I never wanted to be a priest. As a child I wanted to be an architect. I liked drawing. I watched a lot of “This Old House” (PBS’s HGTV before there was an HGTV). I suppose I just wanted to make a better place of this world, a safer place, a kinder place. My mother occasionally refers to me as her Buddha- baby—the middle child born with eyes wide open, calm and observant. If I ever saw things clearly, I also remember wanting for them to be different than they were. I deeply wanted for us to treat each other better than we did. I wanted suffering to stop. I wanted things to change.
I never wanted to be a priest. But here I am. Newly minted Father Brendan, and still wondering how I got here. While most everyone around me seems happy enough to have celebrated my ordination, I’m still stumbling into the whole thing full of doubts and insecurities: How did I get here? What difference does it make?
I was ordained six months ago and am now serving at Dolores Mission in East Los Angeles. As I get to know the community I have asked again and again, what draws people to this place? What do they want from their priests? Responses vary, of course—a commitment to justice, community leadership, great food after Mass, etc.—but it is not uncommon to hear that this parish, and the Jesuits who have served here over the years, have a habit of speaking to and from the struggles and challenges people in the congregation face on a daily basis. “You don’t see that in very many other parishes,” they say. “Their priests just don’t preach about real issues.”
I’m still stumbling into the whole thing full of doubts and insecurities: How did I get here? What difference does it make?
In recent surveys of those who have left the Catholic Church for other denominations, the reasons given for leaving include both a mixed bag of disagreements on certain teachings and also a sense that “their spiritual needs weren’t being met.” It is as if over time a gap developed between their sense of meaning and the message on offer. What they hear, or who they hear it from, is not credibly related to what they know, or would like to know, by experience. People come to church on Sunday having spent the week buffeted by news of racism, injustice and political division. They come with anxiety about both economic and environmental well-being, about struggles and opportunities for their children. Too often these concerns are not being met, are being left not only unacknowledged but even unnamed.
Already, in only six months of priesthood, I know how easy it can be to convince myself that the abstract message of love is sufficient, how convenient it is to name sin and injustice just broadly enough so as to avoid making the congregation—or myself—too uncomfortable. After all, this religious thing we’re doing, this public act of worship, is already hard enough to believe in without adding the problems and provocations of any real prophetic challenge.
We will never be moved to authentic worship if we refuse to be touched by the complexities of lived experience. If the priesthood is to mean anything, we cannot avoid the dangerous and the difficult in the practice of our preaching. If our faith has anything to do with communicating the credibility of love, if the love of God has anything to do with the “real issues” of our day, then something has to give. Truth makes a difference. Love calls us to conversion. And I, for one, have much to learn.
A great need
That so many bemoan the lack of relevance in the preaching at their parishes and that so many more have given up even going at all makes it clear that I am not the only one asking questions. I sometimes wonder if the complaints about what we do and do not hear in homilies reveal a deeper concern about the credibility of the priesthood in general. In an increasingly commercialized and secularized context what can religious worship say about authentic justice and real love? In a world where being religious is reduced to a lifestyle choice, an accessory to personal identity, what need is there for the sacraments and structures of organized religion? If the only criteria for priesthood are being baptized, male and unmarried, what credibility could it possibly have?
When people hear that I was recently ordained, their initial response is usually some form of “congratulations”—many are sincere, others just polite. Those who know better will ask if I am doing all right, if I have had my first crisis or not. These folks understand that the first year of priesthood, like the first year of many things—marriage, parenthood, a new job—can be full of complex challenges.
In an increasingly commercialized and secularized context what can religious worship say about authentic justice and real love?
Celebrating Mass as a new priest can be like trying to recite a text you’ve heard a million times but backward. Suddenly your lines are their lines and their lines are your lines and, um, what were the lines in the first place? I trust that my liturgical fluency will come eventually. But we’re not there yet.
More than memorizing liturgical texts, I am also struggling with a deeper challenge, a kind of isolation by consecration. To be ordained is to be set apart for a particular purpose. This sounds all fine and good, but being set apart can also leave one feeling cut off, irrelevant. When I was a brand new Jesuit novice and experiencing some of the challenges of integrating this new identity, I remember confiding to a close friend, “It’s great finding your cross. It just sucks getting nailed to it.” I have had friends tell me that the early years of marriage were marked by a certain loneliness as they stepped into a new identity as a couple, and even more so when the children came along.
The priesthood has its own flavor of this vocational isolation. The priest in the world today is bound to something which is widely thought to be archaic or unnecessary—the antiquated rituals and structures of organized religion. The loneliness of priesthood has less to do with celibacy, as many presume, and more to do with consecration. The existential strangeness of ordination comes from having crossed the line from religious experience into the very structure of religion. Having been publicly anointed for the purposes of priesthood, I am no longer protected from its contradictions and compromises. I find myself newly committed to a way of being in the world that seems less and less convincing to more and more people.
The loneliness of priesthood has less to do with celibacy, as many presume, and more to do with consecration.
And yet there remains a sense of urgency and relevance to authentic religious commitment. We have need again of a moral vision, a prophetic voice willing to remind us of our obligation to care for the poor and the vulnerable. We have need again of people willing to give their lives in sacrifice before taking someone else’s in spite. We have need again of something greater than the compromised versions of God that have been sold to us for decades—the idols of our time—the gods of privilege, purity and prosperity. We have need again of something more.
Total Surrender
A year before I was to be ordained I accompanied a group of volunteers to Ragusa, in Sicily, to work in emergency refugee reception centers operated by the Catholic diocese there. I had no idea what I was doing. I likely would not be a priest today if not for what happened to me there.
While we were in Italy, refugees were being pulled out of the ocean at a rate of about 2,000 per week as slave traders and smugglers pushed their surplus migrant labor from the shores of Libya into the Mediterranean Sea. There were innumerable needs, but we, being first in the line of emergency support, were asked to begin with the smallest. The work we had to do was the little work—art projects and simple games to pass the time as these men and women were lifted from the Mediterranean Sea into the sea of bureaucracy awaiting them in the asylum process.
As each new wave of arrivals overwhelmed the shelter staff, my principal responsibility became helping people to write their letters petitioning asylum. Every letter began and ended the same way: “I had to leave my country because...” and “...for these reasons I am seeking asylum.” Between those two phrases we filled in some of the most horrific stories I have ever heard. The wrenching process of helping these folks to write their petitions in their own hand, many of whom were barely literate, meant that we had to pass letter by letter and word by word through the most traumatic periods of their lives. “My...my family...my family was...my family was tortured...my family was tortured and killed. And I...and I was...and I was left...and I was left alone.”
For about five hours a day I would walk slowly through these stories. They trusted me with the most painful experiences of their lives. Their hope was tied directly to their vulnerability. They had a deep need for witness and accompaniment. They needed help in the process of making their petition and they needed desperately for their trauma to be heard. They needed someone to be with them and for them, an advocate and an alibi.
There were innumerable needs, but we, being first in the line of emergency support, were asked to begin with the smallest.
Perhaps nowhere have I found myself more powerless and yet more in touch with credible acts of self-giving love than in my time in Sicily. The credibility of sacrifice imposes itself upon us and suffering is not subject to belief. Our experience of suffering is often tied to that of faith because it is an undeniable reminder of our need for mercy and our longing for freedom. In a way that is hard to explain, Ragusa became a place of consolation for many because it was a place where the truth of our humanity became known in our vulnerability. It was and continues to be a way of the cross.
Does this make a difference? I am reluctant to claim too much here because many of those men and women still sit in those same so-called “reception” centers awaiting someone who will let them be anything more than surplus slave labor pulled from the sea and left to rot in administrative limbo while political and humanitarian attention turns elsewhere. But their resilience and their dignity imposed itself on me in a way that left no doubt of their credibility. I was consoled in the experience not by any foolish faith in deliverance but by the redemptive proximity and undeniable beauty of their humanity. I was moved to love by the depth of their sacrifice, the persistence of their hope and the intensity of their trust.
In that place there was a laying on of hands. In that place I was being ordained by and for self-giving love. In that place I was practicing priesthood. One man in the camp actually took to calling me his “chief priest.” I tried to explain to him that I was neither a chief nor a priest, but he insisted. “You are my chief priest,” he’d say. “I’m happy to have a chief priest with us.”
I was consoled in the experience not by any foolish faith in deliverance but by the redemptive proximity and undeniable beauty of their humanity.
The priesthood was not my idea. It was a surrender to the invitation of others, to a litany of saints and a laying on of hands that have imposed themselves on me over a long period of time. I returned from Sicily and immediately wrote my own petition letter, not seeking asylum, but priestly ordination. There was a mysterious resonance between the two experiences. Both were stories about the laying on of hands; both included moments of help and of harm. Both ended in a surrender to the will of the other. Both were written not by choice but by necessity. The hands imposed on me were supportive, while many that touched them were violent. My petition was accepted, while many of theirs never will be.
No congratulations necessary
One thing that has been clear to me from the beginning is an attraction to middle ground, to in-between places, to horizons and frontiers. That was the bait that led me into a Jesuit vocation and, ultimately, to the priesthood. My mother’s buddha-baby found his way to ordination because the priesthood plays in borderlands—it lives in liminal spaces. The priest stands between a people and their God, not as an obstacle or gatekeeper to that relationship but a bridge. The priest has no real power without the cooperation of both sides. I know this because, for most of my friends and family, the Catholic priesthood has no claim on their lives. They have no need of a priest; my ordination was “good for me” but has little impact on them.
It is for this reason that the polite congratulations one receives upon ordination don’t really satisfy. They fail to appreciate the necessity of priesthood. They don’t understand the stakes. To congratulate the newly ordained is to relegate the priesthood to a nice thing they have accomplished, a reward for their work, rather than to recognize it as a deeper induction into service. The newness of ordination might suggest congratulations, but priesthood itself should not. The next time someone visits you in the hospital, helps you with legal documentation, accompanies you in your prayer or your grief, imagine congratulating them and you’ll feel for yourself the strangeness of such praise.
To congratulate the newly ordained is to relegate the priesthood to a nice thing they have accomplished, a reward for their work, rather than to recognize it as a deeper induction into service.
The priesthood, rightly understood, is not about power and prestige, but about mediation and solidarity. We stand with people so that they can stand with each other. Some will say that God has no need of mediators, but we have need of one another. We have, more than ever, a deep need of solidarity. As W. H. Auden observed on the eve of the Second World War, the core of our human predicament is how “we crave what we cannot have—to be loved alone.” The priest is a reminder of the religious wisdom that tells us that we cannot, in truth, be loved alone.
Looking through me
Those suspicious of the priesthood often ask, “Can’t I confess directly to God?” Of course. But God seems concerned that you find yourself and feel yourself forgiven in the real presence of a beloved community. That you feel yourself loved by them and that you dedicate some energy to the work of forgiving and loving them, too. For this we need other people. We need priests because we need each other. God needs us to love and forgive one another. And ordaining people for this service is (or ought to be) a way of ensuring that it happens, that we actually do for one another what God wants for us to do.
In all the confessions I have heard so far, I have had no doubt of God’s closeness and mercy to the experience of human frailty and fault. What is clear in confession is how much we hunger for someone to remind us, to affirm in us the truth of that loving relationship. We want to know that we do not stand alone in our need of mercy. No one stands alone before God, and if someone leaves the confessional having experienced themselves respected in their vulnerability, understood in their frailty and accompanied in their humanity, then we truly go forth in peace.
We want to know that we do not stand alone in our need of mercy.
And so, every Sunday at Dolores Mission, I stand in the back of the church, careful not to block the door as the crowd drifts in and the people find their usual places in the pews. They have been praying long before I showed up. They will be praying long after I am gone. I pass through them, coming into their presence with humility and reverence, as one comes into the presence of God. I bow as I enter the sanctuary. I kiss the altar. And then I look up, always it seems as if for the first time, at the faces of the gathered congregation. I tell them what is already true, what I already know and long for them to realize: that the peace of Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Spirit is with them.
It is a great privilege to stand in that place—a privilege to look into the faces of those who are looking for God. It is a difficult thing to describe, but even though they are looking at me, looking to me, they are in a very real sense looking through me. Surely they notice my faults and stumbles, but they’re not really looking for a perfect priest. They’re looking for a credible sign of God’s presence in their midst. They are not really expecting relevance, but rather relationship. I look at the faces of a community assembled in search of God, a community hungry for a reason to believe that this strange thing we’re doing makes sense, makes a difference, and might actually put us in contact with real, merciful and self-giving love.
We come to the sacraments because we long to make invisible things visible and impossible things possible. People come to Mass because they want to be moved, because they want things to change—bread and wine into body and blood, sin and suffering into communion and reconciliation. We come because we need something to change and we realize that we cannot do it alone. I want to be a good priest. I am often not convinced that I am. But I want more than anything to experience the conversion for which we pray in every sacramental encounter. I want things to change, and I cannot do it alone.
Above the back door of our church hangs a large painting depicting the assassination of Blessed Oscar Romero, who was murdered while celebrating Mass in a small hospital chapel where he lived in El Salvador. It is a haunting image to look at as I stand at the altar with my own arms held outstretched in prayer. It is a poignant reminder of what sacrificial self-giving love looks like, a reflection of what the priesthood entails—mediation and solidarity, reconciliation and communion. As I look through the congregation at that image of Romero being shot through the heart, I take the bread in my hands and I say to my beloved community what Christ said to all of us: Take this. All of you. And eat of it. This is my body. Which will be given up for you.
Wishing Brendan God's blessings in his ministry.
Brendan- that was excellent! All of it. Your willingness to be present to your experience and then, oh and then, your sharing it with us - that is the work of Christ in the world.
Thank you for a wonderful article! It is good to hear about the priesthood from someone who experiences it.
While I am not in favor of women being ordained to the priesthood, I think it is tragic that the church finds no use for women who are interested in doing the work of ministry, but not in being nuns. The church so obviously needs women to express some wisdom in the church and in the world, but it cannot find a way to let women speak. I don't pray for vocations, I pray for the church to be relieved of its blindness to the riches it is offered on a daily basis and it refuses.
As a woman who was called to priesthood in my teens and one who has known what this discrimination does to people's souls, I am going to let you know that your beliefs are unfounded as Christ commanded we treat all the same or we sin, and that your words and support of this misogyny is cripplingly painful to the women you have targeted. Women called to priesthood are called to priesthood and not something else. The hunger never leaves and the pain of the loss is never extinguished while these heinous rules exist.
Thank you. This is what I'm looking for in the church -- real feelings and connections, not pious and rote activity. Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you, Brendan, for your honesty and willingness to enter into your ministry with clarity and humility about the real world and your place in it. Our Church needs you and your ministry . As a Catholic laywoman, I hope for priests who, out of their lived reality, preach a message that connects God's Word and the events of our world. It is why I worship at a Jesuit parish; I expect to be both challenged and consoled by the homilies I hear. The challenge spurs me to action as I respond to the invitation at the end of Mass to "love and serve the Lord."
This is a nice essay, and, right now, it seems your heart is in the right place. But there are also hints of potential danger in your essay - the danger of falling into the sin of clericalism.
To be ordained is to be set apart for a particular purpose.
I hope you are not referring to the sense of "ontological superiority" that too many priests assume. Priests are just the same as the non-ordained members of their congregations. They are doing a particular job in the community. They are to be servants of the community. But priests who see themselves as "set apart" may be in danger of falling into the sins of clericalism, seeing themselves as ontologicaly superior beings..
The priest stands between a people and their God, not as an obstacle or gatekeeper to that relationship but a bridge.
No, the priest is not a "bridge" between people and God. A good priest may be a companion, perhaps a guide, but he is not a bridge to God. People can, and do, find relationship with God without priests and organized religion. Another small whiff of clericalism.
The priesthood, rightly understood, is ...about mediation and solidarity. We stand with people so that they can stand with each other. Some will say that God has no need of mediators, but we have need of one another.
Again, a hint of clericalism. Priests are NOT needed to be mediators. Standing with people is good. But that does not imply that priests are needed to mediate with God.
Can’t I confess directly to God?” Of course. But God seems concerned that you ... feel yourself forgiven in the real presence of a beloved community. That you feel yourself loved by them and that you dedicate some energy to the work of forgiving and loving them, too. For this we need other people. We need priests because we need each other.
One last reminder- priests are NOT needed for people to confess to God, nor so that people will feel forgiven by God, nor that they will feel loved. The priest is not a "beloved" community. He is a member of one particular community that people may belong to. The priest is very often someone the penitent barely knows, and being "forgiven" by the priest is not at all the same as being forgiven by the "community", especially not by those members of the community that one may have hurt. In fact, for too many, confessing to a priest is the easy out.
Anne: In support of the author, I would like to remind you that it is always more charitable to put a good interpretation on the comments of another, rather than a negative one. If a good interpretation cannot be found, it is proper to ask them to clarify, and then correct with love -rather than give them a lesson about a possible future sin. Please be gentle with this man, and allow the Spirit to lead him, rather than presume to know yourself where he should be. You are not in a position to know where his heart might be headed. Please do not point out the splinter in his eye -ie: your perceived clericalism, which I personally did not detect at all in his essay and I think you may be interpolating a bit.
Brendan, keep up the good work! May your vocation be life-giving both to you and to those to whom you minister.
What an insightful article! I gained real insight into what it must be like to function as a priest! Great job, Father. Bless you!
Brendan, You've told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the painful truth, your article redemptive. After more than fifty years of marriage I can tell you its kin to your experiences and wonderful. Thanks for your honesty!
I felt rage creeping up my back while reading this article. Part of that is because I was called to priesthood in my teens and never would have considered seeking ordination just to get prestige or respect. No one would have had to push me into the ministry either. I am very tired of men who act like this vocation is a burden rather than a gift while women are told they are not worthy. I am tired of watching men throw this gift away and complain or cheat on their vows like it is nothing and then expect us to go "oh - it is so hard for you - of course we understand why you failed to keep your vows to God and the Church and treated your priesthood like a commitment to go bowling." Quite frankly, I don't understand it. Not at all.
I believe this man means well - kind of - he mentions slightly that a priesthood that only allows males is not what God intended perhaps: "If the only criteria for priesthood are being baptized, male and unmarried, what credibility could it possibly have?" He is right on this count, while priesthood demands that one group of people's flesh be considered more sacred and ordainable than other people's flesh, it proves itself a ministry that is biased and clerical and all about exclusion and prestige and little more. The longer we refuse to ordain all who are called by God legitimately to ordained priesthood because we despise their gender, the priesthood will continue to weaken. God has a way of making sure even the oppressor is destroyed by his own hatred after a while. In treating women as lesser people, the hierarchy becomes less relevant and respected everyday, as it should, as is just, according to the Gospel teachings of Christ.
It is true because of our church's rejection of me as a human being, I am more critical of these kinds of articles. However, I don't see this man standing up for his sisters really either. He barely points out that an all male priesthood is not quite right, and tells us how he realizes that ordination should not be about respect, but he went for ordination anyway, and he didn't have to, and ordination does come with respect and prestige and he knew this before he became a ordained priest. I am sensitive on this issue too because often we hear how women should just ask to be allowed to do the same things priests do but don't ask for actual ordination: "After all, it is not about prestige and respect of the individual, these ordained priests often tell us." Bull!
First of all there needs to be some respect of what the priest, like a doctor, or professor, is trained to be and in the case of a priest spiritually even called to be. The servant is due his/her wage and in some vocations part of that wage is respect of the ability of the trained person, and this can be necessary for them to accomplish certain aspects of the job. Why have the Sacrament of Holy Eucharist at all, and the Mass, if everyone is equally capable of presiding? even those with no calling, training and no ordination? I would argue this is why we need no permanent deacons. It is senseless and silly to ordain people to do what others have been doing all along, with no ordination and legally with their Bishops full allowance, and doing it as well as those who have been ordained just because they come from a richer, western country and this is true whether deacons are male or female. However, priesthood for most of its known history has required ordination and I believe when this sacrament is not abused as a tool for the hatred of women, it can be powerful for building up the churches.
The sheep need a certain amount of respect for their shepherd in order to believe with conviction in what that shepherd teaches. I find it interesting that men often want this respect and prestige to be the one thing, above all, that women should be kept from obtaining. Yet when I have questioned ex-priests who have left their vocation to marry, the one thing, almost all of these men claim they miss most is the respect and love of their people. Not the sense of service to God but the respect and admiration and love of their flocks. Yet if women should dare ask for the same respect for the same work and training and service, and same ordination and education opportunities, we are clericalized, power hungry, self-centered jerks.
Misogyny is a tricky demon which disguises itself in our church in almost countless ways. We laity and priests need to cast it out from our church body immediately, completely, and forcefully if we ever hope to attract our youth back to our faith or if we hope to be a beacon of hope for the world in the future.