Troubadour, February 2010
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Celebrating the Priesthood in the Year of the Priest
by Robert Fontana
Father Charles Mallet got my dad to go to Mass. Dad was a lazy Catholic married to a “marine” Catholic, my mother. Mom got us to Mass every Sunday, and every morning at 6:15 during Lent, but it was Fr. Mallet who got Dad going to Mass. As the associate pastor, Fr. Mallet was given the challenge of organizing the church choir. He tapped Dad, a band director and music educator, for the job as choir maestro. Dad started going to Mass and young Fr. Mallet became a regular visitor to our home.
In those days, back in the late ‘50s, Fr. Mallet would come to the house after Mass for coffee, and if dad was not yet home, he would wait in his car until Dad arrived. It was not seemly for a priest to be alone with a married woman, even if her seven sons were milling around. There were lots of meals together, conversations about Catholic schools, which of the seven boys would become a priest, the shortness of life, and the demands of faith.
My parents trusted him, enjoyed his stories, valued his insights, and were glad to have a priest as part of the family. As an indication of their love for Fr. Mallet, after he had baptized me and my brother John came along, Mom and Dad asked him to be John’s godfather.
Fr. Mallet was transferred to another church where he was made pastor, but we Fontanas stayed in touch. There is one family story about two of my brothers, Chris and Carl, setting fire to the boat dock at Fr. Mallet’s family’s lakeside camp, but I won’t go into that.
When Lori and I decided to marry, and our college campus minister Father Dennis Berry could not do the wedding, we turned to Fr. Mallet. Lori and I both remember something he told us that day.
“Robert,” he said, “whenever there is an opportunity for you to do something for Lori that would really make her happy, do it for her. And Lori, whenever there is an opportunity for you to do something for Robert that would really make him happy, do it for him as well.”
(We have remembered that and try to practice it every day!)
Lori and I moved away from Louisiana but the Fontana family stayed in touch with Fr. Mallet. And when Mom died, my brothers and I asked him to say the funeral Mass. After the funeral I found my grandmother’s Roman missal printed in Latin and English. And tucked away between its pages was a prayer card commemorating Fr. Mallet’s ordination as a priest on August 6, 1955. Grandma was praying for the success of his priestly ministry.
In the last verse of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus promises his disciples that He will be with them even until the end of time (Matthew 28:20). Jesus is no longer visibly present to His people, so how can we be sure that He is with us through the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows of life? That is the job of the priest. The priest is meant to be a Sacrament, a visible reminder and tangible presence of Jesus’ love, mercy, and friendship. Every time he baptizes, forgives sins, blesses weddings, celebrates the Eucharist, anoints the sick, and buries the dead, the Christian faithful can be confident that it is, in fact, Jesus who is baptizing, forgiving, blessing, celebrating, healing, and burying! Jesus is with His people until the end of the ages.
The priest is not expected to be superman! He is as human as we all are and struggles with sin. He has some gifts for working in ministry, and lacks others. The strength of his ministry comes from deep prayer and strong committed friendships with men and women, clergy and lay. These provide him with a strong emotional and spiritual foundation on which he can build a life of unselfish service to God’s people. A priest must love the people he serves, and they need to know it. The Catholic faithful will overlook and forgive many limitations of their priest if they know that he loves them. Lack of prayer, isolation, and selfishness are the death of any priesthood; prayer, committed friendships, and unselfish service are its lifeblood.
Fr. Mallet is a Sacrament of Jesus to our family, as he has been to many, many individuals, couples, and families throughout his priesthood. He has found great joy in this vocation from God. Even in his late 70s he enjoys being a priest. In this Year of the Priest he is a vivid reminder of the great gift that the priesthood is meant to be for the Church. Thank you, Fr. Mallet! And many thanks to the hundreds and hundreds of priests who have faithfully fulfilled their vocation to be a Sacrament of the Risen Jesus, reminding us that Jesus is with His people even unto the end of time.
Waiting to Forgive
by Kristin White
Are you ready?” I ask Jonah every day as he waits for the carpool to come. He watches out our huge front window, his forehead pressed against the window, leaving fingerprints on the glass.
“Yes Mom,” he grumbles, which gets me every time. My oldest and, usually, most responsible child is very forgetful. Rarely are we not scrambling trying to find his library book, homework, or jacket. “God bless his wife or congregation someday!” I say to myself regularly. All I can do is shake my head, because he’s getting better, and most days all he leaves behind is the fog from his breath on the window.
But just recently I realized that Ash Wednesday was only weeks out. It’s here every year, but I’d forgotten to look at the calendar and see the inevitable back again. Lent. Christ’s Sacrifice. His Resurrection. Our Redemption.
Lent is here. Are you ready? Am I ready? I was thinking about this recently, how Lent has changed for me over the years. How I’ve gone from giving up, to adding more, to actually incorporating it into my life. And Lent has grown on me, especially because of Christ’s forgiveness. This became really apparent to me this fall when I prepared with Jonah for his first reconciliation. For months we went to the classes. The kids learned about the joys of forgiveness and the gift of reconciliation. The adults re-learned about forgiveness, and not passing on our misgivings of reconciliation. It was so enlightening to me, to be with other parents, many of whom hadn’t been to confession since their first time. We talked at length about forgiveness —and not just in the confessional—and I saw places in my own life where I have been holding back forgiveness.
On the night of his first confession, Jonah didn’t really seem fazed. He went up and sat and talked with our priest. He received the sacrament. When he came back and sat with me, he exclaimed for all of those around us to hear, “Well, that wasn’t bad at all!”
Later, on our way home, I asked him if he was nervous. He said no, he knew Father Steve, and he knew that it wasn’t a scary thing. He said he knew it was God forgiving him anyway. He told me that his penance was to set a good example for his siblings. He asked me about my first confession and I told him about how I’d made up all my sins. I was too dramatic to include my real sins which were fighting with my sisters and telling on my brother. Instead I think I confessed to stealing and cheating, because I thought that would make my confession more legitimate. He laughed and told me I was the only crazy Mom he knew. And again I just shook my head, because I’m the only Mom crazy enough to admit to it.
And maybe I am crazy. I don’t dread confession. I love starting fresh, replacing the old with the new. I love that we have a God who is so forgiving that he would sacrifice his own Son for us. We ask for forgiveness, and He forgives.
But recently I realized there are some sins that I keep bringing back into the confessional. A few sins that hold steady, as I stand with my own forehead pressed against the glass. I wait for them to go away but then I grab them up again. When am I going change?
When I think about Jesus, innocent and thrown to the wolves by his own people, are we that far off? We all want someone else to blame. We all want to rationalize our own actions. I see it in my Micah when we catch him disobeying and he says quickly, “Jonah and Daniel did it.” Even if our feelings are valid, is our sin? I believe the sins of passive aggressiveness, resentment, jealousy, bitterness, gossip, entitlement, —the sins we feel we can validate because they make us feel better— they only push Christ farther away.
So I’m working on Forgiveness. We can’t forget that Christ gave all. We can’t forget that evil exists and expects our worst. But we can forgive, because God is good. Reconciliation is good, because we reconcile ourselves to Him. And what do I want to leave to my children, bitterness or grace?
So I wait for Him. I want Him to breathe on me His infallible forgiveness. No matter how many things I forget, He always forgives. You. Me.
Challenges to the Priesthood in the Year of the Priest
by Robert Fontana
I have worked in ministry for many years and would like to comment on a few challenges to the priesthood that I see in this Year of the Priest:
- Regaining trust in the wake of ecclesiastical cover-up of clergy sex abuse;
- Availability of the Sacraments;
- Leadership development; and
- Clergy who are gay.
Regaining Trust
There is no mechanism in place other than the “honor system” to prevent future “cover-up” of sex abuse by Church leaders. The only effective solution that I can think of is that the entire history of the sex abuse crisis —especially the patterns of cover-up— must be taught in all seminaries, schools of theology, diocesan formation programs, novitiates, and Catholic colleges. What this will do is equip the Christian faithful to be able to recognize the signs of cover-up (just like safe environment education is equipping us to recognize the signs of a pedophile) and prepare us to intervene!
Availability of the Sacraments
The fundamental purpose of the priest is to help the Christian faithful encounter Jesus through the Sacraments, especially Eucharist and Penance, yet we have entire communities of people who do not have access to the Sacraments because there is no priest available. Make the Sacraments available by ordaining married men to the priesthood. Celibacy is a gift to the Church that will survive with a married clergy precisely because it is a gift from God.
Leadership Development
I do not think we have a vocation crisis, but a crisis in leadership development. Because we limit our selection of clergy candidates to celibate men, we have grossly reduced our pool of talent from which to choose our priests. There is enormous interest in diocesan, deacon and lay ministry formation programs. Many, many talented and faith-filled Catholics are responding to the Holy Spirit’s call to serve in the Church. I think that we have to expand our “talent pool” in developing leaders to serve the Church as ordained ministers, priests and deacons (notice I’ve added deacons to the mix here). Certainly this ought to include married men who have demonstrated a stable and secure marriage and family situation; and women.
Without hesitation, women ought to be welcomed into the diaconate ministry. There is a history of women serving as deacons in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It would be an enormous asset to the Church to have women who are called and gifted to be able to lead public prayer, baptize, witness weddings, and preach as a deacon can.
What about women as priests? There are three major arguments against the ordination of women as priests: A) Jesus did not call women to be apostles; B) there is no history of women being ordained in the Churches of the East and the West; and C) only a man can sacramentally represent Jesus as a priest precisely because Jesus was male.
Pope John Paul II insisted that the topic of women ordination is closed and cannot be discussed. A bishop has even excommunicated Franciscan Father Michael Crosby for publicly supporting the ordination of women. (It makes no sense to me that a priest who has raped and abused children and a bishop who protected the abusive cleric are not excommunicated, while a priest who supports the desire of women to give themselves in life-long service as priests is!)
However, regardless of what Pope John Paul II has demanded, the issue will not go away because women make up 80 percent of the labor force of the Church and have joined men as pastoral leaders of parishes, and scholars and teachers at universities and schools of theology. They have demonstrated enormous competence in their work and faithfulness to their Catholic heritage. Many people have been persuaded and are asserting that the Church has entered into a new movement led by the Holy Spirit that is calling forth the gifts of women to the ministry of the ordained. The only way to sort this one out, I think, is through an ecumenical council, one that will involve the Church of the East and West, and one that will equally include women with men!
Clergy Who are Gay
Many dioceses and many religious communities have gay men who are serving the Church with great competence and unselfish generosity. However, there are some very real problems with this. A gay subculture has developed within the clergy of many dioceses and religious orders. Some of these priests are sexually active with each other and actively recruit young men into the seminary to join in this double life of public ministry and hidden sexual behavior. Furthermore, a dominant presence of gays in the clergy is a disincentive, rightly or wrongly, for many heterosexual men from entering the priesthood.
It is a complicated and emotional issue, but it must be named and dealt with. Clearly the Church’s teaching on the sin of homosexual behavior will not change in the near future. And banning gay men from the seminary is neither wise nor just! Many priests who are homosexuals can and do serve in the Church with integrity. What to do?
The simplest and least complicated step might be, at least at the diocesan level, to allow clergy to marry and thus create an incentive for heterosexual men who are called and gifted to enter seminary and be ordained priests. This just might undercut the practice of those gay men who misuse the priesthood to have access to a privileged world of men, and hide behind a veneer of celibacy to pursue their own goals.
What do you think? These are four critical areas related to the priesthood that I think need serious attention by the entire faith community. I welcome your comments on what I think and I would like to know what you think. Send me your summary of priesthood-related issues and we will print them in a future issue of The Troubadour.
