How does the Church recover happy priests
in numbers and quality
that befits the Church of Christ, as she once did?

Enjoying the priesthood

By George A. Kelly

On Friday nights many years ago four or five priests met regularly to relax after a long week’s work. As the gathering began, usually with a Scotch, the same priest hoisted his glass, toasting: “Here’s to the greatest fraternity in the world!” No one at that time really gave the matter much thought (it was a bit of tomfoolery), nor did we attend to the meaning of the word “fraternity.” What is etched in memory, however, is that, in our middle forties at the time, we surely enjoyed each other and our work. Working for Cardinal Spellman was fun and important to each of us. We could argue furiously across a dish of spaghetti about a diocesan policy we disliked—or about Senator Joseph McCarthy—but never about faith or morals. We were often loud, but never truly angry about our assignments or at each other. We lived in and around all kinds of bishops, and we knew we were better than most of them, but no one in that circle lusted for a miter, nor fudged his views to gain the bishop’s favor. Indeed, we had large respect for our superiors. They earned it. It was also dangerous, we knew, to tangle with Cardinal Spellman in an offensive way.

Because we enjoyed doing what was expected of priests, we did not know that we were having fun. What is fun, anyway? A Scotch? A golf game? Probably nothing as much as enjoying what an ordinary priest should do. Saying Mass and administering sacraments were part of it, but so was burying the dead, inspiring the young, comforting the sick and sorrowful. Only later in life did the subject “fun” enter conversation, when we began to watch priest-cranks gain notoriety by having fun bashing the Church, her teaching or her bishops. In truth, most of a priest’s day was devoted to routine parish tasks, wherein those of us who grew up in a large family maintained sanity. The very size of our parish or the Chancery community made the Church a veritable playground for those who discovered that work was their play. The unhappy priests of those days were often the lazy ones.

This is not to suggest that hard working priests had an easy life. The capital sins, especially lust, greed, and laziness, were always out there to ensnare the less than virtuously inclined celibate priests. We were well prepared for celibacy, even encouraged by one Irish priest mentor to love all women with great charity thereby diminishing the need of loving a lonely one. The habit of weekly confession, deeply engrained by them, also helped purify and strengthen our resolve to master our weaknesses. The wide range of priest friends available for weekly company, if only on a golf course or for vacations, reinforced the celibate life style. (In an earlier generation late Friday night card games in someone’s rectory forged the same celibate bonds.) Priests learned from the good example of older priests how to deal with the temptations of selfishness, money, ambition and pressure. And the rest of what is now called priestly formation was found in parish work. If a given man fell from grace, he had ignored the learnings and the good example of good priests all around him.

A certain reverence regularly came into one’s life when, for example, a priest sitting at the bedside of a dying old man, holding his hand, realized that the ailing parishioner was talking to you as if he was already talking to God!

Or, to stand at an apartment door, after blessing the home, and be asked: “Do you still have confessions on Saturdays? I haven’t been to Mass in ten years!”

Or, while preaching at the first Mass of one of his converts, who entered the Church the hard way, to find himself moved by the fact that this man would devote the rest of his life to the Church’s mission in Africa.

Or, receiving a telephone call from Frankfurt, Germany, a year later, expressing gratitude from an immigrant for the help he received in returning home, after his few years in America turned out to be a disaster.

How would you like to be the priest who blessed a sterile woman at 34 years of age, be told within the month that she was pregnant, and twice again before she reached forty?

Or, coming from afar to bury an old parishioner, mother of seven, whom he had not seen in forty years, her daughter insisting that her mother’s dying wish was that only he could do the funeral. At the end of Mass, a once-upon-a-time-rascally son, whom I often threatened with jail (with his mother’s consent), rose to say that he owed 90 percent of all he was to his mother; the other 10 percent to the celebrant. Not because the priest was wiser, but because the priest had the best left hook in the parish! The son in question was by then a high-ranking officer in the Police Department.

And so on, these being only a small part of the satisfaction a normal priest experiences during a long life, especially the wide range of his friendships that will die only with his own passing.

These are not the “fun” things associated with conviviality but, as all good works, they are rewarding in themselves, and the result of being a parish priest. Even “conviviality” has more to do with good company than with bibbing. Most good priests go to more parties than any layman. A whole day in the sun with 1,000 parishioners at the annual outing, or with 150 altar boys at Coney Island, or one night at the weekly teenage dance, is tiring, but the events also coalesce into loving relationships with his parochial family, cementing his fatherhood with their well-being, here and hereafter.

Even those Friday night bread-breakers with his peers were rewarding because we all worked directly for the Cardinal. How else, do you think, would God look upon a priest whose entire middle life was devoted to building or beautifying more than 100 diocesan temples of worship? Or, on a priest who devoted twenty-five years to feeding, housing, and rehabilitating the poor of an entire diocese, especially the neglected and disadvantaged children? Or, the one who created a worldwide network of drug rehabilitation centers, perhaps the best of their kind anywhere? Or, the Chancellor who, almost alone, saw to it that the right priests were assigned to the right parishes, or who dealt daily, usually effectively, with the personal problems of priests in trouble? What about the tens of thousands of couples who owe much of their understanding on marriage to a priest teacher? One old priest, responding to a suggestion that he might not be as effective today as he was forty years ago, laughed: “Let ‘em try me!” We used to snicker at the young diocesan money-man, but few outsiders know, or appreciate, a priest’s satisfaction in saving a hospital, or a school, or a convent, for service to the unborn, or for tens of thousands of Catholics who could not pay market prices for whatever care they received in those institutions.

Strange, is it not, at least if you follow contemporary news stories, that priests born during the World War I period (1918) seemingly enjoyed more than their share of “fun,” than some of those who entered the world after 1941. The modern media are generous in tales about how important fun is, in and out of beds or of bistros, but there never have been so many complaints about not getting enough of it, or of being deprived never of a rightful share of it. We of the 1930s, still in Dunwoodie Seminary learning about Pitirim Sorokin’s “sensate culture,” were hardly aware then that the Harvard professor was talking about what “the fun culture” would do to the character formation and virtue of the American citizenry. However, the sensate culture of the 1950s had not yet overtaken the child-centered Catholic household, where doing for others as doing without was taken for granted, where siblings battled just to get noticed, where, to please your parents, passing exams was almost as important as Saturday confessions.

Perhaps, being a Church family—”we ares,” not “I ams”—had something to do with our fond memories of what looks more like fun today than we felt at the time. The Church was not a closed society, but she did have “closed sub-groups” called parishes, especially the “nationals.” It was a period when carrying your share of the common load was Catholic rule number one, where father or mother was more important than the bishop for learning why pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth really were capital sins. The local parish was just as poor as the people but paid the rent of many; priests did not fight each other in public, hardly ever in private; the teaching nuns were simply mothers in religious habit, taught at least 40 kids a day for $100 a month, and would not think of defying Sister Principal. And the parish parties—sometimes sans Prohibition elixirs—flaunted better hornpipes, polkas, and tarantellas than the old Waldorf did minuets. Why is it that there was more togetherness in the old ghetto than in the ballroom of the newer Waldorf? And the priesthood was a real and “great fraternity,” even if priests did not talk about it.

The Christian family of the “big Church” had something to do with the Catholic togetherness of that day. Seek righteousness first, not pleasure; serve others first, especially God, not self, do good and avoid evil; stand in the faith together with Christ’s shepherds, and all other things will be added besides (Luke 12:3). Faith in Christ as Son of God was the starting point, in the Church as Christ’s own Church and in her credal demands as true.

In hindsight, being a Catholic was fun all by itself You did not need to be a priest to enjoy it. Anti-Catholicism helped create Catholic pride, and Alfred E. Smith’s defeat in the 1928 presidential election only impelled Catholics to bull their way into key positions within American power structures. Noticeably so. By the World War II period, Catholics were everywhere in civil society, cops and firemen included, Italians as much as Irish-Americans. What was it, then, that made the attendant priests enjoy their role in society and in the Church? It was the Catholic community’s state of grace that made it possible. Widespread faith with conviction at the parish level, regular religious practice (75 percent, 80 percent among the young), fruitful and solid married life, discipline across the board, pride in the Church and in the Pope did it. No wonder parish priests enjoyed their role, and bishops readily accepted the respect given to their teaching office.

How did a secularist society come to break the Catholic ties? Or, how did Catholics forget so easily that Satan once divided Eve from Adam, sending those original sinners out on their own to wallow in their self-enjoyment? The lure of being god to themselves debased even priests who forgot the exile imposed on our first parents by God himself. Once upon a time priests fostered diversity among Catholics but oneness around Christ. Now many of them—like secularists—foster all divisiveness, even schism, and mollify their consciences by calling their handiwork pluralism. How does the Church—and society—recover happy priests in numbers and quality that befits the Church of Christ, as she once did?

Msgr. George A. Kelly was formerly Secretary for Education to Cardinals Spellman and Cooke. Before his retirement, he was the John A. Flynn Professor in Contemporary Catholic Problems at St. John’s University in New York. Formerly President of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, he is the author of The Crisis of Authority: John Paul II and the American Bishops (Regnery Gateway, 1982) and Inside My Father’s House (Doubleday, 1989). His last article in HPR appeared in August 2002.