AD ORIENTEM IS THE ANTIDOTE TO THE POTENTIAL CLERICALISM OF ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH'S DESCRIPTION OF THE PRIESTHOOD

Pope Francis this is one antidote to the Clericalism you decry:

Pope Francis believes that when the priesthood is equated with power rather than service, clericalism ruins the priesthood.

What Robert Cardinal Sarah writes below sounds a lot like the clericalism that Pope Francis fears, priesthood associated with power. In this case, the priest has power over God. But is this really what the good Cardinal is saying?

I would say that the greatest problem in the Church is a new form of dualism which is also associated with power and thus is clericalism. On one level most laity believe priests to be who they say they are, obedient to Holy Mother, Church through their bishop, who is also obedient, and actually striving to live the promise or vow of celibate chastity.

The breach in power comes not from what Cardinal Sarah states below, but from the hypocrisy of this dualism. By all appearances, the laity's presumption of obedience and celibate chastity gives way to the reality that the bishop is a poor father to his priests and enables bad behavior through benign neglect, a fear to confront errant priests, censure them, remove faculties or even warn them even with behavior that is not only immoral but also criminal. The great discipline of the Church is swallowed up in a corrupt understanding of mercy which leads to enablement.

In the pre-Vatican II Church, it was presumed that there was a great disiciplined order of clergy and relgious under the good order of superiors and bishops. This all collapsed overnight after 1965's conclusion of Vatican II. When the disicipline collapsed Pandora's Box opened. Priests and religious who toed the line because of the strict discipline of the seminaries and superiors, did not toe the line from any internal locus toward self-discipline. This explains why pre-Vatican II trained priests lost it after Vatican II and the collaspe of external discipline. This explains why 1974 has the highest number of priests accused of sexual abuse, most of whom were trained in a more externally disciplined priesthood.

 But despite this ugly reality, bishops and preists acted as though this discipline was still in place and the laity believed it. Clericalism!

Coupled with this was the loss of the "majesty" of living the priesthood in an internal and external way, both in the liturgy, in prayer and on the street and in public. Our late Bishop Lessard often decried the loss of the "majesty" of living out the priesthood both internally and externally.

Finally, to temper and humiliate this "majesty" of the priesthood, celebrating Mass ad orientem humiliates the person of the priest himself and elevates the priesthood, both that of the human ordained priest and the High Priest of Jesus Christ which exalts the ministerial priesthood. At Mass the ad orientem position makes every ministerial priest the one Priest.

What do you think about Robert Cardinal Sarah's comments below. Does it cause clericalism and the abuse of lay people in benign or malignant ways:

What I have become I also owe to my parents: Alexandre and Marie Claire. The priest – here is the most magnificent work, the most generous gift that God has given to humanity – is the most precious and inconceivable treasure that exists on earth: the Curé of Ars, Saint John-Mary Vianney was deeply convinced of it.

He said: “If we had faith, we would see God hidden in the priest like a light behind the glass, like wine mixed with water. How great is the priest! If he really understood (this), he would die. … God obeys him: he says two words and Our Lord descends from heaven at hearing this voice and closes himself in a small host.” The priest is “a man who stands in the place of God, a man who is clothed with all the powers of God. …Look at the power of the priest! His tongue makes God of a piece of bread!”

However, this happens only if we priests agree to be crucified with Christ, if each of us is ready to say, like Saint Paul, in the concrete web of our existence: “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (cf .Gal 2.19-20). Christ, the Son of God, only through the Cross and at the end of an extraordinary descent into an abyss of humiliation, comes to confer on priests the divine power to celebrate the Eucharist and to tear men, his earthly brothers, from the slavery of sin and death, to make them partakers of his divinity.

The Eucharist takes place only if our life is marked by the Cross. According to St. Josemaría Escrivà, the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ is the vital motivation of the priest, the pillar on which his priestly existence is built. In his motto he wrote it this way: “in laetitia nulla dies sine cruce: in joy, no day without the Cross”. The priest lives joy in its fullness in the Holy Mass, which is the raison d’être of his existence, what gives meaning to his life.

During the Mass, on the paten and in the chalice, the priest is close to the Host, he is truly before and together with our Lord Jesus Christ: Jesus looks at him and he looks at Jesus. Are we really fully aware of what the real presence of Christ himself really means before our eyes, under the Eucharistic species? During daily Mass the priest comes face to face with Jesus Christ and at that precise moment, he is identified, he becomes identified with Christ, becoming not only an Alter Christus, another Christ, but he is really Ipse Christus, Christ Himself. He is conscious of being invested by the Person of Christ himself, configured in a specific sacramental identification with the High Priest of the eternal Covenant (cf. Ecclesia de Eucharistia n.29).

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