Tag Archives: religious orders

Amateur Preachers? No Way!

01 Sunday Feb 2015

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We remind you that this not an anticlerical blog. You can find spectacular examples of this on the internet, and see the
difference. It firmly believes that the future of the Church depends on the religious orders and on the values which their vows of poverty, chastity and obedience bring to it, as well as their extensive and intensive theological studies, which will always be required.

One possible and quite practical template for the Extension of Ordination to parishioners has appeared on this site. A basic feature of it is that no Ordained Parishioner would be allowed to preach, doctrinal input being obviously under the control of the Bishop. It is 2015, and sermons of the highest class and topical relevancy, prepared by the religious orders, can be provided within days by internet. Obviously, therefore the secular clergy’s five or six year training period would no longer be necessary.

Really intensive education courses appeared of necessity in WW2, and have since been refined and improved. A
course of no more than a year would be perfectly adequate to prepare for the administration of the Sacraments. And of course would not be provided in Latin. In any case, parishioners are unlikely to vote for a person who is educationally subnormal.

This blog does not believe that the five or six year course of study for secular priests is necessary or desirable today.
1. This was obviously over-compensation by the Council of Trent for generations of neglect.
2. Could it also simply have been a celibacy test ?
3. Were these studies carried out and supervised with intellectual rigour ? The acid test would be if anybody failed them. Have we heard of many cases?
4. What benefits could these studies have brought to the average congregation at Sunday Mass,usually with a wide IQ range , by the preaching of the average secular priest, no matter how dedicated ?
5. Or are these years of study intended merely to highlight the notion of the ontological theory of priesthood, as well as its image in general ?

Whatever the benefits of a five or six year course of education, are any of them worth keeping today, if doing so is an obstacle to the provision of the Eucharist when fifty thousand parishes throughout the world are without priests?
With Islam on the march, and an entire infrastructure having to be created if China is brought back to the table, has the Church got six years to waste ?

And the old system did not always work. A visiting preacher in a Glasgow church galvanised the congregation some years ago by his emphasis on the importance of fate. It was eventually deduced that the preacher, from a different continent, was trying to say ”faith”. And perhaps an important point as the clergy ages, the elderly incumbent of an Irish parish (insert stage Irishisms to taste) was said to bring any topic whatever within minutes, to the two men who went up to the Temple to pray, eliciting the comment from a dispirited parishioner that “it was a dam’ bad day for this parish when those two fellows went up to the Temple to pray.”

Ordained Celebrants,(i.e. parishioners) will not be properly trained, we will no doubt hear.
We say-trained for what, exactly?

Celibacy ? Really ?

26 Sunday Oct 2014

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No. 2 of To Feed The Flock’s 10 suggestions for extending ordination reads as follows:
“ (ii) celibacy is already waived to permit convert Anglican clergymen to be
ordained as priests. It would still exist, of course for religious orders.”
Part 1.
(Obviously, this blog will not take up an anti-celibacy position.
We are old-fashioned enough to still pay heed to the Gospels, in this case
to Matthew 19:12 . The positive merits of celibacy are encapsulated on many websites,
and are particularly valuable to the religious orders, the engine room
of the Church to come.)
What we will take exception to is when it keeps the Eucharist from the Flock.

Thackeray is said to have leapt and danced round the room several times when “Vanity Fair” as a title occurred to him. When the expression “married priest” comes up in any conversation dealing with why we are not allowed to get the Eucharist, it is tempting to do the same,for very different reasons.
The expression “married priest” immediately creates a contra-cultural roadblock in any discussion about how the Eucharist is to given to the world as Christ asked.
The image of the Tridentine celibate parish-supported secular priest is part of the very fibre of the Western Church, gathering about itself even among the more rational of us certain expectations and suppositions. Dr Halliday Sutherland
in his “Irish Journey” reminded us that there can be less rational expectations and suppositions when he met someone who had given up the Church for two years having heard that priests used the toilet.
“Married priest” for some seems inevitably to bring to mind children’s jammy fingers among the chasubles , bell, book and candle for recalcitrant mothers in law, and a wide range of other distinctly distracting matrimonial situations.
The problem appears to have solved itself. There can never now be married priests supported by a parish, except in the case of Anglican converts.
The secular priest as a phenomenon has almost disappeared, taking with it the distinctly dodgy concept- given its obvious track record in recent years- of “vocation”. The real “problem” with celibacy of course has been compulsory
celibacy , to avoid claims on Church property by a priest’s children, embarrassing short-sighted and ludicrous though this may seem to us, but one which made sense in its way to small agricultural mediaeval communities. The past is another world, the mediaeval world another universe, and yet the provision of the Eucharist for the Flock still depends on it in 2014, in the world of the megapolis,of instant world-wide communication , of sex as a dominant, pervasive
element of society.
Does celibacy really have anything at all to do with Christ’s imperative that we change our lives and our world through the Eucharist ?

(to be continued)