The Gift Wrapped Up

Introduction

Without shepherds

Twice in the gospels we read that the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd.” Mark writes in today’s gospel that a huge crowd thronged around Jesus and “his heart was moved with compassion for the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd.” So he began to teach them many things, and when evening drew on, and they were hungry, he multiplied the loaves and fishes for them (Mk 6: 34-44).

Matthew uses the same expression for another occasion. “At the sight of the crowds, the heart of Jesus was moved with compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd. So he said to his disciples, `There is an abundant crop out there in the fields, but laborers are scarce. So beg the lord of the harvest to send more laborers into his harvest’” (Mt 9:36-38).

A problem to be fixed

With what compassion would Jesus look upon us Catholics today who are sheep without shepherds, and whose parishes are without priests! As we speak, here at Old St. Mary’s we are engaged in the changing of the guard. In a kind of sotto voce, Father George once said to me, “I am not going to fix the shortage of priest by hanging on beyond the retiring age. That problem,” he said, “the church herself will have to fix.” So Fr. Tim, pastor of the Church of the Three Holy Women, is now also the pastor of old St. Mary’s. Over and over again I have heard him spoken of in the most glowing terms. I have heard how the people, even young ones, flock to his Church of the Three Holy Women. Now he has a fourth church to take care of. The nicer the poor guy is, the sooner he’s going to burn himself out. We the church have a crisis on our hands: our sheep are without shepherds and our parishes are without priests. .

Here I recall the words of Fr. Hans Küng, Swiss German Catholic theologian, in his little volume, Why I Am Still a Christian. He writes, “I cannot believe that he who said `I have compassion on the crowd,’ [who were like sheep without a shepherd] would have increasingly deprived congregations of their pastors and allowed a system of pastoral care built up over a period of a thousand years to collapse.” (He was speaking to our priest shortage and to our band-aid methods of fixing it, like the Church of the Three Holy Women. We, the church, have a crisis on our hands, and band-aids, necessary as they are for the moment, won’t fix it.

When winter hits Wisconsin with a vengeance, I have the luxury of escaping deep into the heart of Texas as a snowbird. In 2004 I celebrated an Ash Wednesday Mass in a little country parish of St. Anthony in Danberry. I was taking the place of the pastor whom I had never met. I was told that he is sickly and actually says Sunday Mass sitting on a high chair at the altar. And here I was, a spring chicken of 79 years, limping in to help the poor old man.

The next winter 2005, I called the Vicar General of the Houston-Galveston Archdiocese and asked whether I could be of some help in a parish near Alvin, Texas, where my sister lives. (It’s also the hometown of the famous pitcher Nolan Ryan.) I can still hear the surprise and relief in his voice. He exclaimed, “Oh my gosh! You’re an answer to our prayers. One of our priests just suddenly died and isn’t even buried yet. We do, indeed, need help for the moment.” He was speaking about a beloved pastor of Mary Star of the Sea Church in a little blue-collar town named Freeport on the Gulf of Mexico. Here again I was limping in at a ripe old age of 80 to help out. Sheep without shepherds and parishes without priests! We the church have a crisis on our hands. Our sheep are without shepherds—our parishes are without priests. Band-aids, necessary as they are for the moment, won’t fix it.

Fixing what’s not broken!

Last month US bishops voted to fix the wording of many of the prayers we’ve been using at Mass for more than 35 years. It is said that the Vatican (whoever that might be) wanted those prayers brought into greater conformity with the original Latin. I’m sure that also has been bothering many of you. “For example, the “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you” in the prayer before Communion will now be fixed to say, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.” Here’s another earth-shattering fix: the familiar exchange of greetings between priest and congregation “The Lord be with you/And also with you” will now be fixed to say, “The Lord be with you/And with your spirit.”

One commentator wrote, “Shame on you shepherds for expending so much time, energy and travel-expense on a meeting to fix something that is not broken [while a system of pastoral care built up over a period of a thousand years is allowed to collapse]. Shame on you for not mustering up enough courage to insist upon fixing what’s really broken. Your sheep are without shepherds. Your parishes are without priests. The only courage it takes to fix what’s not broken is to withstand the scorn or ridicule of people who laugh at you.”

Our crisis of priest shortage is a good thirty years old. It’s getting as old as we priests. Crises should not be left to die of old age. They should be met with courage. Already a good fifteen years ago, Archbishop Weakland had the courage to try to fix the crisis with something more substantial than band-aids. He addressed it in a long pastoral letter to the Church of Milwaukee. After making a number of careful qualifications, he writes, “I would be willing to help the community surface a qualified candidate for the ordained priesthood, even though that person would be a married man. And without raising false expectations or unfounded hopes for him or the community, I would be willing to present such a candidate to the Pastor of the Universal Church (the Pope)” (Catholic Herald, January 10, 1991). “I would be willing to beg the Lord of the harvest to send more laborers into his harvest.”

Here again I recall the words of Fr. Hans Kung in his little volume. He writes, “I cannot believe that he who was constantly accompanied by women (who provided for his keep), and whose apostles, except for Paul, were all married and remained so, would today have forbidden marriage to all ordained men, and ordination to all women.

Dishing out blame

Some blame the priest shortage crisis, at least in part, on the law of celibacy. Though it’s not the only cause of the present crisis or even the most important one, that law is, indeed, a cause. For there are fine healthy young men out there who might want to be not only the husband of a woman and the father of children but also an ordained priest of God.

Some blame the shortage crisis on the clergy sex-abuse scandal which has rocked the church in recent years. There’s some truth to that, too. Who wants to become a priest, when priesthood these days carries a compromised reputation, perhaps wrongly so because an honest statistic shows that only 4% of priests are sexual abusers (4% too many), while 96% of us are not. I don’t know what the percentage is for ministers or lawyers or doctors.

Blame the shortage crisis on the law of celibacy and blame it also on the sex abuse scandal. Father Andrew Greeley blames it, implicitly at least, also on poor priestly performance. He quotes a survey in the Los Angeles Times on why Catholics become disaffected with their church and leave. Three quarters of the priests surveyed blamed the laity for the disaffection and departure. They cited a list of horrors: the laity’s materialism, secularism, individualism, hedonism, their lack of a prayer-life, etc., etc. Those priests washed their hands of any responsibility for the disaffection and departure of Catholics from their church.

One quarter of the priest surveyed, however, blamed themselves for the disaffection and departure. (God bless them.) They cited a list of their own horrors: their lack of sensitivity, humanity, compassion, and especially their ho-hum homilies and their lackluster liturgies. The survey, I believe, explains not only why Catholics in general are disaffected and leave the church but also why young men in particular aren’t too inspired to become priests. We have a crisis on our hands, and there are many different explanations for it.

The priestly people’s search

God be praised for our crisis of priest shortage! Iterum dico gaudete! Again I say God rejoice! Again I say God be praised for our crisis! It forces us to ask a pared-down and bare-boned question which we would never think of asking had we no crisis. We are forced to ask what in the world should we, a priestly people, look for, when we look for a priestly head?

Should we look for a good administrator to get things done? Should we look for a doctrinist to tell us what the church’s teachings are? Should we look for a legalist to lay down church law for us? When we, the priestly people, go in search of a priestly head, should we look for a celibate to remind us of the superiority of the non-sexual over the sexual? Should we look for a male to remind us that this is a man’s world?

None of the above. When we, the priestly community, go in search of a priestly head, we should expend our time and energy looking for someone who’s good at Word and good at Sacrament. We should look for someone who at the Liturgy of the Word will have compassion upon hungry sheep and feed them with meaning and send them forth refreshed and renewed for the work week ahead. We should look for someone who at the Liturgy of the Eucharist lifts bread on high in such a manner that the assembly sees more than meets the eye. We should look for someone who at the Ite Missa est has the assembly exclaiming like Peter on Mt. Tabor, “Oh how good it is for us to be here” (Lk 9:33)!

For that we don’t need a good celibate or a good male. For that we need a good human being and good breaker of bread. Of that there is no shortage out there. There is a rich supply of married men and even of women waiting to be harvested into the bins of ordained clergy. The sheep don’t have to be without shepherds. Just as it’s a waste not to reap the harvest but to let it rot out there in the fields, so it is also a waste not to tap that abundant supply.

The gift wrapped up

We the church have a crisis on our hands. Crisis comes from the Greek Krisis, meaning “a turning point.” Its verb form (krinein) means “to decide.” A crisis is a moment in the journey of life when we come to a fork in the road, a turning point calling for a courageous decision. We almost always regard a crisis negatively, as when we cry out, “Oh my God, we’ve got a crisis on our hands!” But old oriental wisdom looks upon a crisis positively. It is not only a moment calling for a courageous decision; it is often also a moment that has opportunity as a gift wrapped up in it.

As we speak there is the Middle East crisis with which the media is bombarding us 24/7. It’s a fork in the road. It’s a moment calling for courageous decisions from the family of nations--the Lebanese, the Israeli, moderate Islamic countries, the UN. Despite the terrible appearance of things—the carnage and rubble--, it is also a moment with opportunity as a gift wrapped up in it: the gift of Israel and Lebanon freed from their paranoid fear or insane hatred of the other and at long last living side by side in peace.

We all sooner or later meet up with crises. We all sooner or later come to a fork in the road, a turning point calling for a courageous decision. We all also tend to let our crises die of old age instead of facing them. We all also tend to fix things that aren’t broken in order to avoid fixing what is broken. We all find it hard to be positive and find the gift of opportunity that is often (not always) wrapped up in our crisis.

Conclusion

The gift wrapped

Look at all the gift wrapped up in our present crisis of priest shortage. If the church would meet the crisis head on with courage everybody would win. Healthy young men, who want to minister but who also want to marry, will win. Women, too, who can do just as good a job (and also just as bad a job) as men do, will also win. The three or four holy women who had to join a coalition with a funny name will also win. They’ll each get back their own individual churches with their own individual names, and they’ll each have their own priests again, and a system of pastoral care built up over a period of a thousand years won’t fall into ruin. Fr. Tim will also win. He’ll have help and won’t have to burn himself out before his time. And I, too, will win; I’ll be able to retire before I’m ninety.

The Mass always ends with dismissal. Ite Missa est. Go, the Mass is ended. Go, take courage and fix what’s really broken. Go, lift your fallen spirit and look for the gift that’s wrapped up in your crisis.