Priests need help, not control freaks

When I was an altar server more than half a century ago now, there were so many priests at my particular parish I could hardly remember all their names. Those were the days when parish priests were able to pop in every so often and have tea with parishioners, spend hours at sickbeds and generally have a pretty peaceful, unhurried life with oodles of time for prayer and contemplation.

It’s different today. A parish with one permanent parish priest can count itself extremely lucky. Priesthood today is a tough, all consuming job that carries with it all the stresses and strains of corporate life. Priests not only juggle parish finances to survive but are inevitably also involved in regional and diocesan work, along with serving on myriad other committees, advisory boards and charities.

Which is why South African bishops have been calling on the laity to pitch in and help wherever they can to try and take some of the load off overburdened parish priests.

The problem here is that too many lay Catholics seem to confuse simple helping out with staging a hostile takeover bid.

A few decades of serving on parish councils and committees has left me with the conclusion that in wealthy parishes particularly, there are three kinds of parishioners.

Those who are entirely apathetic and simply go to Mass on Sunday and nothing more. Those who genuinely knuckle down and quietly get on with doing whatever they can to help. Then there are those who involve themselves in parish life with such intensity and fervour that is not far short of full-blown religious fanaticism.

These are the parishioners that present priests with the biggest challenge: not only because they are volunteers who are by their nature difficult to discipline, but also because a by-product of their often innocent over-enthusiasm is a combination of pettiness and one-upmanship.

Calling for volunteers among parishioners unfortunately also tends to draw out control freaks who inevitably end up going well beyond the original notion of fixing broken windows, tending gardens, doing the flowers and working in the soup kitchen or at the bazaar.

These are the zealots who take the parish priest under their wings, sometimes pretty forcibly, and appoint themselves either his mother, father, sister, brother, spiritual adviser, financial counsellor, social secretary, moral guardian, scriptwriter or worse, have delusions about becoming his concubine, mistress or even wife.

These are the same self-appointed custodians of Catholicism who act as uninvited policemen or secret service agents for the Vatican, making notes of what they consider to be breaches of the dress code, order of the Mass and any vaguely perceived hint of heresy that might be hidden between the lines of a homily or sermon.

Then there are those few pillars of the Church who indulge in everything from rumour mongering and frenetic gossip to seriously advocating changes to the ten commandments. Or worse, adding a few of their own.

Some will accuse me of painting such a terrible picture of modern priesthood that vocations will take a nosedive.

Not at all. I believe that one of the things that put many young men off the priesthood is the perception of a lonely, boring lifestyle bereft of any social interaction or secular challenges.

It is not. Today’s priest has everything and more that the average corporate chief executive has with the exception of a seven-figure income and a home filled with yelling kids and a wife to turn to for consolation and support.

Today’s priests don’t have to be hermits in sackcloth, but it does help a lot if they have enough people skills to keep all those over-enthusiastic volunteers under control.