From the editor’s desk

Priests to the fore

The pendulum eventually had to swing the other way. Since the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church has wrestled with the true significance of the common priesthood of the People of God based on Baptism. It rebalanced in many fundamental ways the relationship between priests and people. But in the process, the ordained priesthood has undergone a silent upheaval. Some reassertion of priestly identity was overdue, a reminder that the ordained priesthood is essential to the encounter with Christ through word and sacrament that the Church exists to foster.

Clearly Pope Benedict's inauguration of the Year for Priests, which starts next week, was not designed to undermine the place of the laity. It is a recognition, nevertheless, that especially in the developed countries of the West, the ordained priesthood is surrounded with problems. Numbers coming forward are falling; many who are ordained do not stay the course; those who remain can easily be dispirited and demoralised. The clerical sex-abuse scandal had many victims but it is rarely recognised that priests were among them. Many good priests felt ashamed and betrayed in their vocation by the despicable actions of a few. It even affected their body language, their ability to walk the streets with confidence and look the world in the eye.

Professionally, priests have come to feel an existential uncertainty as to their role. Many people in their congregations will be as well educated as they are, and have a working knowledge of theology that was almost non-existent 50 years ago. The laity in most parishes has taken on an active commitment to justice and peace. At diocesan level and nationally, lay people have taken on leadership functions. The decline in the use of the confessional has transferred the pastoral emphasis to less formal settings, a change which many priests welcome without being sure how to make best use of it. Are they laymen in a dog collar, whose job is to do good in the local soup kitchen? Are they, perhaps, social revolutionaries, leading their people out of political bondage? Or is there a more monastic or ascetic role for them as founts of spiritual wisdom? In the right circumstances all these answers are valid. There is no one model, though the priest's central place in the Church's eucharistic life is common to all of them. It is perhaps not surprising that newly ordained priests sometimes cope with this uncertainty by reverting to a more conservative version of their role, at least in dress, manner and liturgy.

For many priests the pastoral side is what first drew them to their vocation: the desire to help people in the most profound way possible by bringing them the truth of God's love. Teaching is a crucial part of it, by word and deed, to show by the example of one that the path to holiness is open to all. Good priests concentrate on what only they can do, and it is for that that they are most appreciated. The Year for Priests is an opportunity to renew the esteem and respect due to them for their years of training and formation in the service of others, for the sacrifices that entails, and for the authority they have received from the Church to stand in the place of Christ - at both altar and soup kitchen.