Vocations: Crisis and opportunities

As this week we contemplate the state of vocations to the consecrated life, we find that the recent revelations of sexual abuse by some members of the clergy may well serve to discourage young people from answering God’s call to service.

Vocations experts in the United States and Ireland, two countries hit hard by the scandal, have identified this reality as a primary obstacle in the Church’s ability to attract future vocations.

We may anticipate that the domino effect of these revelations is going to reach South Africa, possibly sooner than later. Archbishop Buti Tlhagale, the newly appointed bishop of Johannesburg, last month suggested in an interview with the Sunday Times that this country has not been immune from abuses by Church personnel. Archbishop Tlhagale expressed what many in the Church have long understood: that there are “problems of the abuse of women, of nuns and girls” by priests.

Indeed, it would be naïve to presume that the Church in South Africa, a country that has a most deplorable record of sexual violence in general, should be immune to the incidence of such abuse specifically.

Revelations of scandal in South Africa will surely damage the prestige of the priestly office. For this, we must be prepared.

We must be prepared for self-doubts, and we must be prepared for scornful comments from non-Catholics (or, possibly more hurtfully, from ex-Catholics). The laity must also be prepared to trust and support our priests, most of whom will be deeply wounded themselves by the misdeeds of their brother priests.

At the same time we must be prepared to see the exposé of local scandal as an opportunity for a regeneration of the Church. Apart from the obligation to purge the Church of conditions where such abuse can occur (and potentially be concealed), it may also afford us the opportunity to foster vocations as a way to purify the consecrated life.

Especially in the priesthood, the Church needs young men who have the capacity to represent a positive alternative to what is likely to become a negative public understanding of the clerical office–unjust and untrue though such a perception would be.

Addressing a lecture in New York last month, the Jesuit theologian Cardinal Avery Dulles said that “the immoral behaviour of [some] Catholics” was “a cause of scandal and defection”.

If this is so, then the opposite must be true also. New and recent vocations especially will have the opportunity to provide witness to the inherent goodness of their office, perhaps attracting even the defectors.

This opportunity and challenge in itself might motivate some of those who have heard God’s call to answer it.

Cape Town’s vicar for formation Fr John Bartmann (quoted on page 8 of this issue) points to the commitment and good leadership skills of younger priests as “the best advertisements for priestly vocations”. Many experienced priests will endorse this, perhaps recalling youth chaplains or energetic priests who inspired them to follow in their footsteps.

It is therefore imperative that the youth ministry–on national, diocesan and parish level–should take a place of pre-eminence.

Lay people also have a role to play in promoting vocations, by presenting the priesthood (and consecrated life in general) as an ideal that is still worth aspiring to, the crimes of a minority of priests notwithstanding.