In my own reflections on the priesthood and the many questions I have had to ask myself from a spiritual angle, I came across The maturing of Thomas Merton’s views on priesthood on a “liberal” forum. The fact that many on that forum want the Roman Catholic Church to emulate the American Episcopal Church in one way or another does not matter to me for the purposes of this article.

I was particularly struck by this paragraph:

During 1968, the final year of life for Thomas Merton, Father Louis was offering what some in officialdom might have considered subversive advice to an anonymous priest who could not decide whether to stay in or to leave the active ministry. To a Father D., the monk wrote something of the way he himself had come to understand and to live his own monastic and priestly vocation from his hermitage in the woods: “Couldn’t you be a sort of underground priest’ in lay clothes, saying Mass in private homes among people you are at ease with, and perhaps also serving some tiny community, some convent, and helping out with shut-ins, people who are forgotten, who suffer, etc.? In order words it seems to me that in this Post-Conciliar period you might be called to a kind of hidden service in the sort of unofficial and informal life you desire. In short, be like a layman, live like a layman, but do some priestly work or service along with it. “I don’t see that you have to stop being a priest just because the routine machinery of parish organization is bugging you. All the more reason to get out of the ordinary patterns and yet to be a priest nevertheless, and work in a quiet, relaxed relationship with people you can relate to without too much difficulty. After all, you are always going to have to relate to people. See your priesthood not as a role or an office, but as just – part of your own life and your own relation to other persons. You can bring them Christ in some quiet way, and perhaps you will find yourself reaching people that the Church would not otherwise contact.”