The thought occurred to me today that a good way to fight the declining number of priests and nuns might be to emphasize that it can be a relatively short-term vocation, rather than a life-long commitment. Yes, people sign on with the expectation that they’ll serve for life, but it often doesn’t turn out that way – priests and nuns leave their chosen path for all sorts of reasons, and the Church accepts that. So what if you emphasized that possibility from the outset, and encouraged people to take their vows and serve for just a few years? So, for example, say you have a 22-year old kid who graduates from college and isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life. He is Catholic and admires the Church, but he doesn’t want to become a priest because someday he wants to marry and have children. But then he learns that he can join the priesthood and serve for a pre-arranged period of four years, after which he and everyone concerned understands that he will leave the priesthood and continue on with other areas of his life.
So, this is part GQ and part IMHO: is there anything in Catholic dogma that would prevent such an arrangement? Would this system work? How would you feel about it?
The idea is that everyone is called to a vocation: religious life, single life or married life. Religious life and married life are consecrated through sacraments and they create a permanent identity for the person, which doesn’t go away even if they leave that station in life. People who believe their vocation is with the priesthood don’t even get to perform the duties of priesthood for many years so to give someone those responsibilities immediately and for a short term is inappropriate.
There are certainly plenty of opportunities for people to have short-term human service experiences without making a lifelong commitment. It’s hoped that those experiences would lead to a greater understanding of one’s lifetime vocation.
I remember reading in a comparative religion class that this sort of thing is more common in some Eastern religions, and thinking it was a pretty good idea. Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, and I think it could also have the added benefit of creating a whole demographic of people with lifelong ties to the Church, even stronger than what one might develop through lay service.
All that said, I understand what gigi is saying about the Church and vocations not really being set up to work this way. It would require a significant shift in attitudes and values, and I just don’t know if that’s likely.
You don’t hear as much about delayed vocations (widows and widowers entering religious life), but that does happen. I’ve always rather thought the Church should promote it more. I imagine such a lifestyle change might be more difficult for an older person, though.
When I was Catholic, I thought this would be a great idea. Sort of like ROTC, only with the clergy. Someone who had spent four years as a priest was going to be a lot more likely to stay in the church, I thought. That’s not how they do things, though. A congregation with a few ex-clergy could be very difficult to manage, for one thing.
As mentioned by gigi, the seminary training that is required to become a priest is an extremely lengthy process. I think it’s something like eight years of post-high school training. So, one challenge would be how to “streamline” that kind of intense training without making people think of them as lesser priests.
As I understand it, part of the reasoning behind the celibacy requirement is that the priest is showing his love of God by choosing to sacrifice his chance to have a family, so I think that would be another major problem in getting Catholics to accept the idea of short-term priests.
Well, I’m not Catholic, but we share a fair amount of ecclesial theology, so I can make some intelligent comments.
The Church doesn’t call priests (in its view); God does. What it does is help distinguish (“discernment”) between those with a valid call from Him, and those self-deluded, pressured into aspirant status by family or friends, etc.
There’s no such thing as an ex-priest. There are priests who have resigned from active priestly work, ones who have been thrown out for various reasons, etc. But making someone a priest is marking them for life with an empowerment to be and do certain things that are priestly prerogatives. When someone “quits the priesthood to marry,” what they mean is that they’re reassuming status as a layman in a congregation, and the church inhibits their authority as active clergy except in emergency situations.
The Anglican Church, which has no celibacy rule, has, of course a lot of married priests. But what is not known is that it has a fair number of full-fledged priests who engage in other work than “priest of a church” for their income and daily work, ministering as a priest in their spare time. There are five Anglican priests resident at my parish: the husband-and-wife couple who are our rector and associate rector; a professor of English at N.C. State who has been active in the parish since soon after its founding, and always worships there when not called on to supply another church; the diocesan coordinator of new missions, who is usually somewhere else but does the same thing on her rare Sundays “off”; and our retired rector, who continues to worship there and occasionally subs (as does the professor) to give our clergy couple vacation time.
What is not widely known is that there is no theological reason for Roman Rite Catholic priests to be celibate; it’s a law of the church, formulated in medieval times for one reason (simony) and retained today for another (pressure of parish needs vs. family responsibilities), from which the church can dispense individuals at need, and which could be abrogated in whole or in part at any time by act of the Pope or a General Council.
A much better solution would be to do what has worked for the East for the past 2000 years, and end the (imo stupid) requirement for clerical celibacy. Allow married men to become priests, give a one-time exemption to the rule that clerics cannot marry (so current priests may marry if they so choose), and don’t ordain priests if they are not to have an active parish ministry.
This would go a long way towards increasing the number of priests, and returning the priesthood to its proper role as being the leader and spiritual father of a parish, as opposed to being a “magic man” who flits in, administers the sacraments, and scurries off to the next appointment.
Well, my diocese has 14 men entering the seminary this year, and the Nashville Dominicans (which is an order that still uses a full, floor-length habit) has 16 women entering the convent. Mind you, a good percentage of those will discern that there isn’t a vocation, but surely many will. Yes, there aren’t large classes entering the religious life, but it’s far from a hopeless situation.
In my opinion, a vocation isn’t a part-time or short-term thing. If you can’t make the commitment, don’t take the vows. And of course, there’s nothing that holds men there if they decide to leave the priesthood. It’s a lifetime commitment, but so is marriage, and see how many of those don’t last a lifetime. You go into it trying your best.
I’m discerning my vocation as a nun (that’s not totally true; I have little doubt that I’m called to be a Benedictine, God’s time line just moves a bit slower than mine) and I can’t imagine only being one for the short term. For me, becoming a nun isn’t just about figuring out what I want to be when I grow up, it’s figuring out how I want to live. Does that make any sense at all? Imagining being a short-term nun is akin to me imagining being a short-term wife or a short-term mother. It just doesn’t make sense to plan on that.
This is just my gut response though. It’s an interesting question and I’m sure I’ll be musing on it for a bit longer. If I have any noteworthy thoughts on the topic, I’ll come back and share more.
Being a nun is something totally different; a nun is not the female equivalent of a priest, but the female equivalent of a monk, which is a different vocation from the priesthood. A priest serves the Church by being the head of a community and administering the sacraments. In fact, theologically speaking, a priest is essentially a stand-in for his bishop, which is also how the office of the priesthood originated. A monk or nun abandons all worldly attachments in order to dedicate all aspects of their life to serving the Church.
The two vocations have become conflated in the West, but there’s no necessary reason for it to be so.
And yet people can become “short-term nuns or monks” by becoming oblates. Maybe the closest thing to a part time priest would be someone who commits their time to a ministry.
I don’t think you fully understand what oblates are. I know two Carmelite oblates who say that becoming one is a lengthy process which involves a lifelong affiliation as a layperson with an order. It isn’t short-term, but it also isn’t full profession into an order. For lack of a better term, the two women I know are kind of like junior nuns.
I would not be any more supportive of having short term priests than I would of having short term surgeons or engineers. I would like a guy who was pretty much committed to his field for the long haul to run my parish.
That being said, I feel that something is going to have to give soon. I have seen much more priests retire than come in, I have seen only 2 under 40 year old priest in the past 5 years, and the parishes I attend have been scouring the globe looking for priests (Africa, Eastern Europe, Vietnam to name a few). I am OK with priests getting married.
Father Pedro Legaria (whose name people often mistake for Plegaria, “prayer”) founded the Orden de las Esclavas del Sagrado Corazón de Jesus (Slaves of the Sacred Heart); they’re dedicated to having Casas de Ejercicios, houses where people can go to organize Spiritual Exercises and other religious retreats. The nuns do not take perpetual vows; they take vows for limited periods and renew them or not at will. The usual term is ten years. I’ve known nuns who were expecting to be needed back home at any time (old parents) so they were taking vows in yearly periods. I’ve always thought it’s a neat idea.
Each order of nuns is dedicated to a specific task, so when you join one, you’re basically saying what kind of jobs you want to have.
Most of the nuns I know to whom people refer to as “ex-nuns” aren’t, they’re still nuns but back home taking care of ailing relatives. I know one ex-nun who lost her faith and two who are married.
As for the priesthood, I’ve seen priests who had all kinds of jobs (teacher, doctor, bricklayer) and priests who changed orders or who left an order or who had started as regular priests and then moved into an order. The immense majority of “ex”- priests I know are married ones; a few have lost their faith. But you do not need to stop being a priest in order to get into a different line of work. Both the ability to change jobs and the permanence of the priesthood happen because it’s not a job, it’s a Sacrament.
I’d drop that stupid prohibition about priests marrying. The Church worked fine for over a thousand years without that rule and it ekes out too many good men (either from the breeding pool or from the priesthood pool). Then again, I’d also allow female priests, I’m such a radical!
Depending on the circumstances, so do priests. There are priestly orders which are equivalent to monks and nuns. Yes, diocesan priests are somewhat different in that they may lve on their own and not as part of a community. Yet some churches are served by priests who live in community like some nuns and monks. There are also nuns and brothers who don’t live apart from the world at all, but in apostolic placements. (Roman-Catholic-centric comments!) MissMossie, I hope all is going well! I’m excited thinking about your journey.
This is all true. However, it’s just an illustration of the conflation of the two roles in the Western church, where almost all priests are essentially forced to become monks, and most monks are priests.
The point of the priesthood is to be a spiritual leader of a community. This was the understanding of the Church of the first millenium, and still is in the East (both Catholic and Orthodox). Most parish priests are married and have families. There are some (few) who are hieromonks, which means that they lead their communities and in addition have given up all worldly attachments to serve the Church. Conversely, most monks are not priests, but only the abbot of a monastery and enough elder monks to ensure that all in the monastery have sufficient access to the sacraments.
The conflating of the roles has several negative effects. It prevents men who would otherwise make fine priests from becoming such if they are not also called to forsake the world entirely, thus ultimately leading to the present shortage of priests. At the same time, it means there is an excess of priests running around who have no real priestly ministry, but instead serve other functions such as teaching, living in cloister, or being church bureaucrats. Finally, it has led (along with other factors, obviously) to a push for the ordination of women: if priests are monks and monks are priests, and nuns are the equivalent of monks, then why can’t they be priests, too? Whereas if the roles were distinct as they should be, the answer to that question would be obvious – because priests are to be spiritual fathers to their communities, and a mother and a father are two different things.
There was a very interesting article in Time magazine last November about the surprising rise in the number of women seeking to become nuns. The article noted as well the tendency for the younger sisters to wear the veil, while many older sisters wouldn’t be caught dead in a wimple. Vatican II released most nuns from the requirement of the “full outfit” IIRC, but the younger generation seems to be drawn to the very visible mark of their devotion.
It was fascinating article, especially for a non-Catholic such as myself. Here is a link, as well as a link to nun’s blog that discusses the article.
As I understand it, the sacrament of Holy Orders is a vocation, and makes an indelible stamp on one’s soul, it’s not a job that can be picked up and then left later.
