WHERE-IN A VERY GOOD ARTICLE IN THE NcR ARTICULATES SOMETHING I LEARNED BUT DID NOT QUITE UNDERSTAND WHEN I WAS VOCATION DIRECTOR IN THE LATE 80'S

The NcR has an article today that I think is important to read. Press the title for the full article: 

Francis' new ministry of catechist may help shrink the clergy-laity gap

May 19, 2021

by Richard Gaillardetz

 I would like to focus on Gaillardetz's statement here:

"...read as a whole, Antiquum Ministerium moves away from the prominence given to ordained ministry in general and, in particular, to what the late Benedictine theologian Ghislain Lafont termed a "sacral priesthood." This stress on the sacrality of the priesthood and a cultic theology that supported it was particularly pronounced under the previous two pontificates.

By contrast, Francis locates the role of the installed catechist not in relation to ordained ministry, but within his broader missionary commitment to engage the world on its own terms."

My Comments:

When I was vocation director from 1986 to 1998, Bishop Lessard in the 80's was concerned that we were sending seminarians to seminaries run by religious orders. He told me that the Religious Orders had a different understanding of priesthood compared to seminaries staffed by diocesan priests. In fact the ones staffed by religious orders at that time tended to be more progressive than the ones staffed by diocesan priests.   

What Gaillardetz's articulates in his article is what Bishop Lessard meant and was concerned about. Keep in mind that Bishop Lessard was a mover and shaker in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in the late 80's and chaired the doctrine committee for a few years. 

Gaillardetz, I would presume, is schooled in the Dutch Church's ultra or uber progressive school of theology that one day in the not too distant future (from the 1970's vantage point) a Church where there was no division between clergy, religious and laity. 

The Dutch school of thought, to which I was exposed in the seminary, hoped for a day when local congregations would select their presider at Mass to celebrate the Holy Meal of the Eucharist. This presider would be someone with the charism of leadership and prayer and could actualize for the assembly gathered around the table of the word and the table of the Eucharist what it meant for this community to be the body of Christ and do the work of the Lord with no need for an ordained class of clergy. 

The Church too would be seen not as a hierarchy but as a band of people on mission with action and leadership not from the top down but from the bottom up and mostly local. 

And a desacralized priesthood is the end of it which then opens the door to facilitators, male, female, LGBTQetc. And the sacrificial aspect of the Mass is wiped away too. 

Thus, in Gaillardtz and perhaps Pope Francis, a Jesuit, we see a "desacralized" view of the priesthood under the guise of ridding the priesthood of clericalism. 

The greatest threat to this view of the Church is the Tridentine Model of Liturgy and priesthood. That is why the Tridentine Mass had to be suppressed to bring forth this new model of a desacralized Church.

Thus you see the battle lines drawn between the School of Vatican II that sees it as rupture from the past the the re imagining of the Church and the school of continuity that sees the Church always through the eyes of what preceded any current experience of it.  

Pope Francis has given new energy to the 1970's school of thought on so many issues. Somehow, I think the Holy Spirit will have to make sense out of it all and I trust that He will.