confidant authority in that he acknowledges his own authority as an extension of Apostolic authority and defender of the faith. This is precisely what the Church requires to do to confront the profound error of propagating a new gospel. In Muller’s own words, you cannot correct Christ. I’m a mere presbyter. My words carry weight insofar as they are true. It’s our bishops and cardinals that possess the Apostolic authority of their office who have the serious obligation to confront Francis I on the issues of change of the Deposit of Faith and unjust removal of bishops.
St. Peter tried to correct Christ and was called Satan.
Mark Tabish has it right. I do not want to disagree with Fr.’s article but all these observations are worldly. If you are of the world, you do not belong to Christ. Take up your cross. It’s what Francis of Assisi did. He preached repentance and denial of the self, which is strange because the church wishes no one be denied except those who disagree with them. The teachings of the church should be easily understood because they reflect what Christ said and did. There is only one important thing. Eternal life. What must I do gain it? The rest is of the world, including the synod. “What will it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Our what shall a man give in return for his life?” Who caused all this confusion? The Holy Spirit? No. The church, her theologians, and their desire to make Catholic Social Teaching the cornerstone of their Temple. I saw this years ago in the Vatican on a tour. Hallways filled with old images of man in marble. The sistine chapel, a dead pope in a glass case, in a giant museum. The problem with the church is we accept this glorification of man not seeking God, but to become God. “He leads the humble in what is right and teaches the humble his way. “
Pope Francis often distinguishes clericalism and servant priesthood. One of the items he wishes to take up in the upcoming Synod on Synodality is rediscovering the priesthood from within a culture corrupted by clericalism and to work towards a transformation of the underlying existing relationships of priests. This is the reason why we need to look for a transformation of the underlying culture if we truly want to reform the structures of the church. Transforming existing relationships reminds us that we are all made priests in baptism. Through ordination, the clergy are not called to privilege but to service, that is, to animate and support the priesthood of all the baptized. Along with a well-educated and virtuous laity, virtuous clergy are called “to re-priest a clericalized church.” The Pope hopes and proposes how church reform has to reprioritize the precedence of servant priesthood over clericalism. But this depends first on the transformation of the interior dispositions of the clergy themselves and that transformation depends on clergy looking to servant priesthood as their calling and not clericalism.
“He was faithful, irascible, ornery, and seldom apologized.” haha That could have been my pastor at a French parish in New England. I have never lost the image of that priest in my mind, and us kids were kind of scared of him. Yes, he was all of the above, yet one day in eighth grade at our all-girl Catholic school, he came to ask who was going to 9th grade at what school. If you were going to public school, he asked the girl to come to his office. If she was going to public and it was because her parents couldn’t afford to send her to a Catholic HS, he paid her tuition at the Catholic school, all 4 years. There were many in the class in that situation–he paid the tuition for all of them! Yes, irascible for sure, but a faithful priest who cared about us and especially cared about our souls.
thankyou for this article. i am the skeptic which can never trust a pontificate so ambiguous and speaks with hot air but very little substance. the readings of this pontificates publications speaks well to the effect of much of the confusion and unclear direction; especially with the calibre of ghost writers who claim high places in this pontificate as their reward for loyalty.