There can be little doubt that the experience of being a Catholic in 2020 – the year of COVID-19 – has marked our experience and our habits profoundly and changed the way we shape and imagine our belonging to the Church.
But there is an additional element to consider – the impact of these new circumstances on the way priests imagine and deliver their service to the Church in utterly reconfigured communities they are sent to serve.
A great deal of Catholicism is habitual – from the prayers we pray together or privately by ourselves to the respect we accord authorities in the Church or the acceptance we show to beliefs and practices we may not understand or even may disagree with if we gave ourselves the time to think about them.
Change habits or suppress them and replace them with nothing then cultural collapse follows.
As an ordained priest for 35 years, I used to think that the people made you the priest you became.
In 2020, I now think another factor needs to be taken into account – external forces that affect people and priests that are completely beyond the control of both.
That I make this comment is a measure of how simplistic my own grasp of my evolving identity is!
Despite the history of religions in so many countries that I have studied and the effects of changes in many parts of the world, it is external (and often non-religious) factors that force change on the Church.
This time with COVID-19, the changes have come through the application of rules to preserve public health.
Never mind the origins. The effects are the same: habits have been broken.
Those habits may be restored as they have been in Russia and China with puzzling application, marked by the unusual processes that gave birth to them.
One test of what’s going on and what effect it will have is what it is doing to priests in the Catholic community.
Priests have been lots of things throughout the history of the Church.
What they do, what shape their ministry takes and how priests think about themselves in the Church have all changed over the life of the Church.
What we have is an identity that is best likened to minestrone soup – a combination of diverse leftovers that unite to create a mixed result of unpredictable flavours.
Or not!
Just reviving the old forms of communal celebration in a way that doesn’t acknowledge what believers have been through when deprived of their familiar communal routines will fail to meet the pastoral challenge of this moment.
What has held the identity of Catholic priests together in a stable shape that has endured so many various pressures over the last 500 years since the Council of Trent when extensive changes to the life, discipline, training and regulation of the life of priests were introduced.
This reform of the priesthood was one of the reform achievements of the Council of Trent in the 16th Century.
That Council’s major legacy was the reform of the clergy in their training (seminaries) and operations (diocesan structure and operations) to correct the decadence into which the clergy and the episcopate had sunk in the medieval centuries – over the 12th to the 16th Centuries.
But the whole church globally has rarely (perhaps only during outbreaks of the Plague?) faced a set of challenges imposed from outside its own structures and by its leadership on the scale and with the reach that COVID-19 has imposed.
For those whose engagement with the Catholic Church is intimate and interpersonal such as is required of Catholics in places like China where Catholics are a tiny and often persecuted minority or in places like Japan where the minority status has been constant for centuries and for centuries that status has been accompanied by persecutions, developing a strong interior identity as Catholics has kept the flame of faith burning.
Seeking to enhance each other’s pilgrim journey
In various parts of the world, there is a long history of Catholics identifying themselves in ways that have relied on non-demonstrative points of reference, known only in the family and with few if any physical reference points like churches, festivals or communally celebrated feasts.
Not so for the common mainstream of Catholics throughout the world whose faith has been shaped and carried by feasts, festivals, Seasons, devotions centred on saints and of course Sunday Mass in a local parish.
But it is fanciful to think that lifting the constraints imposed by COVID-19 restrictions will see patterns and practices applying before the restrictions just automatically resume.
Why fanciful? Because patterns of behaviour in everything – from how we interact with each other at any level down to even to what we value, esteem or despise – are all acquired characteristics, mostly from others. And without our regular repetition of them, we lose practice and they just evaporate.
Then comes the really interesting part:
- Where do we go within ourselves and, most importantly, between ourselves, to reference and reinforce what we value and wish to maintain?
- How do we ground and justify to each other what we value?
- How do we move beyond being a collection of ever more self-isolating individuals to becoming a community of people seeking to enhance each other’s pilgrim journey?
And that’s the question that is really important for me to answer to myself as a priest.
My clear sense of myself is as a celebrant of sacraments, communal values, beliefs and practices, of lives focused by their beliefs and celebrated at each turn in those life journeys, culminating in the final celebration of transition: death.
Those forms of engagement with believers lapsed for me last March when churches closed down in Australia where I happened to be when the restrictions were imposed.
Those forms of nourishment ceased from that time.
They might resume on a very reduced scale in Australia because we’ve been very well behaved and led the world in responsible behaviour around COVID.
But from what I can see around the world, life as we knew it, is a long way from resuming.
I can’t speak for any other priest, but what this experience has done to me is make my approach to faith much more intimate, much less ceremonial and far less communally engaged.
I wonder what it’s been like for others.
My twists and turns inwards – I am by temperament an extrovert and some forced introversion may be a good thing!
My hunch is what moves others may well depend on the depth and ready familiarity of an interior life of prayer that each priest has.
What seems clear to me is that just reviving the old forms of communal celebration in a way that doesn’t acknowledge what believers have been through when deprived of their familiar communal routines will fail to meet the pastoral challenge of this moment.
Everywhere will be different and no universal directives will meet that challenge. The first thing for good pastors to do is to listen.
- Michael Kelly SJ is the CEO of UCAN Services.