31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
Preached at the Church of the Assumption in Bellingham, WA
Previous Years: 2020 || 2017
Recording
https://moorejesus.podbean.com/e/hurt-by-priests/
Transcript
Thanks to J.Y. for edited the transcript.
I am probably hyper-sensitive given that I myself am a priest, but I’ve noticed over the last couple of months with the Synod—but really over the last couple of years, the last couple of decades—there is a strain of anti-clericalism in the Church. It usually takes the form of saying priests need to be different. Maybe the structure of the priesthood needs to be different; maybe priests should have less authority. We should make sure that that our parishes aren’t run by priests anymore, or maybe we should let the laity perform the sacraments—things like that. Sometimes it’s just saying, you know, priests aren’t good enough in this metric or that metric or whatever else. Two things to say about this.
On the one hand, we have to be very careful because Holy Orders is a sacrament ordained by Jesus Christ. It is the explicit will of Jesus Christ that His Church should be hierarchical—a word in Greek, which literally means an arrangement of priests—and that the people of God should be taken care of by priests. The priesthood is an essential constitutive element of the Church. It is the Protestant churches at the Reformation who rejected this sacramental view, who said holy orders is not a sacrament, that priesthood is a human institution, and that the leaders of the Church should be elected or chosen by the people. They’re not a special class; they’re just in a role that could be temporary.
On the other hand, if significant quarters of the Church are complaining about the priesthood, it means there is something wrong. Nobody asks to change something that is going well. All of these requests for changes mean that there is something that doesn’t live up to the standard of Jesus. If Jesus gave us the priesthood, if He intended that His Church should be hierarchical, it is because He believed that this would be the best for His people—that somehow this is the best way to provide pastoral care, that a Church with this structure is the best way for people to grow closer to Him over time, through the generations. If there are significant corners of the Church calling for a change in that, it means there are significant corners of the Church who have not felt that pastoral care. The way we might put that is, there are significant corners of the Church that have been hurt by priests, and in that hurt comes the call for change. The most obvious of these, just to put it on the table before I go to the rest of the homily, is obviously the sex abuse crisis. It is not surprising to me that over the last 20 years, and then over the last four years since the McCarrick scandal, that there have been more and more calls against the priesthood. Rightly so. There is a lot of pain that comes from that. I don’t want to pass judgment on anybody who is saying something seems to be deeply wrong, and I want to fix it.
Now, our readings give us three ways in which we may have been hurt by priests, in which priests might do damage to their people. The first one from Malachi talks about priests who are losing their way. Specifically, Malachi says, You have turned aside from the way, and have caused many to falter by your instruction—which is to say, priests who are teaching wrongly. You have made void the covenant of Levi, says the Lord of hosts—thecovenant of Levi is the book of Leviticus listing all of the rules and laws that bind the priesthood, so he refers to priests who have decided that those laws don’t apply to them and lead people astray. And Malachi also says, since you do not obey my ways, but show partiality in your decisions—priestswho have decided, well, it doesn’t really matter what the Church says, I have my favorite tribe and I’m going to favor them in my decisions. All of these attitudes do incredible, incredible damage to the people of God.
Jesus says in the Gospel to call nobody on earth Rabbi, which means teacher or father or master. Now, if we took that very literally, then you would all be the worst sinners for addressing anybody as professor or teacher, or addressing anybody as Mr. or Mrs., both of which mean master, or addressing anybody as Dad. Good luck calling your Dad by his first name. I’m sure he loves that. Instead, the point that Jesus is making is that the authority of these titles come from God. There is one Teacher, there is one Father, there is one Master, and anybody who wants to use that title had better reflect teaching, fatherhood and mastery as God lives it out. If you’re going to call me Father, it is only because I am living out the fatherhood of God. If I deviate from the fatherhood of God, I no longer deserve that title, and it would be wrong to give it to me. The same is true of earthly fathers. The same is true of any teacher. They have to teach like God teaches. And so all three of those titles belong to priests. We have to teach. We have to father. We have to govern—the word we use today for master. And if we deviate from the Church or from the Lord in any of those ways, we are no longer worthy of those titles. It does incredible damage to the people of God for a priest to stand up and say, “Yeah, I know the Catechism says that, but I don’t agree with it.” Well, all due respect, Father, I don’t care what you think. Your opinion has no power to save anybody. It is only the Church; it is only God that brings salvation. When a priest makes himself the ultimate authority of the liturgy, of the teaching, of pastoral practice, when he decides he is smarter than Rome, when he decides that he knows more theology than his bishop, it becomes deeply problematic. And as Malachi says, it leads the people of God astray. You have turned aside from the way, and have caused many to falter by your instruction.
Just one example from my own life of how this does damage. My grandfather did not receive the anointing of the sick before he died. There was a priest at the hospital, and we called him in. When he showed up, my grandfather was in a coma, and he said, well, the sacrament of the sick is not for those in a coma. Because this priest had gotten to a place where he believed the power of the sacraments wasn’t in the priest standing in persona Christi—that instead the power of the sacraments was the person encountering Jesus through this dialogical interaction between people—he believed a person would have no benefit from the sacraments if they were in a coma. That is not the teaching of the Church. My family was done incredible damage because this priest decided he knew more than the Church, that his theological notions were more important than those of the Church. In every way, it does damage to the people of God.
Another way in which priests will damage their people comes to us in our second reading, or rather in comparison to Saint Paul. Saint Paul says, With such affection for you, we were determined to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our very selves as well, so dearly beloved you had become to us. You recall, dear brothers and sisters, our toil and drudgery. Working night and day…we proclaimed to you the gospel of God to you. There are priests who feel like they are phoning it in, who kind of treat the priesthood like a 9 to 5 job. They are in the office, and maybe you can get a hold of them, but they don’t really have an interest in being part of their people’s lives—going to their homes, getting to know their families, going out beyond themselves with zeal for the Gospel. It is a sad thing when a priest loses his zeal. We see it happen over and over again, and when that happens, it does damage to the people of God. You deserve a Saint Paul. You deserve somebody who is working zealously and ardently to preach the Gospel, because a priest, again, has to reflect God Himself. God is working tirelessly to bring you to salvation, and a man who stands in the place of God should reflect that. Tirelessness. We are very blessed here in Whatcom County; all four priests here take very seriously their sick calls. But I’ve heard from other priests, friends of mine, that there are parts of the archdiocese where priests won’t take a sick call for somebody who’s not in their pews every Sunday. They get a call from a hospital priest, and their response is: Do I know the person? Are they registered? Well, it’s not my problem. That’s deeply damaging to the people of God.
And finally, we get to the Gospel, and Jesus gives us a couple standards. One of the standards, that I’ve talked about already, is a priest who doesn’t live up to his titles; a father who doesn’t act like a father. Another one is priests who don’t make any effort to help their people. As Jesus says, They tie up heavy burdens hard to carry and lay them on people’s shoulders, but will not lift a finger to move them. If I’m going to stand here and preach sin, then I have a responsibility to be in that confessional, helping people alleviate their sins and find a path forward. If I’m going to say we’re going to bind ourselves to the Code of Canon Law and all of the difficulties with marriage that comes from that—people with irregular marriage situations—well, then I and the parish have a responsibility to walk with people through a long and hard process to get themselves regularized with the Church. I can’t just throw the book at them and walk away. That would be abandonment of my priesthood. But Jesus does say in reference to the scribes and Pharisees, Therefore do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you. That office is handed on to the priests of the New Testament; they sit on the chair of Moses. The priesthood still has the authority of teaching, and that authority can’t be abandoned by the Church. But if a priest preaches and doesn’t practice, it’s incredibly damaging to the people of God.
You should have priests who take seriously not just their priesthood, but who also take seriously their Christianity first and foremost as a foundation—men who desire first to be Christians, to follow the Lord Jesus personally in their lives, and only after that, exercise an office in the Church. As Jesus puts it, you deserve priests who are servants, who are among you as servants who don’t exalt themselves but humble themselves in service and practice. A priest who doesn’t do that, who obviously doesn’t take seriously his faith, who doesn’t desire holiness, who doesn’t live out the things that he preaches is incredibly damaging to the people of God.
Now, I am not preaching this homily against anybody except myself. I know these temptations. I have felt these temptations powerfully. The temptation to make myself the standard of all Catholicism, to make myself the authority by which all things are judged. I know the temptation to laziness, to just make it somebody else’s problem. I know the temptation to accept honor and praise and glory without doing the work. I know the temptation to sin, as all of us know the temptation to sin. I give you these standards for two reasons. One, to apologize on behalf of myself and any priest who may have done damage to your faith. You deserve good and holy priests. That was the Lord’s intention in instituting the priesthood. And if we can’t walk away from the priesthood, then we can’t walk away from our desire to have holy priests. If you have ever experienced a priest who didn’t live up to the titles or the standard, I am sorry on my behalf and on behalf of them.
Second, I give you this homily as a way of accountability. Like I said, I know these temptations, and I think, as the people of God, you have a responsibility first and foremost to pray for your priests, because we desperately need it. We have a big spiritual target on our backs. But also hold us accountable. If we are lazy, if we are deviating from the Church, if we are hypocrites in some way, shape or form., we need to know. For the sake of yourselves and for your fellow parishioners, you have to keep us holy. We answer to the bishop, but the bishop is two hours away in Seattle. Sometimes I just need to hear from the people in the pews that I need to shape up. That’s okay. I don’t want to hear it, but sometimes I need to hear it. In the end, the priesthood is a gift. Jesus would not have made the Church this way if it weren’t a gift. It is a gift to the people of God that you should have shepherds. Sometimes that gift is corrupted, and it does damage. But please pray for your priests so that you can experience the priesthood of the Church as the gift that Jesus wishes it to be, that you can experience the priesthood of the Church as a sign of God’s love for you.
Fr. Moore 