Sunday evening service in a West Riding town forty to sixty years ago was not very much different from the scene in the church at Sandymount on Bloomsday. For the priests it marked the end of a quite heavy Sunday, the climax of a by no means easy week. Two Masses in the morning with a sermon at each, fasting from midnight perhaps until 1 o’clock, baptisms and children’s service, rosary—or Vespers—or Compline, another sermon, and Benediction. On the Saturday five or six hours’ confessions. In this town as in many others of its kind, from Friday night to Sunday afternoon, all the time left over from church services and absolutely necessary meals and rest, was spent in house to house collecting. The parish priest might reserve to himself the task of counting or he might share it with the curates, thus lengthening the weekend’s work to Monday midday. For some this might be followed by recreation on the golf links and dark murmurings with other clerical companions about the tyranny of parish priests. For the rest of the week, two hours of every day would be taken up with Mass and Office, there would be at least one evening service with a sermon, perhaps a confraternity meeting, instruction of converts (most of them marrying Catholics), a weekly visit to the school, visiting both of the sick and well (the latter being questioned, if necessary, about attendance at Mass and Easter duties). A conscientious priest might use some of the time left over to prepare his sermons.

I recognize at once that any viewpoint I express on the Synodal Document on the priesthood is necessarily unrepresentative. There are relatively few of us who are priests in ‘secular’ employments. Because I have no specific mandate, as I would if I were a full-time priest-teacher in a diocesan seminary or school, or if I were a religious pursuing the community’s special ‘work’, it may be that I have put any opinion of mine out of court. I would hope, however, that there would be some who might accept that even two years’ experience in extra-diocesan work could be the basis of a small contribution to the debate on the nature and contemporary forms of priestly ministry.

While the Synodal Document has many indisputable matters in it, and also poses some questions more radically than one might have expected, I cannot help feeling that the difficulties it faces in the current crisis are intractable on the basis of its theological view of the ministerial priesthood. Almost by its own definitions, which have been our standard fare for centuries, it can allow for little development. The document seems to have settled, as matters not open to question, that the specifically priestly functions are clearly defined ontologically; and further that the priestly character pervades the whole life of the ordained man. In doing so, some facts of the church’s history are overlooked; or, if recognized, are touched on so lightly as to minimize their relevance to the contemporary situation.

Eighty Catholic priests who live and work among the working classes in Chile met in April in Santiago to study the most effective way priests and lay people could help in building socialism in Chile. What follows is a summary made up from answers given to questions asked at a Press Conference on 16th April, to some questions asked later of some of the priests taking part, and from statements made in some of the papers read.

It has been compiled by the Uruguayan journalist MARUJA ECHEGOYEN.

Background

During the final Session of the study group, eight priests held a Press Conference at which they read out a prepared statement and answered questions from journalists representing both Chilean and overseas papers. Among these priests were Fr Gonzalo Arroyo, chaplain of the Catholic University of Santiago, and Fr Alfonso Pujadas, Director-General of the Workers’ Movement at the same University. The journalists mostly represented left-wing organs. Not long before, the Christian Democrat daily La Prensa had published, tendentiously and without prior authorization, with misleading headings, a private document circulated in November last year among a group of priests, wrongly making it out to be the starting-point for this meeting of Socialist priests. Gonzalo Arroyo attacked this action at the Press Conference, and it is indeed one more example of the growing inability of the more right-wing sector of Christian Democracy in Chile to listen and discuss rationally.

The Earl of Shaftesbury and the ‘Papal Aggression’ of 1850 is an interesting example of how a man of sense and humanity can be driven by prejudice into taking a posture that contradicts everything he has striven for. What he did was of less importance than why he did it, for even at the time intelligent men were aware that Shaftesbury was obsessively involved in a storm in a tea-cup.

The term ‘Papal Aggression’ indicates how Shaftesbury’s contemporaries saw the Papal Bull of 1850; this Bull abolished the administration of Roman Catholics in Great Britain by Vicars Apostolic, and appointed instead two Archbishops and twelve Bishops with territorial districts clearly marked out. Shaftesbury was in Scotland recovering from illness when he heard about this. It was, he considered, ‘an act of great annoyance and audacity’ but not contrary to law, and he was prepared to simmer awhile.

When Dr Wiseman was appointed the first Archbishop of Westminster and raised to the dignity of a Cardinal, then Shaftesbury felt that he had no other course but to act, and the publication of the pastoral ‘From out of the Flaminian Gate of Rome’ was interpreted by him as a direct threat towards the Church of England. ‘Catholic England’, wrote the Cardinal, ‘has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament from which its light had long vanished’.