Our People

Clergy morale and the beatitudes

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, First Conference

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
28/11/2005

I don’t know much about military matters, less about the role of a military chaplain, except what I’ve seen on MASH. I have read, however, a book on the life and times of one Pere Labat, a Dominican in the Caribbean around 1700. His biographer tells of a passage in his life where he was an unofficial chaplain to a group of pirates – more precisely privateers with letters of marques from the French Government. The pirates had begged him for Mass on board.

The necessary Church furnishings were sent for, and a tent was put up on the quarterdeck for the altar, both pirates and settlers sang the service to the best of their ability and it began with a discharge of musketry and of the eight cannon that made up the ship’s armament. These noisy salutes punctuated the whole of the Mass, and after the prayer for the King the French monarch was cheered heartily. Only one incident upset the tenor of the devotions: one of the pirates, who was standing in an indecent posture during the Elevation of the Host, was reproved by Captain Daniel. Instead of correcting this he answered impertinently, swearing execrably, whereupon Captain Daniel promptly shot him through the head, swearing to God that he would do the same to any who dared to treat the Holy Sacrifice with such disrespect. The unfortunate priest was horrified, especially as the murder took place quite close to him. Captain Daniel did his best to soothe him: “Don’t be upset, Father, he was a rascal who was heedless of duty and whom I punished in order to teach him a lesson.” After the service was ended the corpse was simply thrown overboard.

Military discipline has its uses for the clergy! I suspect, though, that military chaplains are not exempt from the great problems facing the rest of the Church. One of the chief among these is, to my mind, morale among the clergy. Many clergy have left the ministry, not just because of affairs of the heart or of crises of faith, but because the stress has become too much for them easily to bear. Some remain but have left in every sense except physically. Increasingly clergy find their recreation and personal support – if they have any at all – not with brother clergy but with other friends or colleagues. This is all the more likely when clergy are geographically isolated from each other. The theological polarization of the last forty years and the ease with which intra-Church disputes find their way into the secular press has meant that suspicions inevitably arise among the clergy. Some think the Church has changed too much, too fast; others, not enough. Some think Vatican II has been betrayed and reneged upon; others that it was kidnapped by the zeitgeist and is yet to be freed. Even members of the laity, who, in the past have often been too uncritically supportive, now shop around at will for what they like in religion, if they bother to attend church at all; some have developed a sense of entitlement to what were previously sacerdotal ministries; and many have developed views, more informed by The Da Vinci Code than the Catechism, about nearly everything. Personal support from parishioners can become theologically and personally selective.

Likewise, the justified sense of betrayal felt at the incidence of paedophilia in our ranks has left many of the greater majority of clergy who have remained faithful feeling isolated and traumatized. There is also a sense perhaps of having been somehow violated, polluted even, and the fear that false accusations of this sort could happen to any of us, bringing any public ministry to an ignominious and undeserved end. Likewise some feel that Church and state leaders and courts are all too willing to presume guilt rather than innocence, and to punish self-defensively rather than show mercy. Real or imagined, all these perceptions make life much harder to endure for some clergy who try to focus on the business of saving souls day by day. The Gospel that we preach can become distant – a joke to which we have forgotten the punch-line.

Under these circumstances the Church itself can become an embarrassment to our preaching and our sense of priestly and diaconal ministry. So many people want spirituality without the demands of the Gospel or a Jesus without the Church – certainly without the Church portrayed in the media. This can have strange effects on the clergy. I saw an internet report recently of a US priest (seemingly of a piratical kind) who told his parishioners that their children were safe in his church because he was a licensed shotgun owner; what’s more, he knew how to use it and wouldn’t hesitate to do so if he found anyone interfering with the kiddies - from bishops down! It reminds me of the saying that, “Every problem has a simple solution, and it’s almost always the wrong one.”

We have all perhaps felt the same way – if we did not feel her wounds, we would not be the men of the Church that we proclaim ourselves to be. As men who seek wisdom, though, we also have to recognize that we are in a hard place from which there is no easy exit. The demands of pastoral care of others, of our own sacramental and prayer life, of preaching the Word of God, are never easy: they have always involved the acceptance of Christ’s Cross. How that Cross comes to us we never get to pick.

One of the most frequent images used in the parables by Our Lord is that of the Wedding Feast. Traditionally Christians, following the New Testament, have associated the Church with the Bride and Christ with the Bridegroom. The Church as the spotless bride is a theme we are all familiar with. We often forget, though, the frequency with which the Old Testament speaks of the prostitute or adulterers as an image of Israel. This theme is taken up in the New Testament when Our Lord says that prostitutes are making their way into the Kingdom of Heaven and has a number of encounters in his public ministry with adultresses. The Fathers use this image to symbolize the sins of the Church precisely as a collection of human beings. The Fathers also dwelt on figures such as Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, whose household alone was saved from the destruction of the City, as types of the Church saved by Christ. Like the sinful woman who washed the feet of Our Lord, she has been cleansed. The Spotless Bride made holy by Christ and the sinful woman, the Church of the Saints and the Church of Sinners, the wheat and tares co-exist now and will continue like that until the end of time. The Church is the Casta Meretrix, the chaste harlot, both sinner and saved.

Now more than ever it is imperative to catch hold again of what is essential to the Gospel and to us, as preachers of that Gospel. Bossuet, the greatest preacher of 17th Century France, writes, “If the Sermon on the Mount is the summary of all Christian Doctrine, the eight Beatitudes are the summary of the whole Sermon on the Mount.” To be frank, it can be difficult at times to see much of the Sermon on the Mount in the official structures of the Church. It would be a brave Pope or Bishop’s Conference that abolished all the congregations and commissions and replaced them with the Sacred Congregation for Meekness, the Bishops’ Committee for those who Mourn or the Catholic Commission for Poverty, Purity and Persecution. Parish Councils rarely spend much time reflecting upon the beatitudes. Yet if it is difficult to imagine the institutionalisation of the beatitudes, we can and should imagine what an individual person’s life led in accordance with them might look like. When we are at a low ebb, beset by the various troubles of life and apostolate, the Beatitudes can more than most of the New Testament bring me back to centre.

So let us recall the beginning of the fifth chapter of St Matthew:

Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”

The first thing to note is that Christ does not offer new legislation of the same sort as Moses. Christ has indeed set himself up as a lawgiver and judge, amongst other things, but his laws are of an entirely different kind. There is no injunction to be poor, or to mourn, or to be meek. There is not even an explicit injunction to do anything about others who might be poor and meek, so that we can reap the appropriate spiritual reward. It is rather a revolutionary statement about the Kingdom of God turning the world as we know it upside down. Like many of the parables, Lazarus and the Rich Man, for example, it is a declaration that something new has irrupted into human history. That something new means that all of the old certainties have been turned on their heads. Riches are no longer a sign of God’s favour but can even mean the opposite. The poor man, the beggar, the cripple are no longer cursed by God, but may indeed be blessed. It is not the powerful but the lowly who have the key to the Kingdom of Heaven. Our Lord’s commands later on in chapter five show us what a life lived for that Kingdom might look like – going the extra mile, turning the other cheek, giving up our tunic as well as our cloak.

A second point we might consider is how strange Jesus’ idea of blessedness or happiness is. If someone said to you: “join me and I can promise you poverty, hunger and thirst – physical, emotional and, if you’re lucky spiritual; I offer you purity and peace, but not as this world knows them, since there will be meekness and grief beside them; best of all, if you do all I ask, you will be really, really blessed: you will be persecuted and reviled and defamed” you might very well say: thanks but no thanks. If that’s what’s on offer as blessedness, give me the curses; if that’s Christian happiness, gimme some old-fashioned pagan pleasure instead. In the midst of our times of low morale, Jesus’ beatitudes seem at once offer us a way to resurrection joy beyond and, in the meantime to tell us that He is there with us to strengthen us and to teach us to be happy. Jesus subverts everything we naturally think and believe, including our most basic ideas about happiness. He offers us a new, deeper, more lasting kind of happiness. Think of the wonderful stories in The Cross of ANZAC about chaplains keeping up their own cheer and that of their men amidst the terrors of war, of being prisoners of war, of being slaves on a railway and worse.

Third and lastly, the Beatitudes are no sort of eight step programme for self-improvement or Jesus’ version of the How to Win Friends, Influence People, Get to the Top and Make Millions books. Like the Church herself, we are both sinners and saved by Christ. The more we understand our need for salvation, our utter dependence, how easily we fall into sin, our need for grace, the holier we become and the less holy we feel. St Therese of Lisieux, a few months before her death exclaimed, “How happy I am to find myself imperfect and so much in need of the good God’s mercy at the time of my death.” Our righteousness is not like the scribes and Pharisees – or at least it shouldn’t be -- because we can never say we have arrived and mastered Virtue, or even only one of the virtues. The qualities that Our Lord considered important are precisely the ones outlined in the Beatitudes. It is when we are poor, mourning and powerless that we are closest to Him. And Christ and his Gospel is the only Christian spiritual programme there is.

This is, however, no excuse for complacency. To quote Bossuet again, “The Christian lives in another Kingdom”. Learning to live in that other Kingdom is the task, and a hard task, of a lifetime. We come to see things differently, to count different things as success or failure than this world does. Yet we might say that the kingdom life of the beatitudes is mostly failure. The closer people come to sanctity, the more areas desperately in need of improvement, they discover, and most of those are in themselves. Far from the sublime confidence that they have run the good race and fought the good fight, as Paul had (or at least told others he had), many saints suffer what today we might call ‘low morale’, even depression. Therese of Lisieux recorded that she was tempted to suicide in the latter part of her life. The founders of her Carmelite order John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila gave a name to ‘the dark night of the soul’ and knew it from the inside. Thomas Aquinas having written the greatest Catholic philosophy and theology in history had a mystical experience which led him to conclude it was all so much ‘straw’ and set about dying though not yet 50. St Catherine of Siena was a Dominican lay woman and to date the only doctor of the Church who was neither a cleric nor a religious. In her short life of 33 years she advised and rebuked popes, princes, prelates, priests and people. She converted mercenary war-lords, a prisoner on the point of execution, and thousands of ordinary people. She served the sick and poor and influenced the course of the papacy. She produced a large volume of influential writings which are still treasured today. Yet if there were achievements, they were mostly not due to her own efforts. Many of her famed efforts at counseling, exhorting and diplomacy came to nothing. Most of the causes she so passionately preached came to nothing. Friends betrayed and abandoned her. Pouring out her energies for the papacy’s return to Rome for sake of the unity of the Church, she ended up having to defend a tyrant pope, and died with the Church split into schism by rival claimants to See of Peter. In her final months, her biographer Mary Ann Fatula writes, a “wound began to devour Catherine, a crushing sense of her own responsibility for the Church’s destruction.” Fatula’s conclusion is chilling: “Not one of her great works achieved any final outcome except failure”

Yet we call her saint and doctor of the Church and Patron of Italy and of Europe! Hers was a perfection lived towards the infinite perfection of God - a boundless, endless perfection upon which we can never put any limits. It is here that we find Blessedness, not mere contentment in the enjoyment of finite things of any sort, but delight in the pursuit of a good without end – something that cannot be contained in this world but needs a whole other Kingdom. Simon Tugwell, a Dominican spiritual writer, says

the beatitudes do indeed draw for us a picture of a kind of spiritual perfection and ethical achievement, but it is a kind of perfection which will be, almost by definition, not self-conscious of itself as perfection or achievement. It is a kind of perfection which even seems to render useless the whole familiar distinction between success and failure, achievement and non-achievement.

If at times we feel low spiritual morale it may not be depression, or a lack of spiritual joy and peace, but rather than saintly dissatisfaction of the soul never at rest until it rests in God, never perfect until divinized in the beatific vision.

Christ himself is the measure of the Beatitudes. He is the Blessed Poor Man, the One persecuted and held of little account for the sake of righteousness. If we see this played out and made manifest on the Cross, so also do we see the real nature of Blessedness in His Resurrection and in the Gift of the Holy Spirit.  So may it be for his deacons, priests and bishop.