Plus ca change?

Catholic New Times, May 18, 2003 by Jim Roberts

In my previous column I wrote about the factual demise of universal priestly celibacy in the Roman rite today and now I want to offer several vignettes signalizing the demise of the clerical culture that has long sustained the reigning priestly caste.

Last September, freshly minted, I got my first appointment as pastor (incredible!) of a Black parish of 26 adults and sundry children in North Carolina where the state's Catholics numbered less than one per cent. Technically, the segregated parish extended some 2,500 square miles on the map. All this without a smidgen of awareness or education regarding Black history, issues of race relations, social justice and civil liberties, which were just coming to a spotty boil in the South during the late 50s. However, I was a certifiably full-fledged priest and could be parachuted into any situation to take control and be unquestionably accepted and obeyed. "Father knows best." "God will provide."

The Ku Klux Klan crosses burned on Carolina's hillsides many a night and caravans of Klansmen drove through the impoverished Black sections of Monroe, inner car lights turned on so the white hoods and gowns sent their menacing message while gunshots screamed skywards puncturing the eerie quiet--this we priests bore with innocent resignation, not a peep out of us, while the Blacks cringed with fear, children hiding under the beds.

My transfer to the Vancouver archdiocese in 1958 became a graduate course in degrading clericalism. Priests stationed in the Cathedral were forbidden by the live-in archbishop to flush the toilet after 10:30 p.m. and woe betide anyone breaking the rule. The archbishop had sharper ears, an even shaper temper and a salty tongue to go with it.

After lunch, "recreation" in the second floor common room, christened "the gloom room," was mandatory. The archbishop presided over the afternoon newspaper, the Vancouver Sun, and dispensed sections of it to the priests according to his whim. Too bad if you had no taste for Sports and Business and got one of those sections handed to you. You knuckled under and read the thing or feigned to.

The rectory, which the archbishop referred to by its proper name, the Palace, was locked tight at curfew time and priests who were caught out had to scale up the rear drain pipes to scramble through a second floor window. The novelist J.F. Powers described the subservient priest curate of those days as a mouse in training to become a rat. After graduate studies in Rome I worked in the Marriage Tribunal and was sent to reside in a local parish to assist the pastor as required. The couple of years I was there provided a tightening of the clerical noose. I was the low man on the totem pole of the rectory hierarchy: the pastor, the pastor's dog, the housekeeper, the housekeeper's cat, the assistant priest.

The pastor, of course, was coddled solicitously.. In the years of my residency the pastor never invited me to perform a baptism, a wedding or a funeral. Those were his prerogatives. He was later to be elevated in rank within the archdiocesan office.

The saying, "ambition is the ecclesiastical lust," was validated time and again among the clergy. Once, at a priests' meeting, we. were all invited to express our minds on some sensitive topic now lost to nay memory. I did so. A few days later the new archbishop took me aside and said: "You know, you didn't help yourself by what you said in that meeting." By this time I'd pretty well had enough of the clerical game of playing and jockeying for position. But, I replied, "I wasn't trying to help myself. I was trying to speak the truth as I saw it." Of course, the club was now closing for me. Infantilism was not an option.

Exceptions among the priests were rare in Vancouver, though a few cantankerous men, often loners, winked at being kept men and went their own sometimes healthy, sometimes destructive ways. The Oblates (OMT) and the Christian Brothers of Ireland, were regularly hospitable.

All that is gone now, death and desertion having impoverished us, but a new clericalism is sadly on the rise. How long, O Lord?