Dupe
Yeah, you finally got it. Monks is not the same as priests.
Think of it as if pastors who belong to large churches are corporate employees, while those who are hired by a smaller congregation are employees of a smaller company.
Priests do not live in community, do not have a vow of poverty, do not have a vow of obedience, have always held other jobs if they wanted to (the “worker priest” movement of the '60s and '70s was about getting blue-collar jobs rather than the white-collar ones they’ve usually held, being educated people). They go on vacation wherever they want to and can afford, just like anybody else.
It depends on the order, though. Franciscan priests do take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Our parish priests were always TOR (Third Order Regular) Franciscans, and they all lived in the rectory. The church itself owned everything.
Hmm.. Quite the opposite from my impression of the way things worked. After all, you read things like the diocese moving a priest (many priests) halfway across the country or even out of the country on short notice. Although that didn’t stop the eventual lawsuits, they did often evade prosecution. So how did that work - did they find a non-parochial job? (According to news reports, no.) Did the guy in a nice cushy parish get told “you are getting a new asistant/partner”, or did they do the musical chairs thing? On the more mundane level, I heard stories of a local priest about 20 years ago who was moved because there were rumours he was carrying on with a divorced (female) parishoner.
As for jobs, the only “working” priests I ever heard of were doing things like teaching, university jobs, running charity projects and other such “church” stuff. Same with all the new articles, stories and literature I read about this… Maybe it would solve their priest shortage if the got back to the parsh priests being simply ordained from dedicated members of the local community with an outside life; but I never heard of priests living that way.
But then again, most of my exposure was decades ago, before I decided not to be involved with the church, and I never really asked any priests the details of their financial life. North Americans typically have this thing that how much money you have, or make, or how you spend it, is nobody’s business. Back then, the concern would be more about things like should the priest even have a TV, let alone colour TV, if most of his parishoners could not afford one? Is watching TV tripe even appropriate activity for a priest? Ah, we’ve come a long way, father…
All in all, very different from where the locals in a protestant church or synagog get a committee together from the church board, to hire someone and pay them out of the congregation assets.
I have never heard of the local Catholic congregation being in any way involved in priest hiring or selction, except to complain when a popular one was replaced by powers above. I guess if I cared at all, I would know more about current practices.