The Coming Clerical Cold War
Much has been said in the past three years about the anti-establishment political wave sweeping the Western World. Many people usually ascribe this phenomenon to the yawning gulf between political elites and their interests, and that of the ‘average’ person. In the context of America, the elites are typically coastal, urban, and wealthier. The rest are the opposite. Ironically, this same entrenched elite class is artificially buttressed by an extremely powerful educational-entertainment complex, whose role is essentially to indoctrinate young minds into the same ideological camps which their overlords already inhabit. This alliance between Hollywood and the Ivy League is extremely potent, but also extremely fragile. As the new generation comes of age, as is typical for all generational shifts, new fault lines and patterns of power appear.
Today I read Joseph Sternburg’s excellent May 13th Wall Street Journal Editorial, Boomer Bequest Is Millennial Misery. The main thesis is this: the boomer generation, traditionally those born between 1946 and 1964, effectively created the prevailing social, economic and cultural conditions which are now, like nature in late autumn, bearing their last rotting fruits. Millennials, those persons born between 1981 and 1996, are currently the up and coming generation in the world. A strange dynamic exists between these two generations, with the intervening generation, so-called ‘Generation X’, wedged in between. While the Boomers created the global system that currently prevails, ranging from Breton Woods to cheap Chinese shoes, they also created the primary socioeconomic crises of postmodernity: out of control deficit spending, the wreckage of the nuclear family, and an amoral, unaccountable managerial class in the government.
It occurs to me that a mirror crisis is now reaching its apogee in the Roman Catholic Church: an entrenched clerical Boomer generation, which created the current crisis in our religion, has a complete unwillingness to own their responsibility, and will not let new hands take the reins. This problem is more acute in clerical circles, both because the retirement age is so high for Bishops and Priests, and because they have ‘hacked’ the traditional Catholic ‘essentialist’ theology on Holy Orders, and apply it selectively to their ideological allies. Thus, a Priest who conforms to the party line largely has protection and enjoys his canonical rights; a Priest who does not toe the party line in effect has no rights. A Priest is a Priest forever, unless he is a conservative. To quote one chancery official regarding Priests they considered problematic, “What are we supposed to do with Priests? Take them out and shoot them?” It was almost ten years ago when that was said, and I hear the admonition of Our Lord: “If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)
I remain convinced that we do not have a shortage of Priests. I think, by God’s providence, we have exactly the amount of Priests we need granted the true faithful on the ground. What we are doing now is buttressing an old system, much like millennials labor for a Social Security System: we are pretty sure it will not exist when we come into our own, but the powers that be will fight to the last to ensure that we, like little Atlases, hold up their dying world.
It is now mid-May, which traditionally begins in many dioceses both the season for Ordinations, and for transfers of assignments. I do not have all the data on hand, but if trends found in most Metropolitan Sees in the United States are constant across the country, 2019 and 2020 will be watershed years for clerical retirement: the ordination classes of 1969 and 1970, granted they were ordained at the minimum of 25 years of age, are now 75 years old. These are the classes directly after the annus horribilis of 1968, and were the ones by and large responsible for the current state of affairs. Generally speaking, these were some of the last large classes that entered the Seminary, and after that, vocations began to fall off the proverbial cliff. With their retirement, most Western dioceses will begin to experience a free fall in clerical manpower. The old adage goes that beggars cannot afford to be choosers, but that is exactly what is happening in most dioceses.
What ought to be a natural handing-on of leadership across generations is now ideologically charged, and many of the Church’s managerial class are employing dubious methods to ensure their hegemony continues. Much has been said among Priests about the complete evisceration of the rights and authority of Pastors across the Latin Church. That is one of the primary loci for the coming conflict. Rome typically has been rather pro-Pastor and pro-Parish when Canonical cases have been appealed. In light of this, Bishops and their chancery allies have become increasingly creative in how they sideline and manage their clergy: Pastors are moved with alarming frequency, thus contributing to institutional instability. This moreover deprives the Priests themselves of their practical authority, because entrenched parochial interests can wait out reforming Pastors. Even worse, the practice is increasingly being adopted that all new would-be pastors must be Parochial Administrators, which in some places is now becoming a perpetual rather than temporary appointment. This most certainly contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of the Code of Canon Law. In several places, Pastors are required to submit a letter of resignation of their parish to be kept ‘on file’ in case the Bishop wants to move him. These and similar policies send a clear signal to younger clergy: we do not trust you. Younger clergy are by far more conservative and orthodox today than their predecessors. Yet what emerges now is that the older generation would sooner see the whole edifice burn down than that their younger colleagues try something different, or, to put it a better way, to try something perennially valid: a return to fidelity, both in faith and in morals.
The practice of sidelining otherwise healthy and upright younger clergy is going to be deleterious to their spiritual and mental well-being. Mentally sound young men especially typically desire not only to be competent, but to appear to be so. By treating younger clergy this way, not only does the Church impoverish herself in terms of budding leadership, but also is engaging in what I would term ‘institutional infantization’. Church officialdom is saying that we want you to do the work of duly appointed pastors of souls, sometimes ‘staffing’ multiple parishes, but we will only truly empower selectively those who are worthy of our trust. In effect, the only ones worthy of the blessing from on high are those who submit to being reduced to Mass Machines, Yes-Men and Sacramental Magicians. Away with intrepid Pastors of souls: bring in those who, above all, will not disturb the status quo.
Does any other institution work this way and prosper? Let’s say a business wanted to promote rank and file workers to local managers. After training the new manager, would they then give them only provisional authority over hiring and firing, inventory, and customer relations? Would they be given the message that they could be demoted, transferred, or fired at any time based upon the will of the corporate brass without any kind of appeal? Moreover, what if corporate wanted to micromanage the operations of the local manager: I think understandably, most managers would ask what is the purpose of their role. Certainly no one would seek the position any longer. Let’s throw ideology in the mix, and that certain managers were treated that way because of their beliefs: then there would be a deluge of lawsuits. At the very least, in the business world, workers have rights which are enforceable by law. This is not the case in the Church today.
In theory, a Vicar for Clergy at least represents the closest thing that approximates a Human Resources Department in Diocesan Chanceries: in practice, this is rarely the case. In fact, in many places, they are a hybrid of crisis management director and executioner. Every Priest, let’s be honest, experiences a cardiac event when the caller ID reveals its source in the chancery: no one from there calls to ask about our health. Appeals and Canonical recourse are often expensive and time consuming. The Priest on the receiving end of the soft persecution of the institutional Church rarely, if ever, can defeat a Diocesan apparatus that is prejudicial to him.
For years, older orthodox Priests used to tell the young ones that all they had to do was wait as the ‘biological solution’ ran its course. Then their time would come, and perhaps they could undo the damage of the previous decades. But if current trends continue, the only thing that the boomer generation may bequeath to millennials is salted earth. That is to say, if the boomer (Pope Paul VI) generation, which makes up the majority of the manpower of Western Dioceses, not only refuses to empower younger clergy to be effective leaders in their own right, but also acts to selectively discourage and disenfranchise them, the conflict will move from the inter-generational to the intra-generational. A true clerical cold war will begin, with ramifications which we cannot yet predict. A class will emerge within the millennial clergy which will have all the advanced degrees, all the chancery positions, and all the bureaucratic power. They will perpetuate, in all probability, the old heterodoxies, and the nostrums of the old managers. As the boomers move to their eternal reward, the millennial Priests who are left will be damaged men in every sense of the term. This sort of treatment creates the very environment in which emotional and personal immaturity thrive, and where fully masculine, ‘integrated’ personalities cannot, and will not, be able to come into their own. I anticipate that whereas record numbers of Priests requested laicization in the days of Pope Paul VI, record numbers of Priests will be requesting excardination and incardination during the days of Pope Francis’ successor: the clerical culture in some places may become so sclerotic and so corrupt that the Priests may have to move for their own health. Primus vivere, as they say; to do anything, first you have to be alive. It really is becoming, as some Priests have already said in public, a seller’s market. Just give us a Bishop and a Diocese that respects our humanity, let alone our Priesthood: we will gladly go to that magical place.
What is the way out? I think that Bishops and their entourage first need to understand that asking a decreasing number of Priests to continue to do this dance of personnel musical chairs is a failed endeavor: some things, even for the most hard working and the most zealous, are beyond human endurance. As Nietzsche said, a man can endure any ‘what’ if he knows the ‘why’. How can we expect a young new pastor to be hardworking and zealous if he knows his position is at best tenuous? How can he command the respect of the parish staff? How can he even unpack his bags, if he knows that he can be out of his Rectory in a nanosecond if his Bishop removes him as a Parochial Administrator?
Second, Priests need to start learning holy rebellion. You have canonical and human rights: act like it. As most dioceses continue to feel the squeeze, inform them that you will personally tighten the screw, and with a smile, if your legitimate needs are not met. First, appeal to your Bishop and to his spiritual, paternal obligations toward his Priest sons: if he is insensitive to this, appeal to his sense of self-preservation, which is an even more primal, aboriginal instinct. Remind him that if your fidelity, orthodoxy and adherence to tradition disqualifies you from exercising parochial ministry, he will have one less finger to fill the leaking holes on the collapsing dam. I wish I could say that we could appeal to these people on the basis of basic human decency and the virtues of justice and charity: but the fact is we are here right now precisely because certain persons have abandoned these principles already.
Third, don’t be a lone wolf. Presbyterates must practice solidarity, and that should not be a matter of ideology, but of principle. The human mistreatment of Priests is not a theological question, but a matter of basic decency. This bridges the liberal-conservative gulf: injustice to a Priest anywhere, is injustice to Priests everywhere. Once again, if we cannot act out of higher motives, let’s at least act out of self-preservation. Wedged between a hostile world and a potentially hostile Church, we are our own best advocates.
Saint Paul reminds us that we must defeat evil with good (Romans 12:21). Even as we find that the times may demand that we must resist evil, and evil policies, we ourselves must not succumb to the evils we resist. It starts, as usual, with the personal and the local: Priests must learn to treat other Priests with respect and love, even those Priests with whom they have personal disagreements. We remember that our Lord’s commandment to “Love one another” was not just given to everyone, but specifically to his Priests at his Last Supper. This must be because Our Lord knew no other group would need to hear it more. Because if the devil in his cunning already has us turned against one another, how can we unite and strengthen our people against the coming storm? Whatever away you can find to affirm, encourage and ennoble other Priests, do it.
The millennial laity, which mirrors the millennial clergy, are themselves largely traditional, conservative, and eager for leadership. Any Priest who is doing the right thing can inspire and command respect from the people he serves. He should be eager to be a true spiritual father to these people. Millennial Priests today bear double freight in a world which not only hates true leadership in general, but authentic masculinity in particular. Priests today are not only spiritual fathers; for some young people, they are the only true father figure they may ever encounter. Do not allow yourselves to become spiritually or psychologically neutered by the powers that be. Rally the faithful around you. If you are preaching and living the truth with genuine love, you will typically command the love and respect of people. Do not lose your God-given manliness in the face of a passive-aggressive and dehumanizing regime. Your personal and eternal worth is not based upon the esteem of your superiors. Some Priests, especially those who have pathological personalities, parasitically need the adulation and the approval of those whom they presume are their ‘betters’, and will do anything they say, regardless of conscience or principle. To hell with that. To slightly adjust St. Augustine’s advice: be faithful, and do what you will. It isn’t more complicated than that.
