The priests' congress

A few days before the International Convention for Priests began I was in Valletta and saw a group of black-coated priests, one of them in a soutane, enter the city. Something about the scene bothered me but I could not quite pin down what it was. But yesterday, Steve Mallia's interview with the convention's organiser, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the Vatican's Prefect for the Congregation of the Clergy, helped me put my finger on it.

I had initially thought that what struck me about the group of priests was that they stuck out. Here, I thought, was a palpable sign of how secularised Malta had become over the last two decades: Priests in groups now draw attention to themselves; they no longer seem part of the taken-for-granted.

In fact, however, it is not the secularisation of Maltese society that drew my attention to them. Rather, it is the secularisation of the role of priest. It has become very difficult to describe what priests are, if not in terms of secular roles: The priest as carer, counsellor and social worker, for instance. In the interview, Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos speaks of priests as cultural interpreters and as preachers (but preaching is not the distinctive feature of priests - as both scripture and Church history make clear).

I now believe it was this uncertain identity, in religious terms, of what a priest is today that struck me when I saw that priestly group: I saw them as men in costume, as men with a certain sociological profile and not more.

If this were just my quirky personal problem, the professional deformation of a social scientist, I would stop here. But the uncertain identity syndrome seems to touch Maltese priests, too. In the spate of discussions about the role of the clergy and Church, which we have had recently, I heard a lot about politics and the oppressed, social subjects dear to the Church since its foundation, though not a distinctive concern of priests; and I heard little about what it means, for priests today, to be the ones solely responsible for the administration of the sacrament of the Eucharist.

I believe that, in one respect, the convention, too, did its part in promoting this secular image and role of the priest. In practice, the convention brought together priests only. That makes sense if the priesthood were a guild but it does not make sense if the priesthood derives its sense from its relationship to the laity. And of course it does.

Two large processes have contributed to secularisation but only one is usually given attention: The secularisation of the mentality of the laity. But the priesthood has also been secularised as a result of the secularisation of property, which changed the priesthood's relationship to the laity.

By the secularisation of property I refer to a past practice whose consequences are still felt by many readers today: The practice of either leaving land to the Church, thereby obliging many home-owners, even today, to pay a nominal sum for the "lease"; or, even more strikingly, the practice of leaving the house as legacy to an heir, on condition that the heir contributes a stipulated annual sum to the Church for a particular sacred cause - say, the payment for the Good Friday sermon.

The condition continued to bind even people who bought the property decades or centuries later, with the result that today someone may be obliged to pay the pittance of 10c, annually, for the saying of a Mass in Gregorian chant or the preaching of a panegyric.

These practices tied the laity to the clergy in complex ways. It tied the living clergy to the dead laity, the family and its heirs to the sacramental life of the Church. What seems amusing or annoying to us today had a force then: A force of intensifying the meaning of the sacramental life and of blurring the boundaries between the religious and other domains of life.

That world is gone. The laity organises its property in different ways now. The Church itself has simplified its hierarchy, making it more of a military pyramid, less of a complex series of interlocking, interdependent parts where hierarchy changed according to context (where convents, for example, were more independent of bishops, and bishops more independent of the Vatican, than they are today).

The challenge for priests and the priesthood today, therefore, is not just a question of how to get the laity to listen more to priests, or priests to listen more to the laity. It is how to make the laity and priests, once more, see each other - no, not see: behave - once more as a chain, of the living and the dead, of gift-givers.

ranierfsadni@europe.com