The assistant priest of our parish – long since retired but still regularly saying Mass – died a couple of weeks ago. Sadly I didn’t really know Fr Francis. A former Anglican, he served for almost twenty years at an Anglo-Catholic parish in our town before being received into the Church in 1997. He was 91 when he died, which means he was probably first ordained (in the Church of England) in the 1950s or 1960s, six decades ago. What an extraordinary life of Christian service.
I thought, when I heard the news, of that great commendation spoken by Jesus in St Matthew’s Gospel, which is sometimes seen on gravestones and memorials: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant”. Death in old age is natural, and indeed inevitable, but all the same there is something profoundly sad about the loss of all that memory, experience and wisdom.
Reflecting on what it means to be a priest of Christ for such a long time made me realise that we perhaps have a tendency to take priests for granted – specifically “ordinary” priests. I use the word ordinary advisedly, because I agree with CS Lewis that “there are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit”.
I am using it in a non-pejorative sense. I mean the priests who are not famous or unusually eloquent or renowned for their spiritual mastery, who do not write books or serve in a wealthy or prestigious parish, but simply undertake the priestly task diligently and selflessly in the place where God has called them. From official figures we can estimate that in England, Wales and Scotland, there are around 5,000 Catholic priests currently active in parochial ministry to some degree. This includes clerics who are members of religious orders, like the Oratorians, and those like Fr Francis who are formally retired, but keep their hand in. Relatively few of those men are big names in the conventional worldly sense; they do not have thousands hanging on their every utterance, in the way that the prominent priests of YouTube and social media do.
Nevertheless, they are among the everyday heroes of the Church. Mass by Mass, baptism by baptism, confession by confession, they bring the sacraments to the people of God. They provide good counsel and spiritual guidance and instruction in the faith. They meet individuals in all sorts of crisis, and not infrequently these are difficult or dangerous individuals. They are present at moments of high emotion and turmoil. Often priests live alone, which can make them vulnerable, in all sorts of ways.
It’s common for the laity to get frustrated with the clergy, for all sorts of reasons. And a good deal of time, that frustration is justified. Undoubtedly there are valid criticisms to be made, whether to do with liturgy, preaching, vision or Church teaching. However, we do need to match our dissatisfactions with a recognition that the vocation and life of a priest requires great and ongoing sacrifice and commitment.
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