The future of the priesthood depends on the restoration of its relevance and status, and the reversal of decline in its morale, veteran seminary formator and former Broken Bay vicar-general Fr John Hill said in the inaugural McGuire Lecture at ACU on 7 August.
In his lengthy address at ACU’s Strathfield campus, Fr Hill offered insights ranging in tone from the oracular to the obstreperous, as he told a story of the diminishing standing of the Australian priest in his community and called for a return to the parish’s priority in Catholic life.
He inveighed against centralisation, condemned the overuse of the term “clericalism” with its negative connotations, and said priests’ vocational satisfaction depends on, “understanding and respect for the service they render to society, and in particular to the Catholic community, with a presumption in favour of their competence, commitment and goodwill.”
In the early 20th century, the time of Bishop Terence McGuire—staunch advocate for an Australian priesthood for whom the lecture, sponsored by the Manly Union, is named—the priesthood was demanding but Catholic morale and self-confidence was high, Fr Hill said.
“The confidence of Catholics at that time was based on Catholic unity. There was little dispute about the nature of Catholicism,” he remarked, adding that the Australian priesthood’s overall outlook in the decades after Federation was “quietly practical” and their standing in the community was never in issue.
In more recent years, however, a range of factors have combined to displace the priest and parish from the centre of parish life, causing a drop in morale and, consequently, vocations.
Priests are often motivated by idealism, he said, but without respect will struggle to recruit and retain vocations—as are other “frontline workers” like nurses, teachers and general practitioners, also suffering from staffing crises.
Fr Hill disagreed that “intentional communities” are the solution, because the parish is a place where anybody can “feel at home.”
“There are certain needs the intentional community does not, and cannot meet. The parish can; it takes more effort these days, but there are certain things only it can meet. And with that is tied up the whole identity of the priesthood.”
From the 1960s onwards the face of Catholic education changed, with the centralisation of the parish school system, decline of teaching orders and rise of paid teachers, and boom in enrolments, Fr Hill continued.
The relationship of priest to school also shifted, as did parental expectations: where once the laity saw themselves as owners of their schools, established to teach their children the faith, parents are now clients.
“All this, and conforming to the increasing demands of government regulation, led to the growing detachment of the school from the parish, and an expansion of diocesan Catholic schools offices and growth of their bureaucracies,” Fr Hill said.
“The journey had begun which is now concluded, with diocesan takeovers of parish schools, and the exclusion of parishes from employment and enrolment policies.
“I must confess when I was parish priest I did not enjoy going to enrolment meetings. In fact, I detested them. Now, I wouldn’t be invited.
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!” he told the priests in the audience.
Fr Hill described the existence of two national organisations of priests as an “index of Catholic disunity … the National Council of Priests, and the Australian Confraternity of Catholic Clergy, with rather different understandings of the priesthood. That’s putting it mildly.”
He also said there were two types of seminary in Australia today: “Those who find refuge in the past, and those that don’t know what they’re doing.”
The COVID-19 pandemic and the child abuse crisis also contributed to the decline in priestly morale, Fr Hill briefly mentioned—the first by de-emphasising the “community dimension, participation, the liturgical interaction between priest and people” in favour of virtual services, the second by destroying the trust between laity and clergy.
“The proper relation between priests and people cannot be re-established until trust is restored. All of that is part of the picture,” Fr Hill said.
Fr Hill concluded by saying the “parish once more must be front and centre,” if morale and vocations are to improve.
“The community must determine what is the place of the clergy in the Catholic Church—then at least, when we pray for vocations, we shall know for what we are praying, and young people will know what they’re signing up for.”
Associate Professor Maeve Heaney VDMF, Xavier Chair for theological formation at Holy Spirit Seminary and ACU, and a contributor to the Ratio for priestly formation in Australia with Bishops Anthony Randazzo and Shane Mackinlay, gave an irenic response to Fr Hill’s strident lecture.
“It seems to me that one of the most important dimensions of reflecting on the issues facing our church, the ministerial priesthood included, is asking the right questions,” Heaney said.
“What sort of priest, for what sort of church?”
But the Second Vatican Council “in all its brilliance and prophecy and complexity” did not develop a theology of the priesthood of corresponding stature to its other documents, Heaney continued.
“I intuit and I understand that some of the work of the future in relation to the identity and ministry of presbyters needs to reimagine how we work together, and as our ecclesial structures shift, that we may think about how the tradition of the church—all that she is, and all that she believes, to quote Dei Verbum—may be handed on,” she said.
Polarisation, by contrast, “attacks the heart of God’s life within us,” she continued, going on to cite the theologian Fr Bernard Lonergan SJ’s prediction that there would emerge a “solid right bound to live in a world that no longer exists … a scattered left captivated by now this, now that.”
She agreed with Fr Lonergan that “what will count is a perhaps not numerous centre” committed to patient dialogue and solution-seeking—“real conversation.”
While the speakers only tackled the issue obliquely, worries about the polarisation of ministerial expectations and priestly character between newly-ordained and older clergy have come to the fore in recent years.
In the week preceding the McGuire lecture, Canberra-based church reformer John Warhurst wrote a mournful essay in Eureka Street about the generation of “Vatican II clergy” who are passing away.
The changing of the guard is most evidenced by the decline in membership of the National Council of Priests, Warhurst wrote, whose 780 members from around 3000 Australian priests have an average age of 80 years old.
“The most disappointing explanation would be that it signifies an active rejection of the Vatican II ethos represented by the NCP. If that is the case it endangers the success of synodality, an idea which draws heavily on Vatican II,” Warhurst wrote, concluding that reform of the church “will become less likely without this Vatican II-inspired generation of priests.”
In an interview with The Catholic Weekly prior to the McGuire lecture, Heaney said that the church is a communion and is “not afraid of any vocation.”
“I don’t think we should be saying to people when they come, ‘You want to come for this, but we actually need you to be that,’” she said.
“That I don’t think is the right disposition in formation. I think you welcome the people who present themselves for calling, and you help them discern.
“They’re presenting these days with a real thirst for God, and I think that’s because in the world in which we live there’s a real thirst for God. And that’s a real sign of the Spirit we need to listen to.
“We have to listen to how young people experience God and try to facilitate that. We need to listen to how the church wants to experience God and try to facilitate that.
“I definitely don’t think we should allow an either/or to emerge.
“One of my deepest concerns with the church, with the world, is that we don’t know how to pray.
“Often we don’t know how to access an experience of faith. That’s the first thing—there’s a thirst for prayer.
“I think when people present to priesthood, as to any calling, there’s their desires, which need to be received and welcomed and understood.
“And then there’s the church’s need and its discernment, and the process of discernment is the coming together of those two.
“I don’t discern my call to be a Verbum Dei missionary, for example. I discerned it with the community to see if they recognised it in me.
“That’s a journey of growth, and why the process is long.
“It’s a long process because you’re committing your life to something, and in that journey there’s an unfolding, one would hope.
“That’s why it’s an ecclesial endeavour. They have to grow together into the leaders they’re called to be.”