I have never physically met Sebastião Rodrigues SJ, Francisco Garrpe SJ, Fr Otsu, Fr Valesco, Fr Rank, a certain unnamed French curé or an unnamed fugitive Mexican priest. But they have accompanied me during my 44 years as a priest. Together with the Word of Good, books about the theology of priesthood (my favourite is Ministers of Your Joy by Joseph Ratzinger), these literary figures helped me to understand what being a priest is all about.
When, on June 19, I celebrated with my brothers who were ordained with me on June 19, 1977, I remembered each and everyone of these creations of Shūsako Endō, Graham Greene and Georges Bernanos and thanked God for making my meeting with them possible. This acquaintance, with some of them almost friendship, made me better understand what priesthood is all about.
Not all of them are what Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard would call a ‘knight of faith’ but they are nonetheless good priests. They have weaknesses and they have sinned but does not St Paul tell us that God shows His strength in our weakness?
What goes in a single human heart
Fr Rank does not play a major part in Greene’s The Heart of the Matter but his final conversation with Mrs Scobie could have been lifted from Pope Francis’s oeuvre The Name of God is Mercy. Her husband had faked his suicide as if it were a heart attack. He considered his suicide to be his ultimate act of love for his wife and his mistress. When Mrs Scobie faced Fr Rank with the Church’s teaching (then, not now) that who commits suicide is damned, the priest answered: “don’t imagine that you – or I – know a thing about God’s mercy”.
He added: “The Church knows all the rules. But it does not know what goes in a single human heart.”
Fr Rank taught me that a priest should always be merciful but never be judgmental. Fr Paneloux in Albert Camus’s The Plague is exactly the opposite. He is poor in mercy but rich in judgements. The plague was “the flail of God” and God’s visitation on “all the cities that offended against Him”, he thundered in the cathedral of Oran.
What abominations we have preached in his name!
Laying the Host, laying God
There are then the two unnamed priests. They are my favourites.
In The Power and the Glory, Greene gives us the ‘whisky priest’ who even fathered a child. However, when faced by persecution in Mexico, the ‘good’ priests ran for their lives while this ‘bad’ priest stayed around trying to minister to his flock as best as he could. He finally did get away to a safer state. He called by a dying Gringo wanting to confess. The priest was almost certain that this was a trap. However, he felt the greatness of the priesthood saying: “to lay the host between a dying man’s lips was to lay God.” He left the safety of his haven and – as expected – was arrested and, later, martyred.
In The Samurai, Endō gives us another priest – Velasco – who, in spite of his sins (in this case the sin of ambition and conniving to become bishop of Japan) left the safety of his convent in the Philippines to return once more to Japan (which, like Greene’s Mexico, was persecuting Christians) where martyrdom would be a certainty.
Salvation comes, after all, from the ‘miserable scrawny man nailed to the cross’- Fr Joe Borg
Greene’s and Endō’s novels present two priests in all their misery. Both priests teach me that ours is the misery; but the power and the glory are the Lord’s.
All is grace
Both Sebastião Rodrigues SJ and Francisco Garrpe SJ (originally the creations of Endō’s Silence and then Martin Scorcese’s film) were tormented by God’s silence during their mission in persecution-ridden Japan. Fr Garrpe gave his life trying to save Japanese Christians. Rodrigues apostatised to try and save Japanese Christians. He felt that a kenotic and self-sacrificing Christ urged him to trample on his icon as he came into the world to suffer. Though rewarded by a government pension on condition that he stays a Buddhist and does not practise the priestly ministry, Rodrigues risks all to hear confessions.
Fr Otsu of Endō’s Deep River was cast away by his confrères because of his doubts and unconventionality. Like Christ he carries a cross though not a wooden one. He carries the corpses of poor Indians who die on the streets abandoned by all. Like Christ, Otsu suffers at the hands of those he loves and serves but his sacrificial love – like Christ’s – is not in vain.
Rodrigues, Garrpe and Otsu teach me that serving and loving others may sometimes ask of the priest to free himself from all institutional shackles. Salvation comes, after all, from the ‘miserable scrawny man nailed to the cross’ – as Endō’s characters so often refer to Christ. Charity is the suprema lex.
The least controversial of all my priests is Bernanos’s unnamed curé of the hostile parish community of Ambricourt, France, featured in Diary of a Country Priest. Gossipers accuse him of being a drunk and a womaniser, though he was none. His problems were loneliness, dearth of charisma, children making fun of him in catechism classes and crippling stomach pains. In fact, he dies of stomach cancer at the dingy apartment of an ex-priest who was living with a woman. Such a life and such a death should have made someone utter “all is suffering” as his final words. Instead, he repeated the words of Theresa of Lisieux: “all is grace.”
I pray that the unnamed curé of Ambricourt helps me learn and teach that “all is grace” through my priesthood.
