Another request arrived by e-mail, asking me to comment on Fr Robert Hart’s article Yes it does matter. Initially, I was reticent as I have read a number of articles by this apparently quite erudite priest of the Anglican Catholic Church in the US, and who has been quite intemperate in his language and unmeasured in his polemics over the past few years. It remains that he has studied, comes from a family of interesting ideas and is appreciated.
I reverence his reverence, notably a vision of Anglicanism represented by the post-Reformation high-church movement from the late sixteenth century to the era of the Restoration under King Charles II. The vision is that of the Old High-Church, with which I have some sympathy if it is not too much of a single-issue. However, my own vision is wider between what was wholesome in medieval Catholicism to the aspirations of the ordinary people we meet every day in our time.
In a nutshell, Fr Hart is advocating high standards for ordination of new priests for the Church, any Church, and in his case, the Anglican Catholic Church. Having myself been a product of the Roman Catholic seminary system in its retro version, I have given a good deal of thought to the training of priests. I believe the good Father Hart is trying to compare the importance given to a priest validly celebrating the Sacraments simply because he has been ordained by a Bishop in Apostolic Succession with the education he needs to be capable of explaining the Scriptures and their meaning to the congregation. Indeed, the Word is on a par with the Sacrament in Christian worship. There he is right. The priest also needs to have solid moral and human qualities and be a devout Christian.
The issue really is one of standards of the clergy. I have been quite shocked to see the abysmal ignorance of some priests I have met, particularly in the “independent sacramental” world and in continuing Anglican jurisdictions. Amateur bungling prevails, and if it goes on for long enough, you get characters like in this country selling blessed roses on St Rita’s day, at twice the price if they are individually blessed! The bishop (validly ordained but pig-ignorant) I am thinking about lives just down the road from where I live. I think of a story related at the Council of Trent when they were discussing liturgical abuses. In the early sixteenth century, a bishop visited a parish and was given a very grubby and old host for his Mass, and rightly complained about it to the priest. The priest replied by asking what was wrong with it, because he had been using it for the past fifteen years. He was consecrating the same host each time he celebrated Mass but never received Communion. That priest was doubtlessly “validly ordained”!
A priest needs to have the equivalent of a university degree in philosophy and theology, and then needs to have had years of experience of liturgical practice. Normally, a candidate for priestly training has already spent a significant time in a parish and has learned the functions of acolyte, thurifer and MC, and has watched what the priest and deacon do week after week. In the Roman Catholic Church, you went to a seminary and lived a “soft” monastic life for five to six years, sometimes longer. You learned to be a cleric and develop clerical manners, and polished it to a fine art. Like men in prison, one also learned to use intrigue and other means to manipulate others according to the power of your personality and lack of scruple. The seminary is a double-edged sword. Also the seminary is not designed for married candidates for the priesthood as are found in the Eastern Orthodox and Anglican traditions.
For me, the ideal is a young man who has been an altar server for years and / or who has sung in the choir, and shown commitment in his parish. He then goes to university and studies theology and acquires a critical spirit. Perhaps he gets a job for a few years and grows up as a person, then gets married and the first children are born. If the Church he belongs to has no financial resources, that’s it for our young man. He stays a layman with responsibility for his family, or the Church finds a way to have him as a kind of “apprentice” in the parish in view of ordination, taking the constraints (job, money, family commitments, etc.) into account.
I am for the abolition of seminaries for many reasons, but all for a theological education to a high standard and solid apprenticeship training in “priestcraft”. There is not only a question of the ability to celebrate liturgical services correctly, but also the art of preaching, pastoral work and simple management and communication skills. One doesn’t ask for a rocket scientist, just good professionalism.
The tendency in the Roman Catholic Church is “panic damage-control”, at least to an extent, so the clergy begins to become quite elitist and often confined to a particular social class. In any large institution, the tendency is to do nothing until it all gets into the newspapers and the blogs, then react to the other extreme. That, with the “small and pure” church model, should not be the aim, but there is a happy medium between that and “anything goes”. Criteria studies and other “guarantees” always allow the bad stuff to get through the net. Even in the very Tridentine style seminary where I went, a man who was later convicted for child sex abuse got through – and looked so pious and perfect – as did another who turned out to be a common thief. The only way is for the Church to be sufficiently family-like for the Bishop and parish priests to know their men, and to have known them for years. Bureaucracy does not replace human qualities and interactions.
In this last paragraph, I have already addressed Fr Hart’s criticism of the Roman Catholic Church on account of the sex abuse scandal. You get bad clergy in all churches, bad teachers, bad policemen, doctors, everything. I don’t pretend to know why bad men are bad or what could be done to prevent them getting through the system. Psychopaths and sociopaths, by their being individuals without scruple or conscience, are artists at manipulation and pretending to be what they are not. I believe it is unfair to single out the Roman Catholic Church when evil has happened in every single religious and secular organisation.
Fr Hart, in his article, made the point that the Roman system of selecting and training clergy needed to be reformed. In that, we would be agreed, and so are many others including the so-called “liberals”. Like the liberals, I advocate the dismantling of the “clerical caste”, notably through the abolition of compulsory celibacy, except of course for those who are called to a monastic life. Of course, the same can be said for any elite system in any walk of life where cronyism and nepotism are the rule. My own argument revolves around the dismantling of large impersonal structures and bureaucracy and its decentralisation to produce family-like local communities where people know each other. There is no substitute for intuition and knowing a person. That isn’t infallible either to weed out evil, but more effective.
Slamming the Roman Catholic Church in these questions is a red herring, even if the RC Church has the biggest and most impersonal bureaucracy. The Church of England has the same problem of evil priests, though on a smaller scale. The problem isn’t going to be solved by tightening the screws even tighter, unless you stop ordaining priests altogether and decide to have a purely lay Church – and then such a thing couldn’t be controlled! There is no one simple solution other than decentralisation and more human influence.
The good padre gives his own church a slap on the back. Perhaps their agreements between bishops of various continuing churches have done a considerable amount of good to stop the infighting. I have yet to hear of good practical resolutions for the training of future priests, and perhaps with some nice reports of bright university graduates doing their apprenticeship in a parish.
Obviously, for many Americans, no other place exists in the world and American notions of evangelism (marketing and the commercial advertising model as the “mega churches” use) work everywhere. They don’t. Even in America as the “empire” crumbles as it runs out of money, people’s relationship with God and religion is changing. It is all well and good to dream of a dynamic and spiritual church of the future. But, why is it not here already?
Perhaps the whole notion of the “mainstream” church and its imitations is what is wrong. We cannot relate to institutions and bureaucracy, but we can relate to family and friends, to spiritual kindred. And that is what is important. Once there is the cement of friendship that is a true icon of God’s love, then one can consider the roles of the Word and the Sacrament in the liturgy and the ministry of those who are ordained priests. Continuing Anglican churches and independent Catholic communities are small and have this potential, once the red herring of replicating what we left has been consigned to history.
Then on that smaller and personal scale, we might find we already have what we have been coveting – right under our nose!
The Blue Flower 
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Just a word about education of clergy: I would much rather trust a godly and holy priest with little education who is teachable, actively seeking to be taught; than a well-educated man who thinks he knows enough. It most certainly is a terrible thing when one is ignorant and does not wish to learn. I’ve know a lot of those, and it is a form of arrogance — but what is even worse than this is the man who uses his fantastic training to elevate himself above others and thinks himself above being taught. I’ve actually known more clergy of this second category than of the first
My firm conviction is that no one can truly be ‘apt to teach’ (as Paul demands for bishops and deacons) unless he is being taught, and also that one who is learning has something to teach. I’m also convinced that an essential mark of holiness is the desire to learn more of the things of God, and to be changed by the learning.
One of the problems of an institutional church is the tendency to get stuck in the machinery, but the principal problem of a church without institutions is its very encouragement of self-sufficiency. One needs a structure within which to learn, or one comes to the place (or can easily get there) where one decides one is always right and knows enough. Authority at its best applies a corrective, an incentive to realize it when one errs.
All this is to say that we need scholar-priests AND simple priest who can teach from the scholarship of others. We need formal training, and we need simple men informally rising by their holiness to be priest like the Cure d’Ars who was ordained in spite of flunking his courses and became a powerful spiritual guide. Both, and — not either, or.
I replied to Deborah Gyapong about educational standards when she picked up my article. There is an excess of elitism in some churches and an excess of ignorance leads to amateurism and sometimes to serious abuses such as what the Reformers and the Council of Trent wanted to reform in the 16th century.
If I were a bishop with responsibilities for ordaining priests, I would set the standard high, but would be flexible about whether the person has a degree or does the studies in a university or by reading and being examined. I agree that piety and goodness, known from the person’s time in a parish, are primordial. I also think standards can be variable according to the person concerned and the kind of ministry he would be likely to be given.
It is a difficult one, and the answer is invariably In medio stat virtus, the via media. In any case, even if the academic standard is made realistic, there still has to be training in the practical aspects of the liturgy and good pastoral practices.
Brothers in Christ, I have followed this discussion with interest. I completed four years study towards the Priesthood ( level of a licentiate in Theology ) , but also offered years of experience in serving and subdeaconing in the sanctuary, vestry service, youth work and Parish visiting. I did do a University degree but in Business Administration, would have liked to have to a Masters in Theology, but am running out of time now. Years back in the Old Catholic Church of Holland, in which I was baptized and brought up , most Priests had doctorates , but they talked to you and counselled you from a totally different level. Very unhelpful. My name sake Ed made a valuable comment , can we have more Holy people, perhaps less qualified , but who can be trained?
Father Anthony also touched on the importance of people of sound integrity and I agree. We have seem to have less and less clergy, who fall under that category.
A Roman Catholic Father with whom I trained back in New Zealand ridiculed my four years of study and TAC Priests who expected to be ordained under the provision of the Ordinariate ,who had not completed a seven year seminary education like he did. Yet he could not hold things together and lacked a lot of compassion. Top educational qualifications for a Priest and Bishop does not guarantee a clergyman filled with love and being of sound integrity. The two issues , i.e. education and spiritual suitability have to be kept in some sort of sound balance.
Father Ed Bakker OPR
Thank you, Father. We live in a time when everything has to be guaranteed. A particular kind of road accident happens and the speed limit in that place is made excessively low. This is the mentality that will remove fire extinguishers from an building in the name of health and safety, because not everyone has a certificate in fire-fighting aptitude and using an extinguisher. So I suppose its “safer” to leave the building to burn down together with people still trapped in inaccessible parts of the building!
So you get pig-ignorant priests and you get paedophiles and all sorts. For each harrowing case, you get a new law that binds all. So they tighten the screws until the torque is so high the metal shears off! In the end, there is probably no guarantee against bad eggs getting through and harming God’s people. The nearest thing would not be a technocrat but a down-to-earth and experienced bishop who is street-wise, a good judge of characters and who is above all a man in the field, on the front lines, you name it.
What I value most is not actual theological qualifications or the sophistication of a man’s “intellectual masturbation”, as I saw so frequently when I was an undergraduate at Fribourg. What I value is the ability to reason and judge soundly, to think logically and coherently, a very Hellenist view of education. That is what is important alongside good spiritual direction and practical hands-on training.
I find elitism just as execrable as bungling amateurism. We don’t have to do things perfectly – just well.
Actually, my experience with under-educated priests, is that ofttimes they are the most arrogant, self-centered individuals I have ever met. Many it seems long dreamt of becoming priests, wearing clericals and gaining respect from the office without willing to put in the years of hard training in theology and philosophy that the job really entails.
As I say, the essential is the attitude-forming role of education and learning to reason. Education should bring tolerance and all the other positive values of the Enlightenment. Ignorance often begets silliness. I’ll just offer a quote from Oscar Wilde:
“Like all poetical natures he [Christ] loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea. But he could not stand stupid people, especially those who are made stupid by education: people who are full of opinions not one of which they even understand, a peculiarly modern type, summed up by Christ when he describes it as the type of one who has the key of knowledge, cannot use it himself, and does not allow other people to use it, though it may be made to open the gate of God’s Kingdom”.
The truly educated man is not the one who knows a lot of things, but rather the one who realizes how little he knows and truly wants to learn. What I learned in school led me to think I was pretty smart. What I’ve learned with decades of experience is that I’m not.. There certainly are those who know little and do not wish to learn, and there are just as certainly those who know a great deal and think that makes them so wonderful that they need learn no more. Frankly, they aren’t that much different from each other, nor is either kind of much use in teaching. All either can offer is a dead end. But he who is learning is treading a path on which he can lead others
Thanks Ed, I am inclinded to agree with you. I find myself still putting some time aside for further study, this is very helpful. Blessings Fr.Ed Bakker OPR
Formation is an issue – true, I’ve no problem with someone who is genuinely “holy” and can communicate the Faith simply and succinctly – but few of those present themselves generally! Some understanding and experience of formal Theological study is a must, I think, in order for someone to be able to communicate the Gospel authoritatively and some study of Philosophy whether of Religion or Classical too would be useful in order to be able to deal with the more awkward and searching enquirer of “truth”! It would be nice to receive more enquiries from someone genuinely motivated for the salvation of souls too, so many seem obsessed with their own spiritual journey and “vocation”… until you ask them to explain that in more depth and often one hears little more from them. I insist on some evidence of Theological/Philosophical academic study and/or a willingness to receive some.