The Clerical Mental Health Maelstrom

On December 13, 2019, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, announced that he was taking a medical leave of absence due to ongoing problems with anxiety and depression. It seems that most have received the news with compassion, understanding and support. Most certainly, I feel the same toward him.

In the past I have received some criticism, mostly from lay people, that I have been far too hard upon the Bishops in my writings. I wish to make very clear that I support Bishops very strongly, precisely because I view them as Priests first. If the pressures against average Priests is immense, so too must be that toward Bishops. Record numbers of Priests even decline to become Bishops nowadays. As Priests, we have in common our same fallen humanity, as well as all the beauty and joy that comes with our common vocation. It is a great honor and a delight to be a Priest, even in the worst of times. To keep our focus on Christ is a powerful shield against sadness and discouragement.

However, reading that news about Bishop Conley, I could not help but feel that this move was the beginning of a deluge. To be more precise, it is the manifestation of something which has already been underway for some time. In some dioceses, Priests on leave approach upwards of 10% or more. Burnout, a perennial problem among clergy, is increasing. The stresses on a Priest are truly enormous. However, I argue that they are worse now than perhaps they have ever been. It takes courage to admit that one needs to minister first to oneself, in order to minister to others; we have all seen the skyrocketing rates of obesity, substance abuse and other maladies among the clergy, as they seem to minister to everyone, but have so few to minister to them. There are Priests who are out there, unfortunately, to be served, and not to serve. But I truly believe they are not the majority. The majority of Priests are good men who are themselves victims of a sick culture, much like the laity. An increasing number of Priests were raised in families with broken homes and divorce. More and more Priests, especially in the ‘First World’, are only children. Now a Priest, if times get hard, cannot even rely upon his own blood relatives, either because they do not exist, or if they do, they are hostile to the faith and their vocation. The so-called ‘support structures’ that have existed for Boomer Priests and their predecessors have been shaken to their foundations. As the Episcopacy and the Presbyterate now are being made more and more of the generations after the Sexual Revolution, a reckoning of sorts may be imminent.

Concerns with problems unique to the generations after 1968 have already been raised by Seminaries across the world. It is now assumed that all these men have seen pornography from a young age, imbibed a neo-pagan cultural milieu, and in some cases critically lack an ecclesial consciousness, since fewer of them are products of Catholic Education or other institutions that once were the seed bed of vocations and a Catholic sensibility. The Millennials and Generation Z especially are reporting higher levels of anxiety and depression than their predecessors, and this trend is due to continue, as many of them will inherit responsibilities within the Church, like that of being a pastor, at a far younger age than their forebears.

You add on top of this already volatile human mix of factors the fact that we have in the First World an institutional Church increasingly obsessed with process and product rather than relation and reason. No one gets a call from the chancery to ask after one’s health. Rarer still is real solicitude for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the Priests. Perhaps even worse, many Priests resist such outreach even when it comes, because many instinctively believe such an interest is insincere. This is a point where I would like to say that if it is bad for Priests who run parishes and other institutions, how bad must it be for the Bishops? Yet the difference is that it is precisely the Bishops who have the power to influence this state of affairs, but so far have shown more reactive energy in crisis management than proactive action in trying to help Priests and themselves before things get truly dire. We seemingly lurch from problem to problem, and I am not very sure we remember who and what we are.

Consider the Priests out there who have had to do painful things like closing and merging schools and parishes. Some have even had to endure death threats and physical intimidation from the people who are supposedly their flock. I wish these stories were rare, but many Pastors know the heartache and difficulties that come from having to do those things. Or consider the opposite case: Pastors who lead growing mega-churches almost the size of Protestant mega-churches, but where the role and importance of a Priest in many places is largely lost in swarms of “Lay Ministers”. Some Dioceses have made the role of a Pastor largely irrelevant outside of the strictly administrative and sacramental. The first Apostles made Deacons precisely to avoid being caught up excessively in administration to the detriment of preaching the word and prayer. Now it seems that an increasing number of Priests can find time for neither. This is a recipe for disaster.

Let’s consider the recently well-circulated piece from the AP, “US Catholic Priests describe turmoil amid sex abuse crisis“. Dr. Terry Mattingly does a good job in his analysis of the piece, where he describes Priests as “stakeholders” in the story. His questions are more important than what the AP coverage suggests. Firstly, the headline may be about sex abuse (it earns plenty of clicks, no?), but the whole article is really about stress and the concrete stressors of Priests across the country. Secondly, Mattingly notices a discrepancy between the AP’s focus on the problems traditionally affecting the Catholic ‘heartland’ of America, which was mostly in the Northeast, and the growth of the “Sunbelt”. Now, he notices, we have a sort of “two-speed” Church in America: a relatively booming south, benefiting from the dual forces of migration from the north and immigration from the south, and the relative depopulation of the American Northeast in total. What Priests in the North and the South seem to have in common is a problem managing expectations, as Northerners want the same “services” their ancestors enjoyed, even as their own participation is paltry, while in the south, the model which seems to prevail is that of having Church buildings which could hold thousands at a time, so as to maximalize the amount of faithful that can attend one Mass at a time. While this is understandable and I sympathize with this, the meta-picture is not looking good: whereas the Catholic population has largely doubled since 1960, and the number of Priests in the US has halved, we are doing 1.5 more Masses than we were in 1960. That statistic does not take into account all the other responsibilities of the Priesthood, but that alone should give us pause.

Yet I find that, in conversations with Priests across the world, the care of souls is not the primary cause of burnout: instead, it is when a Priest finds himself wedged between a proverbial rock and a hard place. That is, where the people they work with are hostile or apathetic, and the people that work above them are the same.

There is another stressor which did not exist for previous generations; a sense of mistrust of even the Roman Pontiff and the Holy See, which is eroding from the very center the place of the Pope in the consciousness of the average Priest. In the movie Casablanca, they always had Paris to fall back to. In 2019, most Priests don’t know if they will have Rome. The massive sense of apostasy is probably the single most discouraging sign of the times. To quote Elie Wiesel, “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” The average parish Priest is having trouble breaking through the spiritual apathy (acedia) of the people. As one elderly Byzantine Priest told me, “I joined the service of the Lord’s vineyard to feed Christ’s sheep. I never could have imagined that one day I would be feeding swine.”

There are a few suggestions I have to help to buttress the flagging spirits of clergy, bishops included. First, we ought to put behind us as a failed experiment the creeping corporatism of the past forty years. Secular businesses may have good models and practices for making money and promoting a product: but this does not transfer into the Holy Church. We can learn some things, but we must never adapt ourselves completely to the modus operandi of the business world. Most of our Churches and schools were built with by men and women who were poor in wealth, but rich in faith. Out of their meager wages and living standards, they erected most of the beautiful things we still enjoy today, and even take for granted. We are the most affluent Catholics in world history, yet it seems we can’t even run a decent charity without getting a huge portion of our financing from state subsidies.

The need to forsake corporatism also extends to parish and diocesan bureaucracies. Some Episcopal Conferences are multi-million dollar monstrosities with negligible use, either to the bishops themselves, or to the Church at large. Some Parishes, on the other hand, employ multiple secretaries, business managers, liturgy coordinators, directors of religious education, and more…and what do we have to show for such a prodigy of expenditure? Where is this actually taking us? Cui bono?

My second suggestion is that Bishops and Priests need to be more supportive of each other. There are some assignments which are very difficult. If a Bishop sends a Priest there, the Bishop should be very clear that the Priest will be backed as much as possible, even if he has to make some changes. A Bishop may even want to consider refusing to send a Priest to a Parish or other institution which is a notorious ‘Priest eater’. When Our Lord wasn’t wanted by people, he did not beg to be loved and accepted. He moved on with his work. We need the courage sometimes to do the same, even if it appears we aren’t “accompanying” people in their own obstinacy in the road to destruction. Bishops should consider pushing more initiatives for evangelization than they do capital campaigns. It’s a lot easier for me to take my Bishop and his leadership seriously if he does not squander his ‘spiritual capital’ on endless assessments, when it is clear to us that the people have less and less faith.

My third suggestion is that Priests and Bishops together resist as much as possible the dangers of isolation. The ‘Oratory model’ of rectory living may be the healthiest out there. The ‘lone ranger’ Pastor is potentially dangerous situation. Maybe some sort of hybrid between an oratorian and a cathedral canon may be helpful: that is, making the community of prayer and fraternal support primary, while being sent out for ministry flows from that primary apostolate, that of prayer. Someone may say that that sounds similar to religious life, and it is. But I find it more troubling that prayer and fraternal support are becoming more the specializations of the religious orders than for Priests in general. We risk losing the ‘soul’ of our work if we do not regain our raison d’etre, and it is not to be a Mass machine or a corporate functionary. We are meant to be Apostles.

The Priest feels within himself the imprint of his sacerdotal character. If he is forced to a mode of life which is alien or prejudicial to his divinely predestined vocation, it should not surprise us if the result is sadness and disorientation. Good mental health and good spiritual health are intimately connected, and unless we can return to making that primary, I believe we are going to have more sick Priests, and a more sick Church, as a consequence.