(LifeSiteNews) — A high-profile symposium took place last month in Rome at the initiative of Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, in his capacity as prefect of the Congregation for the Bishops. Under the title “Toward a fundamental theology of the priesthood,” the event was clearly an effort to promote the vision of Vatican II in the perspective of the upcoming “Synod on Synodality,” with the aim of “changing” the way the priesthood is perceived in order better to integrate the notion of “common priesthood of the faithful.”
The symposium, which was held in the modern Paul VI Aula in the Vatican where many papal events take place, attracted large numbers of bishops, priests, and religious, but also the most powerful cardinals and prefects of the Roman Curia who in turn chaired six half-day sessions from February 17 to February 19. All communications were simultaneously translated in six languages.
The symposium received negative attention from the French media because of the presence of a French priest and “Catholic psychoanalyst,” Tony Anatrella, who was suspended from celebrating the sacraments in 2018 by the Archbishop of Paris, having been accused as early as 2006 of sexual abuse by seminarians. In 2014, Ouellet prefaced a book written by Anatrella. It was subsequently made very clear that the priest was not invited to the 400-strong event but had joined of his own accord via the inscription platform managed by an Italian company that was probably not aware of his status.
Marc Ouellet, 77, was made cardinal under John Paul II, who had previously appointed him to the chair of dogmatic theology at the John Paul II Pontifical Institute for the Family. He had a reputation for doctrinal orthodoxy and the defense of traditional marriage. However, after the two Synods on the Family and the publication of Amoris Laetitia by Pope Francis, he wrote a book in French (Famille, deviens ce que tu es, “Family, become what you are”) in which he specifically endorsed the controversial proposals regarding access of the divorced and remarried to Holy Communion under certain circumstances.
Pope Francis himself made an appearance for the opening lecture in the presence of Cardinal Ouellet who chaired the first morning session. Getting such public support for his symposium from the Pope was a positive sign for Ouellet — who meets with Francis every week, in contrast with other less-favored cardinals — and stressed that the two men have a high degree of convergence.
Calling on his own experience rather than “any theory,” Pope Francis said:
The times we are living in require us not only to experience change, but to accept it in the realization that ours is a time of epochal change – I have said this many times. If we had any doubts about this, Covid has made it amply evident: indeed, the outbreak of the virus cannot be restricted to a question of medicine and health care; it is much more than a cold.
We can respond in many different ways to the challenge of change. The problem is that while many actions and attitudes can be helpful and good, not all of them have the flavor of the Gospel. Here is the crux of the matter: discerning whether changes and actions have the flavor of the Gospel or not. For example, seeking established ways of doing things, very often anchored in the past, that “guarantee” a sort of protection from risks, sheltering us in the world or a society that no longer exists (if it ever did), as if this determined order could quell the conflicts that history sets before us. That is the crisis of going backwards in order to find shelter.
Another attitude might be that of exaggerated optimism – “Everything will be all right” – moving too far forward without discernment and without taking necessary decisions. This optimism ends up ignoring the pain involved in this transformation and failing to accept the tensions, complexities and ambiguities of the present time, “consecrating” the latest novelty as the ultimate reality and thereby dismissing the wisdom of the years.
Asking priests to remember that their vocation is to “holiness,” striving “to love others as Jesus does,” and that “each particular vocation, including Holy Orders, is a completion of baptism,” Pope Francis suggested that the present crisis of vocations in many communities is often “due to the absence within communities of a contagious apostolic zeal, with the result that they lack enthusiasm and attractiveness: communities, for example, that function and are well-organized yet without enthusiasm, where everything is in place yet without the fire of the Spirit.”
After having invited all priests to practice true “closeness to God, closeness to the bishop, closeness to other priests,” Pope Francis said that there must also be “closeness to people:”
I am convinced that, for a renewed understanding of the identity of the priesthood, it is important nowadays to be closely involved in people’s real lives, to live alongside them, without escape routes. “Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people” (ibid., 270). ‘A people’ is not a logical category, no; it is a mythic category. To understand this we must approach it as we approach a mythic category.
The people as a “mythic category” is a favorite expression of Pope Francis. He explained its origins in his mind in The Path to Change, his dialogue with French sociologist Dominique Wolton (our translation):
There is a thinker you should read: Rodolfo Kusch, a German who lived in the northwest of Argentina, a very good anthropological philosopher. He made me understand one thing: the word “people” is not a logical word. It is a mythic word. You can’t talk about people logically, because that would only be a description. To understand a people, to understand what the values of that people are, you have to get into the spirit, the heart, the work, the history and the myth of its tradition. This point is really the basis of the so-called “theology of the people.” That is, to go with the people, to see how they express themselves. This distinction is important. The people is not a logical category, it is a mythical category.
He omitted to add that Kusch’s approach to the indigenous peoples he studied in the Andes was to consider all their beliefs, traditional religions, superstitions and so on as being part of the building of their “myth.”
This led to a renewed criticism of “clericalism,” with the Pope insisting that priests should engrain their “closeness,” “compassion,” and “tender love” for the people in their own closeness with Christ. He added: “If we are tempted to get caught up in interminable speeches, discussions about the theology of the priesthood or theories about what the priesthood should be, the Lord for his part simply looks upon us with tenderness and compassion.”
His speech only included a fleeting mention of a sacrament, that of reconciliation; the only other moment when the word was used was when he quoted obedience to the bishop as a “concrete sign of that universal sacrament of salvation which is the Church.”
Speaking of the need for ordained priests to be “shepherds in the style of Jesus,” the Pope said they should not be “‘clerical functionaries’ or ‘professionals of the sacred’ — let’s recall that period in France, the time of the Curé of Ars: he was a curate, but there was also ‘monsieur l’abbé,’ a clerical functionary.”
Saint Jean-Marie Vianney was certainly close to his flock, consumed with the desire of leading all his parishioners and penitents to heaven, but he was also exigent and had a profound sense of the sacred distance between the ordained priest and the layman. “What a great thing is the priest,” he said, and:
Go and confess to the Blessed Virgin or to an angel. Will they absolve you? Will they give you the body and blood of our Lord? No, the Blessed Virgin cannot make her divine Son descend into the host. If you had two hundred angels there, they could not absolve you. But a priest, however simple, can do that. He can tell you: Go in peace, I forgive you.
He also once said: “If you had faith, you would see God hidden in the priest like a light behind a glass like wine mixed with water.”
This was most emphatically not the main idea developed during the three-day symposium, whose intention was to reflect on the vocation, religious or not, of all the baptized. In fact, many communications spoke of the “common priesthood of the laity” as stressed by Vatican II. This was not done by undermining the specific nature of the ordained priesthood with regard to the sacraments, which nobody was negating, but by in some way glorifying the lay people as “priests, prophets, and kings” through baptism and the work of the Holy Spirit, blurring the divide. This is certainly what it takes to “change” the vision of the priesthood that several speakers were hoping for.
Beyond this point, the speakers had a generally “classical” conception of the priesthood. There was no campaigning for an end to priestly celibacy, allowing ordained priests of the Latin Rite to marry or for women to become priests, and indeed there were talks that carefully and even brilliantly set forth some traditional teachings of the Church, such as the doctrine of priesthood of Saint Thomas Aquinas, set forth by the American Dominican Fr. Dominic Legge (available here).
However, the general impression was that of a shift aiming for the priest or the religious no longer to be seen as “set apart” from ordinary laypeople, with the occasional lash at the figure of the priest as he was seen by the Council of Trent.
Among the top-grade prelates who answered Ouellet’s invitation to preside sessions, thereby giving the symposium prominence as a mainstream Vatican event, was the prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, the Korean Archbishop Lazarus You Heung-sik, who spoke of synodality as “the very form” of the Church. He said that the tradition from which we have come had “encouraged a certain precise vision of priesthood and it is necessary to open up to the new circumstances and complex situations of the day” by allowing oneself to be challenged by “the signs of the times.” He added that “we need to think out the relation between ordained priesthood and baptismal priesthood to find new forms of ‘ministeriality’ allowing the Church to go out to meet the world” in a “renewed” way of evangelization.
On Friday, February 18, Cardinal Ouellet himself spoke of “The Holy Spirit and the priesthood of Christ in the Church.” The session was presided over by Archbishop Arthur Roche of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Roche is the author of the harsh “Responsa” that have put even tighter limits to the Pope’s motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, restricting access to the Traditional Latin Mass. It is true that senior sources in Rome have said that Ouellet was among the four cardinals who were active in preparing and supporting Traditionis Custodes.
The afternoon session was presided over by Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, also one of the “four.” One speaker, Sr. Alexandra Diriart, spoke of the increasing role of laypeople in taking up leadership positions in the Church, from the parishes upward, and commended their help with problems of governance. She said that in contrast with past centuries where the accent was put on “the perfection of the state of life,” where consecration to God is the highest, things had changed with the “universal call to sanctity” by Vatican II.
In a round table on new forms of ministry for the laity, Michelina Tenace, a professor of dogmatic theology, noted that the setting up of a commission on women deacons by Pope Francis in 2016 had already had one effect with the Motu proprio Spiritus Domini instituting female lectors. She suggested the question was not to go back to the role of female deacons in the early Church, as “it would be too little,” but to ask what ministries our modern world needs. She complained that the fact of having stopped “giving” certain ministries to women had coincided with a “masculinist and clericalist drift within the Church” where “men and women are no longer clothed with the same dignity as human beings.”
She pleaded for new instituted ministries for women, describing them as something necessary to show the true identity of the Church. “If the Church does not call, a ministry risks being considered as a right, but to serve is not a right, it’s a duty,” she said, adding that it would be a mistake to think that allowing women to accede to the priesthood would give them greater dignity. She concluded that the Church could not do without “renewed theology of the human person,” an “anthropology of man and woman” according to their vocations, with a reflection on ministry in the context of an “ecclesiology of communion on a path of synodality.” She was enthusiastically applauded.
On Saturday, Mass was celebrated Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin.
The first session was chaired by Cardinal Marcello Semeraro. It included a firm defense of priestly celibacy by a Spanish priest, Emilio Justo.
The last session was presided over by Cardinal Kevin Farrell of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life. As ex-cardinal McCarrick’s housemate for six years, he has claimed he knew nothing of his behavior. He is also controversial for having allowed pro-LGBT Fr. James Martin SJ to speak at the World Meeting of Families in Ireland in 2018.
During this session, Fr. Hernandez Peludo structured his talk about education to the priesthood on Pope Francis’ “four principles”: “Time is greater than space,” “Unity prevails over conflict,” “The whole is greater than the part,” “Reality is more important than ideas.”
As so many seminaries in the world, especially in the West, remain desperately empty, this introduction of “principles” that have nothing to do with theology, the sacraments, and the priesthood would not seem to be a sign of hope.
The final address was tremulously presented by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, another star of the present pontificate who heads the Congregation for the Evangelization of peoples.
It was difficult not to see the event as a way of “placing” candidates for the conclave that will inevitably come.
