"Is it just the priest"?
Catholic scripture scholar calls for more creative and evangelical way of conceiving ministry in the Church
La Coix International May 6, 2020
English-speaking Roman Catholics are at a disadvantage when it comes to discussing priesthood. Since childhood they have all known about the parish priest, but call him a "presbyter" and many will start thinking, "Presbyterian?" And there it means what the original Greek word meant, "elder".
By a roundabout way, however, through early French (prêtre) and German (Priester) languages, "priest" emerged in English for the Catholic minister who "offers the sacrifice of the Mass".
This left "presbyter" available for Presbyterians to fall back on when they began emerging around the 1560s and changed the English to "elders".
After the 1960s, however, confusion intensified when, on its very last day, the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) published its "Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests" (Presbyterorum ordinis). This Latin document called these priests "presbyters", a term that carries no connotation of the sacrificing priest.
Restorationism in the post-Vatican II Church
Shifting terminology reflected stresses in the theology of priesthood, and in the following decades priesthood itself took a severe buffeting. That theology derived from the end of the medieval era in the formulation of the Twenty-third Session of the Council of Trent (1563).
During the first year of his pontificate, John Paul II issued a Letter to Priests (Holy Thursday 1979) in which he attributed the disorientations within theology of priesthood to forces of "secularization".
Thus began a drive towards what is called restorationism in respect of the Tridentine model, a hallmark of which is its strictly sacerdotal character: that is, the exclusively priestly office of offering sacrifice to the deity.
John Paul's successor, Benedict XVI, pushed hard in the same direction.
He inaugurated a Year for Priests in June 2009. Conscious of what he also identified as "a context of widespread secularization", Benedict sought to re-establish the priest as "a man of the sacred, removed from the world to intercede on behalf of the world", as he described it later.
Benedict attributed this concept of priesthood to the Letter to the Hebrews (cf. 5:1). But, as we shall see, it had long been at the core of the Platonic view of the cosmos (Politicus, section 290d).
Plato and his descendants
Embedded in ancient Greek religious culture was the notion of "ministry" as diakonia, a working space between heaven and earth.
In his Politicus, Plato (d. 4thcentury BC) defined the role of the diviner or soothsayer as interpreting the gods' intentions for mortal beings. This was figure so significant in a land of oracles that Plato was assessing the diviner's candidacy for the highest role in the republic.
Plato's language provided him with the ability to name such activity "a diakonic skill". Similarly, the priest's "diakonic skill" was "to give to the gods gifts from us ... and to win for us from them the bestowal of good things".
Mediation is of the essence of ideas conveyed to the Greek mind by these diakon- or ministry words. Several hundred years later, another Greek philosopher named Themistius (d. 387 AD) illustrated how our sense of touch differs from other senses.
What we touch is contiguous to us: we are in immediate contact. The process is different when we see, hear or smell something.
Here, Themistius says, we need "an intermediate body [let us say air] acting as a medium" for the sight, sound or smell to reach us. His word for such mediation is diakon- (de An. 125.9).
Wishing to overcome "dangerous forms of reductionism" of the notion of priesthood, Pope Benedict lamented in the above-cited address how "recent decades" had witnessed the introduction of "categories that are functionalist rather than ontological".
Benedict XVI and the "hermeneutic of priestly continuity"
He said these categories could be countered only by maintaining "a hermeneutic of priestly continuity". In the Italian original, "priestly" is "sacerdotale".
He was making a distinctive theological point, eulogizing today's priesthood as having passed continuously from Jesus of Nazareth "through the 2,000 years of the history of greatness and holiness, of culture and devotion which the Priesthood has written in the world".
This is not an apologia that Benedict would be likely repeat today. In his two final years as pope he defrocked "nearly 400 priests" for sexual abuse (Guardian,17 March 2014).
However, he would still emphasize that "the ontological belonging to God" of itself constitutes a "prophetic" character within priesthood and that, accordingly, "in the priest alone will they [the lay faithful] be able to find the word of God".
I pause to note two things. First, there is a terminological shift from the presbyteral to the sacerdotal terms. And, second, it is the totally exclusive function of the priest in relation to the word of God.
The shift remains a marker of the now longstanding tensions in the theology of priesthood.
In the original Italian of Benedict's short address, the priest is never the presbyter whose profile had been so prominent in Presbyterorum ordinis. Instead, the priest is the sacerdos: the sacerdote (14 occurrences) is endowed with sacerdozio (10 occurrences).
We see something similar in the 1998 apostolic exhortation Christifideles laici, which was John Paul II response to the Synod of Bishops' assembly on the Laity that took place the preceding year.
Here, sacerdotal terms occur 52 times while presbyteral terms occur only 8 times, seven of these being in citations of earlier documents. In the conciliar decree Presbyterorum ordinis, Latin presbyter terms had predominated over sacerdotal terms to the order of 185:75.
The name game is not just a game
What's in a name? Obviously, a lot of theology.
When the crisis in numbers of clergy overtook the crisis in theological identity of the presbyterate, countless commentaries emerged second-guessing the pastoral initiatives the ecclesiastical authorities might turn to.
At the top of the list has been the call to ordain viri probati ("men of probity", let us say), married or not, and not excluding the recall of resigned priests.
Of course, many continue to call for the ordination of women, in spite of the possibility of attracting canonical retribution.
Several years ago Tom Roberts of the National Catholic Reporter relayed a conversation he had with a prominent Melbourne pastor about how to come up with a new model. The pastor could only say, "I don't know; I don't know."
If we need to rescind any return to the category of ontology, we can look back again to the language the early Christians adopted for the purpose of designating the foundational and enlivening functions within their communities under the headship of their Christ.
From our brief encounter with the terminology above, perhaps this language already places in a different light the ministry of Jesus who came "to minister" (diakon-, Mark 10, 45) and the ministry of Paul, whose most urgent claim was to be a "minister" (diakon-) of the heavenly Christ (2 Cor 11, 23).
All we can do here is assure those with deep concerns over these matters that the values supplied by an authentic reading of diakonia endow us with a masterful versatility in arranging an appropriate ministry for the Church in any ecclesial context and at any historical stage of its experience.
Look to Luke the Evangelist
Our traditional forms of ministry have been hobbled by the sheer weight of their history: by a good deal of obscurantist theology; by our canon law; by the inertia of the people of God induced – sadly – by the very forms of the ministry itself; and, not least, by the ambition, jealousies and foibles of our churchmen.
Luke the Evangelist, at the very beginning of our records on ministry, showed us how to let ministry loose.
In the much-misunderstood sixth chapter of his Acts of the Apostles, when the Greek widows are overlooked in the daily "ministry" of the Twelve, these do not say, "Well, let their brothers-in-law look after them." No. The Twelve do something different, something churchly.
The Twelve are creative in ministry and institute an extension of their own. According to Acts 1, the Lord gave them a ministerial commission (diakonia) to proclaim the gospel.
So in this time of need they enter into consultation with their fellow believers and – in a process of selection that they leave to the believers, in prayer together, and in the laying on of their own hands – the young Church's ministry expands.
By such means do pastors equip the saints, build up the body of Christ and "do the work of an evangelist and fulfill their ministry/diakonia" (2 Timothy 4:5).
We are left with the question: what stands in the way of our present Church leaders doing the same?
John N. Collins is a world expert on the history and meaning of diakonia/ministry. A former Sacred Heart Missionary, he studied at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Rome) and the Ecole Biblique (Jerusalem) and has taught in universities in Australia. This article is adapted from Gateway to Renewal: Reclaiming ministries for women and men(Morning Star Publishing, 2016), one of several books he has authored.