April 2011 Print

Fr. Yannick Escher, a Swiss priest, discovered Tradition through the Society of St. Pius X. He draws up an alarming report on the situation of the clergy after the Second Vatican Council.

The Priest Today Is a Victim

Imagine a priest, Fr. N., who arrives in a parish; quite often he feels alone amid the ruins. Now, you may say that this is exaggerated, a caricature, but we must once again face reality. What is happening? Few people at catechism classes, graying congregations, church buildings in not so good condition (depending on the region and the country), and then an excess of work, of Masses, of ministry. The priest leads the life of an official, always preparing something, running from one place to another, and it seems that he has few results to show for it. And then finally a great solitude there in the middle of it all.

And therefore the priest is a victim of what was set in place during the years after the Council, when the whole parochial fabric was destroyed. And people often make the mistake of saying that the world is what changed. “It wasn’t us! It is the world’s fault!” Now, that is too easy an explanation to always blame others, saying that it is the world, that it is the people’s mentality, that people are no longer Christians. It wasn’t the world that caused Catholic schools and hospitals to close, that disbanded parish associations; it wasn’t the world! It was the priests who decided to close them, to change.

I will quote what was said by Fr. Duccarroz, who is the provost of St. Nicholas Cathedral in Fribourg, in a moment of great lucidity and great honesty. He is a priest who was ordained right at the end of the Council, and he said this on the radio: “They told us, when I was ordained, to get rid of the cassock, to shut down Catholic works of charity since the civil communities have them too, and to approach the people, to be open! That’s what everyone did, and our churches emptied, our seminaries were vacated; maybe they were wrong after all.” An extraordinary moment of lucidity!

Well, then, the young priest arrives with an ideal, full of good will, and he finds himself facing ruins. And alone facing ruins. Here he is the victim of this state of affairs; he is not the agent responsible for it.

The Priest Is Poorly Formed

On paper you have to satisfy Rome, which determines the academic curriculum. But after that you have to look at the quality of the academic curriculum. The philosophy they teach us, for example, is often a bit of history of philosophy. But when Rome says “philosophy,” this implies what the Church has always taught: the philosophy of St. Thomas, which teaches you to understand theology. Nowadays they offer some history of philosophy or some modern philosophy. Therefore there are no longer any conceptual tools.

Then, as for dogma, you get essentially some history of dogma with a bit of speculative theology. And then, at any rate, what I have been able to see at the University of Fribourg, the emphasis is on pastoral themes, man and ethics, religious education, which don’t have very much to do with the priestly formation. That can be learned on the ground or at the end of the course of studies. But the major subjects at seminary are taught in a diffused manner and are no longer the backbone of theology and formation. And so the priest today has ideas, vague notions, but ultimately the men who come out of the seminaries are no longer theologians as such.

And then, since the level of formation has dropped, the requirements are lowered just a little. It was striking: our class on Church history, at the university level, was actually a course that could have been taught to high school seniors. And when you looked at the students who had courses in secular history, or modern history, they had real history courses with academic, scientific demands. But not in Church history! It was a sort of panorama sketched in broad strokes. And there was nothing but that sort of stuff. You got the impression of puttering around academically. And therefore there are no tools.

And therefore, of course, history, Tradition, everything starts with the pre-conciliar period or with the Council. Now this just might be called one of the guiding principles. But although this generation of priests does not know what there was before, the elderly priests whom they have met have criticized what there was before, telling them, “Ah, it’s not like before; before, they used to do things differently.” I personally experienced a typical example of a pastoral course at the University of Fribourg when I was a student. The priest came in with a poster he showed us, and told us, “Before, the Church was like that!” He showed us this poster on which there was a pyramid drawn. And he turned it over and then said, “The Church is like this.” It was a circle. At the university, this was the second or third year, to make us understand what the Church is. This was in pastoral theology. So it is always in comparison, in opposition. Somehow, people don’t understand well.

And before? Well, no, there’s nothing to it! Or else that depends on history or is based on anecdote. For example, in the liturgy there ought to be a certain continuity. To quote the Holy Father, a “hermeneutic of continuity.” Now, here is an example of what my professor in Fribourg used to say: “The liturgy was perverted after Constantine and rediscovered its wonderful, primitive sources with the Liturgical Renewal and especially since the conciliar constitution Sacrosantcum Concilium and its implementation with the Mass of Paul VI.” There you have it! I dare say that is quite clear. And then, only as a parenthetical remark within a historical digression, there was the Tridentine reform.

The Priest Is a Prisoner

The priest who has experienced the Tradition of the Church, what the Church has always done, ends up feeling like a prisoner because he is held hostage among his confreres, the faithful, the lay pastoral assistants, and his bishop. I recall a young priest who said that he was obliged to give collective absolution during a penance service, which is still forbidden by the Church today. In some dioceses it is done openly, with the discreet blessing of the bishops, and everyone knows about it. He was obliged to do it and right afterward he went to confess to another priest. He had been obliged to do it and still he repented of it! That is tragic! Therefore he is like a prisoner because he has to do such things, but he knows that it is not right.

What if he cited the documents of the Supreme Pontiff, which are all clear enough, like John Paul II’s motu proprio on confession? There is a series of documents that are very clear on all the liturgical questions. Similarly there are documents even on the role of lay people in the Church. Well, if the priest quotes them, they tell him, “Fortunately, there are mountains between Rome and us.” Or else, “This document is very nice, but it is not suited to our ecclesial situation.” So he is a prisoner because he sees there is a problem.

Here’s another example of a parish priest who told me quite recently that the director of his church choir is divorced and is living openly with someone who is not his wife. Everyone knows it, yet he is obliged to give him Communion. He did try to discuss the matter with him, but the person didn’t want to hear about it. This priest told me: “If I don’t give him Communion, I have no more church choir and he will complain. What should I do?”

Another priest tells me that he was appointed to a parish, but the catechisms were already distributed by the lay people before he arrived. He cannot do any sacramental preparation, neither for First Communion, nor for Confirmation, because the lay people are involved in that. And he doesn’t even have the right to train Mass servers because, again, a layman is in charge of that! So he confided to me: “I can’t do anything. I’m good for nothing but to say Mass and hear the confessions of the few people who still go to confession. And that’s all.” In that sense, the priest is a prisoner. And yet he quite often has the best intentions in the world!

The Priest Must Obey

This is the big weapon. Everything has been sold at bargain prices, but there is still one weapon: obedience. The bishops are popes in their dioceses. One day someone appealed to obedience in my hearing, and I replied to him, “If you ask obedience of your clergy, Your Excellency, you yourself must set an example by obeying the Supreme Pontiff. If not, you cannot demand obedience from your priests!” The discussion ended there, incidentally. But this is very important because there is a terrible insistence on obedience. This sort of thing gives the priest a complex; he tells himself, “I am disobedient. I am a bad priest. It doesn’t work, so it is better to be wrong while obeying than to disobey and do what is right.”

The Distorted Priest

I think that there is really an intention to stop having sacramental pastoral ministry the way the Church has always done it: Confession and Holy Mass. Today, you have to go meet the people where they are—which is fine! All missionaries in the Church have done that. But now we try to awaken in people’s consciousness the desire for Christ. We try to stir up a “transcendent experience of the spiritual” so that the faithful discover Christ themselves that way. And so we must not be dogmatic, we must not impose formulas, etc. This, among other things, is what we call in Switzerland the “pastoral approach of engendering” or “occasioning.” This pastoral approach changes every year, or else every five years you have a new pastoral approach. People write, people hold symposiums, and after a few years, when they see it doesn’t work, they change and adapt. Whom are they mocking?

I have worked with a lot of young people and they have a thirst for the truth. And the truth has a name, a face; it is not a theory. It is a person, Jesus Christ. We have to give them Our Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, with a lot of tact and sensitivity, you have to make the truth inviting. You can’t hit them over the head with the catechism. Of course we agree with that! But we are not there simply to be facilitators of a spiritual club. There is no point to that! We are there to be the ambassadors of Christ, as St. Paul says. Now, I find it hard to see anyone considering the priest as the ambassador of Christ.

General Deterioration

I myself did not experience these incidents. I was a student and other persons who were in the seminaries experienced them. This is just to illustrate the theme. It is to show the general deterioration found in priestly formation and what people try to impose on seminarians: Slow recorded music during adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, a crescent moon placed at the foot of the altar in a tree stump to symbolize the humility of Our Lord, etc. The point is not to generalize; these are very specific things, but ultimately they are signs of a loss of direction.

Vatican II, the Golden Calf

It is the Golden Calf, an idol! No one ever reads it! I would be curious to know who has read it from start to finish and written a commentary with annotations. If they at least had the courage, the audacity, to read the Council, you could discuss it. But, no! They have never read it completely. They take slogans from it: “the spirit of the Council.” It is an event. The school of Bologna, in Italy, which is very liberal, which has studied the Council and published a five or six volume history of the Council in different languages, demonstrates this very well. It is not so much the text; it is a happening, the Council which continues and follows its course in time. It is a spirit! And that is how they answer us.

If you try, in the case of the Constitution on the Liturgy, to cite the Council, to say for example that Latin remains the language of the Church, that Gregorian Chant remains the chant of the Latin Church: “Ah, yes, but no! We have gone beyond that! There is a spirit of the Council, an opening, a renewal!” Therefore it is really their idol, which they always invoke and which destroys things from within. Because there is nothing outside of all that. And from the idol proceeds the ideology. And the ideology is always, always totalitarian. It excludes everything else and it destroys everything else. The distinctive characteristic of the idol and of the ideology is that it destroys those who profess it and blinds them completely. That is why there is a problem: there is blindness.

I don’t think that there is really bad will, but rather a form of blindness. How can anyone say that with five percent of Catholics practicing their faith, we are going to find solutions that are purely human? Merge parishes? But where has that got us? Eventually you have to sit down, look at the situation and say: it’s not working.

They go so far as to justify pastoral failures by saying: “But this is in the image of Our Lord, who humbled himself. The Church is experiencing that. She is becoming humble and poor.” And they fall into a sort of ideology of being miserable which is completely false. But they justify this too by the Council.

The “Sin” of Tradition

I think that it is the biggest sin. They can forgive a lot of things that you do in the Church. They will forgive you for having an affair. They will forgive you for not saying Mass every day, for abandoning your Breviary, for ridiculing time-tested devotional formulas, for making heterodox statements (to say the least) from the pulpit. They will forgive you because they are very charitable. But there is one thing they will not forgive you for: The supreme sin is to look to Tradition and, even worse, to look to the Society of St. Pius X. They will let you go to Protestant worship services and even allow priests to go to Communion at Protestant worship services, which has happened! Or to conduct interreligious dialogue with the Buddhists, and to go make Zen retreats. They will find that you are the most open, marvelous person in the world; they will hold you up as an example!

But when you celebrate Mass in Latin, even if it is not the Mass of St. Pius V, when you wear a cassock: that is suspect. When you pray the Rosary, when you hear confessions in a confessional, you are suspected of fundamentalism. Then, as you can very well imagine, when you start to talk gratefully, very lovingly, and amicably about Archbishop Lefebvre, for example, and about his work, well, that is unforgivable. Once again, they forgive you anything but that.

 

Transcribed from a video interview conducted by DICI.