The Meaning of Priesthood

No discussion, therefore, of one of the functions of Christ's Mystical Body, in this case the priesthood, can be intelligible unless it is related immediately to fundamentals. There are, I believe, three basic principles which, if understood, will clarify everything in the Catholic religion from contemplative prayer to the blessing of holy water, and these are the three principles in relation to which we are going to consider the organic function of the priesthood. Briefly they are these:

1. That since God is love, and since the goal of love is union with its object, the aim of the Christian religion, that is, salvation, is to realize the eternal union of man with God. By union I do not mean identity but a perfect union of different things, as when color and shape unite to form, say, a red circle.

2. That this union is realized through mutual love between God and man, where love is defined as giving oneself wholly and unreservedly to another. God gives himself wholly to man, and man gives himself wholly, in body, soul and spirit to God.*  [*Although God gives himself wholly, creatures do not receive him wholly. The sun sheds its light upon all things, and they reflect it in varying degrees, but none equal to the sun in brilliance.]

3. That this union is achieved, in the first instance, by God who initiates the union by giving himself and his own eternal life to sinful men. "Herein," wrote St. John, "is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us." It follows, therefore, that eternal life is not a prize to be earned but a free gift to be realized, appreciated and used. In other words, Christian sanctity is not what we do to get union with God; it is what we do with it. It follows also that the Catholic Church is not an association formed by men to discover God, but an association formed by God to discover men.

It is significant that the second of these principles, at least in part, is far more widely recognized and understood than either the first or the third. Every Christian, and for that matter every Jew and every Hindu, understands that religion involves the giving, the dedication of himself to God -- in a word, sacrifice. The truth that sacrifice is of the essence of religion is a revelation that has penetrated human consciousness from time immemorial. But in practice the other two principles have been minimized and obscured because, for dimly conscious reasons, we cannot quite bear them. A false humility makes us timid in acknowledging the tremendous destiny which God has prepared for us -- eternal union with his own divine Being -- a destiny which popular notions of heaven almost entirely obscure. And the glorious message of the Christian gospel, that in Christ God has freely given us this union, is a complete outrage to our pride. For it means that God has put us in an infinite and irrepayable debt, and we are so embarrassed by such unmerited love that we are loath to admit it and adopt almost any means to conceal it. Thus the average Christian of today hears little or nothing of the gift of union with God, of divine sonship; he hears only that Christ came to the world to cancel past debts, to give him a fresh start, to set him an example of righteousness, and to bestow upon him a dose of spiritual power to help him earn his passage to heaven.

Therefore as popularly conceived there is no essential difference between Christianity and any other form of ethical theism, between the old law of Moses and the prophets and the new dispensation of Christ. The only difference is one of degree -- as if our Lord had come into the world merely to give us a fresh start with a new and improved moral law, a bigger and better Pharisaism, a more rigorous and demanding code of sacrifice. In actual practice popular Christianity is no more than a rarified Judaism, though Catholics are perhaps less prone to this error than liberal Protestants, and the reason is simply that the world does not want to face the implications of the Incarnation. According to the liberals it would seem that the only difference between the old covenant and the new is that the price of redemption is no longer the sacrifice of bulls and goats but the sacrifice of one's very self, with the encouragement of Christ's example. In this case the gospel is not very good news. A more Catholic type of misunderstood Christianity embellishes this story with one rather dubious improvement: that whereas the sacrifice of bulls and goats and obedience to the law of Moses would not purchase entry to heaven, the sacrifice of oneself will -- because Christ has opened the gates. God, in other words, has agreed to let us in, though now he is talking in terms of a vastly increased entrance fee.

Of course it has been stated very briefly, but in fact that is about as much of the truth of Christianity as manages to reach the mind of the ordinary Christian. In practice the doctrine of the Atonement means to him no more than that Christ has opened the very distant gates of heaven, and because the age of the old covenant, when the gates were closed, is so remote in time the fact that they are now open has lost its impressive novelty. The rest of the truth, wherein lies the full splendor of the gospel, the truth of one "full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world" is for him a veiled and incomprehensible mystery. In effect, therefore, most Christians are still trying to live under the conditions of the old covenant, wherein each man's own sacrifice, not of bulls and goats but of his whole life, is the only means of finding favour with God.

It follows, then, that the popular conception of the Christian ministry differs only superficially from the priestly and prophetic ministry of the old covenant. The minister is holy, not because he is an ordinary sinner called to a special union with Christ, but because he himself has dedicated his own life to God, and is specially righteous as a vicarious sacrifice for his people or at best as an example of individual goodness and individual sacrifice for them to follow. The people dance and drink, but not the minister. The people laugh and joke and relax, but not the minister, save perhaps in an obviously artificial manner so that we may be sure it isn't real. The Protestant minister is a subtle and up-to-date form of human sacrifice, and what he ministers is not the gift of union with God but "precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line." At least, that's what seems to be expected of him, though the grace of God sometimes makes him more human and lovable. The Catholic priesthood is, on the whole, in a rather better position, despite the fact that a family will offer a son for the priesthood in much the same spirit as an old Hebrew family would offer first-fruits for the altar. And do the people understand him as one who ministers union with God in Christ? On the contrary, he is all too often the mere mediator of individual sacrifices of a crudely commercial character -- "sacrifices of masses" to be had at so much cash, remission of sins for so many "Hail Marys," curtailment of Purgatory for so many novenas. But at least his people get the impression that somehow or other he is a source of life and power, however magical and trivial its nature.

But the truth contained in the Old Testament that sacrifice, and sacrifice involving our own lives, plays some essential part in our relations with God, still remains. Without sacrifice creatures cannot be made holy, which is to say healthy, whole, one with God. The word sacrifice itself has the double meaning of offering a thing to God and making a thing holy. Man is created for union with God in love, and since love consists in giving oneself to another freely, man's love of God is precisely sacrifice, the free surrender of his whole being -- physical, mental and spiritual -- to God. To be acceptable to God a sacrifice must be perfect, and in practice this means that it must be offered to God absolutely, without conditions or reservations, because the only way to render a human life without blemish is to put it entirely in the hands of God.

Obviously the priesthood of the old covenant was quite inadequate to achieve such a sacrifice. To begin with, what it offered at the altar was not human life but mere symbolic tokens of that life -- portions of the meat and drink whereby that life was sustained. Furthermore, it was a purely human priesthood, and one individual human being can no more sacrifice for another than he can eat another's food for him. How much less could he offer another person's whole life to God, when the essence of such an offering is that it be one's own free action? For individual human persons are mutually exclusive; I am I, and you are you; I cannot see through your eyes; I cannot, unless you permit me, command your will; I cannot surrender your soul to God. Thus the priesthood of the old covenant was only a sign, a type, a figure of what had to be done. The sacrifices which it offered could not effect the forgiveness of sins because they could not effect union with God: the two states are one and the same. God is forgiveness; his "nature and property is always to have mercy," and to be one with God is to be one with forgiveness. Under the old covenant each man was in reality his own priest, because the real sacrifice required by God was that every man should offer himself and his all. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

But the gates of heaven were closed in the sense that man simply could not make such a sacrifice. By his own power he is still incapable of it, for try as you may you simply cannot freely and fully abandon your life and being to God. This is the state and effect of original sin, of man's characteristic and congenital tendency to love himself rather than God. The Chinese have a proverb which aptly describes this condition: "When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way." If you start, then, by being the wrong man you are in a seemingly hopeless case, for whatever means you take to turn yourself into the right man will surely work in the wrong way. If you are by nature selfish, all your righteousness, all your efforts to love God and give yourself to him will have at their foundation a selfish motive. Like a fly stuck on fly-paper, the more you struggle to get off, the more firmly you will be stuck.

This is a truth which all of us know well from experience. We know, for example, that worry is a sin involving lack of trust in God. We know, too, that it's stupid to worry and that worry will solve nothing. But just try, by sheer will power, to stop worrying about something. Before you know where you are, you are involved in a perfectly horrible vicious circle, for you find not only that you can't stop worrying, but that you are worried because you can't stop, and that makes you doubly upset and nervous, so that you are alarmingly worried at worrying because you can't stop worrying.

Similarly, we know that in order to be possessed by God and to be one with him, we must let go of ourselves. Being fond of ourselves we hang on to them with all our might lest something should take them away, and slowly strangle in the process. So we know we ought to let go. We want to let go. But why? Because we are afraid of strangling ourselves. But you see, we are still afraid for ourselves, and in practice all our attempts to let go mean that we just hold on tighter. Thus when psychologists observe human virtue simply as human virtue, they come to the conclusion that altruism is merely indirect selfishness, repressed sexuality, or will-to-power, and thus prove to the hilt all that the Church has taught about original sin. When a human being attains enough self-consciousness to realize this predicament he becomes quite desperate. Some of the Apostles had experienced this despair. St. Paul's epistle to the Romans is for the most part a discussion of this very problem, and according to the Book of Acts St. Peter raised it at the First Council of Jerusalem when he observed that it was quite impossible for men to obey the old law. This was the despair that underlay St. Augustine's conversion, and prompted Luther's revolt against the reversion of mediaeval Roman Catholicism to Judaic legalism -- a revolt entirely justified however regrettable its excesses.

God's solution to this predicament is the Incarnation, the projection into time, space and history of his eternal disposition and action towards man. Because God is love and with his whole infinite being wills the union of each single creature with himself, man's sin does not alter God's nature but rather, from the relative human standpoint, intensifies the flow of the divine love towards him. In spite of the whole enormity of human sin, in spite of the pride whereby man would usurp God's own throne -- the center of the universe, God gives man that which he cannot earn, and performs in man and for man that priestly action which man cannot do for himself. God gives himself to man in an eternal union from which even hell affords no escape, and there offers and sacrifices our human nature to himself to complete and consummate the bond. As an historical event the Incarnation reveals this truth to us in all its tragic and triumphant meaning.

The creeds state plainly that in Christ God became man, not a man. The humanity of Christ is our own human nature, for as St. John says, coming into the world he enlightens every man. The Incarnation is local and historical to make it visible, and then to lead us on to the understanding that it is also cosmic and eternal -- that it takes place not only at a distance from us in time and space, but also here and now, always, within us. In short, God is incarnate in your human nature; he has made the perfect offering of your human nature to the eternal Father on the cross; he has raised your human nature from the dead, and finally has carried up your human nature into heaven, into the inner life of the Holy Trinity. As St. Paul tells us in his epistle to the Colossians, we are already dead to ourselves, and our life "is hid with Christ in God," for our real life is now Christ himself.

This then is the meaning of the Atonement, the at-one-ment of God and man, the one perfect sacrifice which Christ as our High Priest came to perform. It cannot be stated too strongly. We have eternal union with God as a free gift. We do not have to make any sacrifice; we do not have to give ourselves to God -- we have already been given. One thing alone remains for us to do, one power of the soul remains to be exercised which original sin has not destroyed -- the power to say "Yes -- Amen," to give assent to what has been done for us. For we are carried along in an inescapable union with God as in a mighty torrent. We may swim against it, but we do not move against it; we are carried along just the same, but under protest. All we have to do is to turn around -- repent. We can no more escape from union with God than we can escape from the present moment, and not only have we done nothing to deserve such a privilege, but almost everything to oppose it. The love of God is incomprehensible.

The force of this truth has been somewhat hushed up by certain timid theologians who at any word of a given union with God are apt to throw up their hands in horror and scream, "Pantheism!" Be it therefore noted in passing that pantheism involves a necessary and automatic union of the creature with God, whereas Christianity involves an entirely unnecessary union which depends solely on the free and loving will of God. This is a far more exciting kind of union than pantheism can possibly conceive.

From what has been said it should be easy to see what a vast difference lies between the priesthood of the old covenant and the priesthood of the new, -- the one offering many individual and ineffective sacrifices, a human priesthood, and the other embodying, affirming, pleading one cosmic and perfect sacrifice, a priesthood both human and divine. For the new priesthood is simply Christ extended; it is his High Priesthood realized in human persons just as, in a wider sense, the whole Church is the Incarnation realized and extended in human persons. For the Church is the body, the fellowship, of those people who have accepted the gift of union with God which Christ is and which Christ brings. The Church is made up of those who have said "Amen" to the identity of their own humanity with Christ's humanity, so that in a very real sense the Church is Christ's Body.

We saw that the Incarnation is cosmic and eternal as well as local and historical, for since the human mind functions chiefly on the local and historical plane, it has to be approached on that plane. To get an abstract idea across to a child you must make it concrete, illustrate it with a story. Because God's love extends to the whole human race which is largely made up of very simple and childlike minds, he makes his eternal action concrete, and illustrates it in the story of Jesus. As the extension of the Incarnation, the Church is likewise a cosmic and eternal organism as well as a local and historical institution, and herein lies its sacramental character. For a sacrament is a special instance of a cosmic and eternal action, a special instance of the union of God with the world. The ultimate object of the Incarnation and of the Church is to realize the union of the whole universe with God, for as the office hymn says:

From the holy Body broken,
    Blood and water forth proceed;
Earth and stars and sky and ocean
    By that flood from stain are freed.

According to this principle, then, we have an organic series and system of differentiations, of special instances, of God's loving gift of union with himself to the world -- the Incarnation, the Church, the sacraments, the orders of the Church. It is by differentiation of function that an organism develops and manifests its powers, every function remaining, however, a property of the whole organism lest differentiation become disintegration. By virtue of her union with Christ the Church as a whole exercises the priestly office of Christ -- the sacrificing, the offering and making holy, of creation. But for working purposes, that is, for sacramental purposes, this crucial function is differentiated into the sacred order of priests which stands at the focal point of the Church's life -- the altar -- and in the sacrifice of the Mass projects again and again into time and space the one eternal sacrifice, dispensing also in Holy Communion the gift of union with God which it involves. The work of the priesthood, central in the Church, is the work of the Cross, central in the universe -- the realization of union with God through Christ's sacrifice. In short, the difference between the old priesthood and the new is this: that whereas the old stood at the altar to offer his own and our personal sacrifices, the new stands to offer Christ's which is both God's and our own.

The truth which the new sacrifice of the Mass realizes must not be minimized, and the whole work of the priesthood is to reiterate this truth -- that in Christ God has offered our lives to himself and bestowed his own eternal life upon us here and now. The bread and wine set on the altar at the offertory is your own life and nature. Christ in and as his priest takes that human nature, makes it his own flesh and blood, and offers it perfectly to the Father. In Holy Communion it returns to you, enters into you, as the gift of union with the divine essence -- not just as a dose of spiritual power to help you to be good through the coming week. The sanctity which should follow from this sacrament is an outpouring of appreciation and gratitude for the fact that God has given his eternal life to a wholly unworthy creature.

From the gift of union with God flows the forgiveness of sins, and as the primary function of the priesthood is to minister the gift of union, so its secondary function is to minister forgiveness. For sacramental purposes, that is, for making things distinct, clear and simple to our concrete minds, the gift of absolution from sin is differentiated from the gift of union, Holy Penance is differentiated from Holy Communion, although the two are really one and are administered by one and the same priesthood. As our Lord's exercise of the authority to forgive sins was perhaps his most outstanding claim to divinity, so his bestowal of that authority upon the Church is perhaps the clearest possible sign of the Church's union with God, for God alone can forgive sins committed against him. Although the Sacrament of Penance normally precedes the offering of Mass in time, in the spiritual order it is derived from Mass. The confession of sins and the acceptance of God's forgiveness is a way of appreciating, a way of saying "Amen", to the gift which the Mass brings. A person who receives the Holy Communion without repentance and without accepting God's forgiveness is not really and sincerely accepting Communion. You do not accept union with God unless you accept forgiveness from God, and you do not accept forgiveness unless you accept it concretely and realistically for your specific sins.

The priest can say, "I absolve thee from thy sins" because he can say with Christ, "This is my Body." For we are cleansed, not by our own repentance, but because we have been incorporated into Christ and offered by him to the Father. Repentance is the consequence of this fact; it is our appreciation of it, our response to the revelation of God's unfailing love, apart from which "the continual dew" of his mercy falls off us like water from a duck's back. The Prayer Book points out the essential unity of the two sacraments in the Prayer of Humble Access -- "that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood." The priest cleanses us from sin because he offers the sacrifice which effects forgiveness, though in both instances he is the focal point of a function which belongs essentially to God incarnate in the whole Body of Christ.

The third function of the priesthood is the ministry of the Word, and this again proceeds from the priest's union with Christ. Once more, because he can say, "This is my Body" he can say, "This is my Gospel," for in preaching and teaching the priest is to speak as Christ and to convey and explain the truth which inheres in his office. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the good tidings to the poor." The Christian priesthood involves also the prophetic ministry, and as there is a radical difference between the old and the new priesthood, so there is a radical difference between the old and the new prophecy.

Generally speaking the message of the old prophecy was one of judgment and wrath, and of exhortation to repentance. Sadly enough, the message of the Church must sometimes be the same. But that message will be of no effect unless a very definite primacy is given to the "good tidings," for "God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved." The priest's authority to preach is not, therefore, to be taken primarily as authority to moralize. For so many hundreds of years clergy have moralized Sunday by Sunday, bombinating and fulminating from their pulpits like Amos and Jeremiah, that our people have by and large a thoroughly perverted and unbalanced notion of the Gospel, and that the Church simply stinks in the nostrils of the general and pagan public. If such harangues were adequate to win souls, Amos and Jeremiah would not have been succeeded by Christ.

The priest's ministry of the word involves not only public preaching, but also private teaching -- in particular the individual direction of souls in the spiritual life: a task which any parish priest is liable to be called upon to perform, whether he is trained for it or not. How can we expect the Church to have any vitality at all (especially in this state of nervous fidgets called modern civilization) unless we set out definitely and systematically to develop the interior life? Direction in such a matter as this should surely be expected from the spiritual pastor of a community, but this has been so neglected that the interior life, so far as people have any at all, has become the special province of Christian Science practitioners, theosophists, swamis and psychoanalysts. Generally speaking, Roman Catholics relegate such matters to the cloister. Protestants, with the exception of Quakers, heed them not at all, and Anglicans occasionally get around to it. There cannot be any vital religion when it consists only of receiving the sacraments and getting some general edification on Sundays. There must be the daily life of prayer, and of prayer beyond the "Gimme-gimme-God-bless-Mother" stage. In the Church as constituted today it is an essential of the function of priesthood to be the source of direction and training in that interior life without which we can hardly expect any personal realization of union with God. Yet many, many churchpeople have no idea that the Church has any teaching on such matters, and when they begin to experience the first stirrings of inner spirituality find in Unity or Emmet Fox a more sympathetic voice than in their priest, from whom they expect only incomprehension and a few moral platitudes.

The priest is elected to teach because the nature of his office is the central truth of the Gospel. The priest is the minister of Christ, the God-man, of union with God given to our humanity. And union with God he must teach, revealing the length, the breadth, the depth and the height, the full and undiluted implications of God's love. His teaching, as someone has recently said, must emphasize not ought but is -- what God is and has done for man. An ought-message deflects our attention to ourselves and our own discouraging and uninspiring failures. But an is-message lifts up our minds to God. It is the same as when you are trying to read a rather difficult book. If you think, "I must try to concentrate, I ought to get on with it," your attention is deflected from the words on the page to yourself trying to read them.

Therefore in preaching, in the confessional, at the altar, the office of a priest is to lift up our hearts and minds and souls with Christ to the eternal Father, telling us that this lifting up is not a long, hard, agonizing journey to bring us to the verge of despair -- but that, on the contrary, whether we know it or not, feel it or not, we are already lifted up because God has come down to earth and has ascended with us into heaven. "For I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." Therefore, "my yoke is easy and my burden light."

This is why, in the confessional, it does not belong to the office of a priest to scold or to judge the degree of a penitent's sinfulness. He is only to make sure that the person repents sincerely, and then by absolution and by counsel, if necessary, reveal the wonder of God's love so that amendment of life may be inspired, not by shame, guilt or fear, but by gratitude. He is to remember the words of our Lord to the woman taken in adultery, "Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no more."

So also, in offering Holy Mass at the altar, the priest's whole action is theocentric, for he is to focus the mind of the congregation upon God and upon the gift which descends from him. Therefore the altar, not the minister, is the center of attention, and the priest must efface his own eccentricities of voice and gesture, making his own personal part natural, impersonal and unobstrusive so that he does not constitute a barrier and a distraction between the people and their God.

While it is true that the function of priesthood belongs to the Church as a whole, it must be remembered that the Church is a dispensation of God's love to all men both wise and foolish, rich and poor, exalted and lowly. The world's work, the gathering of daily bread, has to be done, and this work has to be made an integral part of Christ's Body since most people in the world are fully and necessarily engaged in it. Hence the vital function of sacramental priesthood cannot be entrusted to all. The stewardship of the mysteries of God must not be entrusted to those who are perforce burdened with the cares of the world, to more than ordinarily foolish human beings, or to those who would serve God much more ably by offering him in Christ some secular work. Furthermore, there are certain spiritual disadvantages in being a priest, for when you have to occupy your mind with formally religious considerations from one day's end to another, it is not at all easy to be religious. You may have to talk about and think about religion so much that you have little energy left to practice it, and the practice of an incarnational religion must of necessity go beyond formally religious actions. I sometimes think it is more Christian to plant potatoes to the glory of God than to say so many formal prayers or offices. But the function of the priesthood is vital, because without formal, sacramental and localized religion, we might lose sight of religion altogther. That is a concession to human weakness.

Despite, however, its disadvantages and temptations, and in virtue of its tremendous responsibility, the office of priesthood involves one supreme privilege. For the priesthood is something more than a merely expedient differentiation of one of the whole Church's functions. Holy Order is a sacrament conferring upon its recipient a permanent and peculiar character. In Baptism, Confirmation, Communion, Penance, Matrimony and Unction the soul receives union with God in its various modes. But by ordination to the priesthood one becomes, in and as Christ, a giver of union with God to others. It is as if the baptized soul were a mirror reflecting the light of God's love back to its source, and as if the ordained soul were also a window admitting the light. Every Christian ministers to others the love which flows from his union with God, but the priest ministers the union itself. This, then, is the meaning of that special union with Christ which the priesthood is said to have. It is not that priests are nearer to our Lord or more loved by him than layfolk; clergy who give themselves special airs as if they were the Lord's elect are a very unattractive breed. The privilege of priesthood is simply to be able to have the joy of giving to others the supreme gift of the Incarnation -- union with God and the forgiveness of sins. And if it is true that a priest is a priest for ever and has a special function even in heaven, I believe that function will be to share, not only in the joy of being able to see God, but in God's own joy that the redeemed are able to see him.

In this present time there is an urgent need for the priesthood to be true to its function, because in general the clergy are attempting to fulfil all kinds of functions other than that for which they were ordained, and as a result the glorious meaning of the gospel has been clouded. The primary function of God's priest is not to be chief executive of a huge social-welfare organization, a keeper of public morals, an amateur politician, an adornment of drawing rooms and civic committees, nor yet to purvey an archeological religion of ecclesiastical history and tradition garnished with unexplained and unthoughtout theological clichés. This kind of thing has reduced the gospel to such a piffling system of ethics with remote and unconvincing eschatological sanctions that it is no wonder that it arouses the barest minimum of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm means to have God in you. Therefore the function of the priest is to minister the love of God to the world, and to proclaim that love not as a mere distant well-wishing but as the gift to each one of us, here and now, of union with God's very self to all eternity. The closing words of our Lord's High Priestly prayer in St. John's Gospel give the essence of that work of priesthood which is his and ours: "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee. ... And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me."