An excuse for the Germans used to be “intelligent but misguided’. Apparently it’s not just misguided . Thanks once again to the ‘Tablet’ – and who knows where we would be without it in Britain? The Central Committee of German Catholics, the umbrella organisation of lay Catholics and Catholic organisations , 20 million strong ,sponsored a debate on the drop in vocations in Germany. Although at least they do have such an organisation, unlike us. But even the president of this, Thomas Sternberg ,was ready to ‘demand that proven lay people be ordained’. He also wanted married deacons to be ordained, but let’s stay serious at the moment.
The word ’proven’ connects with a priest we were speaking to last week. Two boys had passed by him, one of whom he knew from a previous parish. He said, ’Oh, hello, Father’; the other said quite clearly ’paedophile !’. The priest’s reaction to this was interesting. Rightly, he took the second to task for his impertinence. The terrifying thing is not the word, quite inapplicable in his case, but that this reaction to it seemed to be his only one.
Although otherwise highly intelligent, he still seems to be living in an age when the Tridentine priesthood meant something. Even ten years ago, would that situation have been possible ? We have moved on far from the age when parish priests ruled their fiefs like mediaeval barons, when even the most ordinary Catholic priests were treated with respect, even if only because of their office as providers of the Eucharist. But that was then. Now they can be insulted in the street, even if there is plenty of proof of what the boy felt when he saw a priest.
Even if Tridentine priests have to accept eventually that ordained laymen can provide the Eucharist just as effectively as they can, the ordained laymen would apparently have to be ‘proven’ .
‘Proven’ to whom? ‘Proven’ in what? Can this conceivably mean found satisfactory to some group of Tridentine priests? The local press has provided in recent years a variety of reasons why this is going to be very difficult to take seriously . It is not too much to say that the Tridentine priesthood is now an obstacle to our relationship with Christ.
And we must not forget the efforts of the media in this, especially television. Whatever its motives- and what actually can they be- the BBC has worked well at this, in particular on the lines that Anglican curates are largely imbecilic. I think ‘Father Brown’ is an ITV product. The character obviously can hardly be depicted as an imbecile , but wears the ridiculous shovel hat, actually only found in Rome, to make sure he is never confused with real Catholic priests. As the poet once said, ‘others abide our question- thou art free’, and undoubtedly ‘Father Ted’ is the apotheosis of anti-religious proselytism There is apparently a humourous dimension to this programme ; would that there was one to the present position of the Tridentine priest.
When ordained parishioners are accepted, if there is still a Catholic Church in which they can function, it will probably be found that few of these negative qualities exist in the average parish. If they do, their proponents are likely to be well known to the parishioners who alone should have the right to elect . ‘Proven’ must now mean , and we can forget its slightly pejorative connotations here ,’ proved’ only to their fellow parishioners. Any other concept of ‘proven’ would be ludicrous. The German sense of humour is apparently elusive, but two expressions currently in colloquial use express degrees of derisive disbelief : one is ‘You’re having a laugh’, and the other is LOL (‘laugh out loud’ to non-texters) . Both are applicable, especially when we are talking about the approbation of those who satisfied the criteria of an organisation which takes five or six years to assess its entrants, and which has so spectacularly failed to do so accurately. For sheer arrogant dismissiveness, the use of ‘proven’ by the Tridentine priesthood – or some of them- takes a bit of beating.
To get back to the Germans and the other side of the argument: as the Australians would say,’ No worries’ in any case. Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki of Cologne said ’relaxing the rule of celibacy would not help the situation.’ Oh well, that sorts that out. Silly us! He said a new evangelisation is called for, to acquaint or re-acquaint people with the Gospel message. We should all, of course, have thought of that ! OK, there’s a tiny problem in that if there are no more vocations, then there will be no more Church, but the cardinal offers no explanation of how it should be done. A topmost cherry on the Schwarzvalde Kirchetorte, or Black Forest gateau for those who haven’t been to a high class funeral lunch in a hotel recently, was provided by the German bishops’ conference director of vocations, Fr Michael Maas, who said that the root problem was that the church was not flourishing , and it was crucial to win young people back into church. As they used to say in our youth ’Waow’! How lucky we all were that such intellects did not play a more important part in recent German history!
We ask again- and not for the first time- what is special about the Tridentine priesthood as a provider of the Eucharist? Where in the Gospels is this found ? Please tell us what you think. Is there some kind of rationale behind this? Any kind of rationale? Or is it simply a very open and frank refusal to accept the validity of the Sacrament of Holy Orders ?