Parish volunteers from hell

When I was an altar server more than half a century ago, there were so many priests at my 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 now, of course. Any parish that can boast one permanent  priest can count itself lucky. Priesthood today is a tough, all consuming job that carries with it all the stresses and strains of corporate life, with priests not only juggling parish finances to survive but inevitably also involved in regional and diocesan work along with serving on myriad other committees, advisory boards and charities.

Which is why the Southern 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, of course, is that far 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. There are those who are completely apathetic and simply go to Mass on Sunday and nothing more. There are those who genuinely knuckle down and quietly get on with doing whatever they can to help. And 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 give priests the biggest challenge of all. Not only because they are volunteers, who are by their very 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 usually 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 bring-and-buy tables.

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—worst of all—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 away between the lines of a homily or sermon.

Then, of course, 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.

There is no question that being a Catholic priest in South Africa is a lot more challenging and stressful than it was when I was a kid who would ride past the church on my way to and from school, wondering at the serenity of all those priests who were pacing slowly about the parish rose garden in peaceful, prayerful contemplation.

There will be those who will accuse me of painting such a terrible picture of the modern priesthood that the vocations campaign will take a nosedive.

That is not at all my intention. I believe that one of the things that puts a lot of youngsters off the priesthood these days is the perception of a lonely, boring lifestyle bereft of any social interaction or secular challenges.

But the priesthood is not like that. Today’s parish priest, along with those who work at diocesan level or in the seminaries or schools, has everything and more that the average corporate chief executive has—with the possible exception of a home filled with yelling kids and a wife to turn to for consolation and support.

While the priesthood is and always will be a vocation in the service of God, it has the same attributes, challenges and rewards nowadays of any secular career one wishes to mention. These include things like holidays, going to the movies and playing golf.

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.

In an effort to avoid being lynched, may I mention that none of the above applies to my present parish where I regard everyone as a saint.