During this Year for Priests, the age-old issue concerning what is usually called "the scarcity of priests" is being raised anew with increasing frequency and intensity. Often, unfortunately, it is addressed from the context of various agendas, some of which emerge not from Gospel truth, but rather from sociological theory or even from refusal to accept the certain tenets of fixed doctrine and/or Magisterial norms and practices. Such questioning is happening despite the certainty that sociology can never reach to the heights of theology; nor can empirical psychology. Neither of these two "sciences," as helpful as each is in its own sphere, can be equated with philosophy, the queen of human science. And philosophy itself must stop and review quests whose nature is first defined as touching on Mysteries of Faith.
Priesthood is, at its core, a Mystery of Faith. Priesthood and priests cannot even be discussed outside of the Faith premiss.
Hence, discussing "the shortage of priests" necessarily entails wrestling with the essential meaning of priesthood. Rereading the great French Nobel Laureate, Francois Mauriac, on this issue in his meditations on Holy Thursday, first published in 1931 (made available in English in 1991), one finds these stunning words from a Catholic artist whose faith permeated all his writings:
"People say that there is a scarcity of priests. In truth, what an adorable mystery it is that there is a scarcity of priests.
"In truth, what an adorable mystery it is that there still are any priests. They no longer have any human advantage. Celibacy, solitude, hatred very often, derision and, above all, the indifference of a world in which there seems to be no longer room for them – such is the portion they have chosen. They have no apparent power; their task sometimes seems to be centered about material things, identifying them, in the eyes of the masses, with the staffs of town halls and of funeral parlors. A pagan atmosphere prevails all around them. The people would laugh at their virtue if they believed in it, but they do not… A thousand voices accuse those who fall..." (Holy Thursday, 1991; Manchester, NH; Sophia Institute Press; p. 33, itals. added.)
The incomparable novelist goes on to speak for priests who, despite the contradictions, and regardless of their dwindling numbers, nonetheless continue to hold the fort, as it were. No one seems surprised, he says, to see them laboring without any recognition, without appreciable salary, bowing over the bodies of the dying, to confer the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, and Penance, and Viaticum – or simply "ambling about the parish…"
Another holy author, from our own land, Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964, wrote these lines to a correspondent, lines which eventually were included by Sally Fitzgerald in her award-winning collection of Flannery’s letters, entitled The Habit of Being:
"It is easy for any child to pick out the faults in the sermon on his way home from church every Sunday. It is impossible for him to find out the hidden love that makes a man, in spite of his intellectual limitations, his neuroticism, his own lack of strength, give up his life to the service of God’s people, however bumblingly he may go about it." (The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald, N.Y., Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. pp. 307-8.)
O’Connor, whose reverence for the priesthood was as substantial as her incomparable artistry, was never reticent to address a topic squarely from the perspective of faith. Moreover, she belongs to our time, and was part of Connecticut’s faith community for more than a year as she finished her first great novel, before returning to her beloved Georgia and, at age 39, to the Lord whom she loved so much as a faithful daughter of his Church.
Which reminds us all here – priests and laity both – of the most brilliant of writers like O’Connor and, of course, Mauriac, who continue to make up an ever-lengthening list of witnesses for the priesthood. Doubtless, the first among them is Georges Bernanos, whose The Diary of a Country Priest remains a classic worthy of the artistry of Sigrid Undset or Fyodor Dostoevsky. In one sense, Bernanos’s portraits of priests constitute a standard by which priests in general are still assessed; "a priest like Bernanos" is, in modern French, the highest compliment possible.
A superb bibliography on the priesthood was published back in 1972 by one of Connecticut’s finest priests, Father Theophil T. Mierwinski, who served on the faculty and as librarian at St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield. Father Mierwinski’s little book appeared about the time that one of the greatest priests of the modern world was declared Blessed: the journalist, theologian and Marian preacher, St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose lifetime of heroic priestly commitment was summarized in his reply to his Nazi captors, prior to being relegated to a starvation bunker in infamous Auschwitz: "… I am a priest."
