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The Priestly Vocation / A Series of Fourteen Conferences Addressed to the Secular Clergy
PREFACE
THE aim of the following pages is to present well-known ideals and principles of action, and to apply them to the state of things actually existing among the secular clergy of this country. They contain the substance of Conferences originally addressed to Seminarists, which are now amended so as to be applicable to a wider circle.
From the nature of the case it happens that the greater number of our spiritual books are written by the Regular Clergy. Yet in some of its phases the religious life differs essentially from that of a secular priest. For example, the virtue of Poverty, or that of Obedience, as practised by the latter differ not in degree but in kind from the manner in which they are practised by those in the religious state. Hence the seculars do not always find the exact application they want.
In the present book it is hoped that frequent quotations from the writings or sayings of well-known bishops and priests who have had personal experience of the English mission may at least give actuality to what is said, and at the same time add an authority for it to rest on.
FEAST OF ST. THOMAS OF CANTERBURY,
PATRON OF THE SECULAR CLERGY OF ENGLAND,
December 29, 1917.
THE PRIESTLY VOCATION
CONFERENCE I
IT is well known that one of the great aims of Cardinal Manning during his long episcopate, and perhaps the one of his works which has left the most permanent impression behind it, was to raise the tone and status of his diocesan clergy. For many reasons connected with our Catholic history, the level at which the average secular priest in the days of the Vicariates aimed left something to be desired. When we read the story of penal times, and realise the kind of life that an ordinary priest had to live, it is not surprising that the tone and quality of mind which we somewhat vaguely designate under the name of the "Ecclesiastical spirit," should not have been largely developed.
We are not speaking now of the time of actual persecution. In the days when a priest had to go about his duties in the continual risk of being apprehended and cast into prison, and being condemned on trial to be hanged, drawn and quartered, the heroism of his life, and the manner in which he had to be almost continuously braving personal danger in his search after souls, would undoubtedly have taken the place of much training and prayer in sanctifying his soul. But with the relaxation of active persecution, came an imminent danger which showed itself throughout the dreary eighteenth century, and during the first half of the nineteenth. There was no longer any fear of violence, and even the depressing penal laws invented after the Revolution of 1688 gradually lost their vitality and ceased to be enforced. But the spirit engendered by these laws lasted longer than the laws themselves, and when the English clergy found themselves able to live the normal life of a secular priest, some stimulus was required to revive in them the spirit of their state, which had been so long obscured by the necessity of hiding their priesthood.
For consider what the ordinary life of a priest was even in the later days of the Vicariates. He dressed as a layman; he did not even venture to wear black, but wore the ordinary coloured coats common at that day. If he was not a chaplain to one of the old Catholic families, he would live in his own hired lodging, by himself, and in the utmost poverty. Only rarely would he have the opportunity of meeting a brother priest. Daily mass was at that time not usual. Even the Sunday services were of a very unpretending character, consisting for the most part of low mass, with some English prayers before or after. The "chapels" had little external signs of devotion beyond the altar itself. Statues of our Lady and the Saints were unknown, for it would have been considered highly imprudent to run counter to strong Protestant prejudice in matters which were not essential. The sacraments were administered with as much privacy as possible: the priest would hear Confessions in his own room; and having no font, would take Baptism water privately to the house of a child who was to be baptised. No vestments would be worn on such occasions, except perhaps a stole over a lay coat. It is not wonderful that such a life produced a kind of religion which was restrained and below the surface, and that there was little inclination to show outward signs of devotion. The lifelong habit of concealing their priesthood from the knowledge of others could not but tend to blunt the esteem for it in themselves; and it engendered a form of Catholicity which was dry and undemonstrative, to say the least, and wanting in the warmth of devotion which we now rightly look upon as among the most valuable aids to piety.
Nevertheless, it would be a great mistake to underestimate—as so many of the early Oxford converts did—the sterling qualities of the priesthood of the Vicariates. A more unworldly set of persons, with greater conscientiousness and devotion to duty, has hardly existed in any age of the Church. Their life had a hardiness and simplicity about it which might well be a lesson to a modern priest. Their self-denial and the strictness of their personal lives, added to their remarkable humility and obliteration of self, often indicated great holiness, but it was of a stamp which an outsider would not easily grasp. They themselves in their daily conversations made light of their labours, and it was considered almost bad manners to talk of spiritual subjects. All that was taken as a matter of course, and anyone who spoke of it would be suspected of self-consciousness. The concealment of their devotional life had become to them a second nature, and it is no wonder that the converts who were brought up under such different surroundings failed to appreciate the real substantial virtues of a priest of the old school, or even failed to believe in their existence, while the roughness of their external behaviour was no small trial to those who were brought across it for the first time. Full allowance for this must be made in reading the strictures which Cardinal Manning made on the clergy with whom he was first brought into close contact.
Yet we must admit that this self-effacement had become a hindrance to their work. The time had come when the sacraments could be publicly administered, when many of the "chapels" had given place to churches which could reasonably be so called, with fonts, confessionals, tabernacles and ambries openly displayed, when a priest could go abroad not indeed in his cassock, but in a distinctively clerical dress, when he could live openly in a priest's house or presbytery, when the churches could be furnished in proper Catholic fashion with side altars, statues of our Lady and the Sacred Heart and the like, and there was no longer any reason to be shy of such practices as burning votive candles before pictures and shrines. Owing to their traditions they did not easily take to such practices, and often even discouraged them as being what they described as "Continental Catholicity," unsuited to the English character. And this spirit was intensified by the action of some of the converts who adopted the extreme opposite course, and carried their slavish imitation of everything Roman to a ridiculous degree. The practical result was that the old Catholics became still more restrained as a protest against the exaggerations of the new-comers, and it cannot be denied that the spirit of shyness of legitimate Catholic devotions thus engendered tended to stunt their development to an unfortunate degree.
It has, moreover, often been said, and still oftener assumed, that the priests of the old school were unfitted or unwilling to undertake new works, such as the building of churches and schools, or other developments requiring initiative and energy. It must be admitted that such was their tradition, for the simple reason that in the greater part of the eighteenth century, no such developments were called for. It was a time of gradual shrinkage of all Catholic work, as mission after mission was shut up. Those who read the account given in Joseph Berington's well-known State and Behaviour of English Catholics from the Reformation to the year 1780, will easily realise how the highest hope of the priest of that day was to keep what remained of Catholicity in the country, and to stem the wearying shrinkage which persistently went on in all Catholic work. It is probable that the English clergy obtained their first lessons of development of such work from their brethren, the emigres priests from France, men such as the Bishop of St. Pol de Leon, or Abbe Carron of Somers Town, or Abbe Maurel of Hampstead, or Abbe Voyaux de Franous of Chelsea, or Abbe Cheverus of Tottenham (afterwards Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux), or others who undertook such numerous works, primarily for the benefit of their exiled compatriots, but works which reacted powerfully on the English Catholics themselves. But as soon as the tide was really turned, and the Relief Act