CHICAGO — As a group of priests gathered to mark the 50th anniversary of their organization, there was some reminiscing, but most of the discussion was about the present and the future, including the need to fight racism, to work more closely with laity and even to re-imagine priesthood altogether.

“Fifty years after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., we still find ourselves confronting many of the barriers to equality and justice for which he gave such a powerful witness,” Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta told those gathered for the National Federation of Priests’ Councils (NFPC) convocation April 23-26 in Chicago.

Gregory noted that the NFPC was founded in 1968 to bring together representatives of diocesan presbyteral councils for fraternal sharing and dialogue, and that the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus was formed that same year for a similar purpose. Since that time, “the names and the voices of yesterday’s racists have changed, but not their message,” he said.

“While we can and should look back on our predecessors with profound respect, admiration and perhaps even with a touch of envy, we must also rededicate ourselves to the same responsibilities of pastoring our people with a full portion of the courage, wisdom and determination that energized those pioneer founders of those twin priestly associations,” he said.

To address racism as well as economic injustice, violence, discrimination based on race, gender or sexual orientation, and the nativism that has “changed its attire but not its vitriol,” today’s priests need to be better formed in the church’s social justice teachings and tradition, Gregory said.

“We must help to prepare the hearts of those who will assume leadership in the next half century,” he said. “Seminary formation today must include training our candidates to see the world and its troubles as an exciting and compelling field for gathering in a harvest of justice.”

More Catholics, fewer priests

Yet, while the societal challenges have remained over the 50-year history of the NFPC, much has changed for priests in the United States.

To start with, it’s a smaller group: about 22,000 fewer religious and diocesan priests since 1967, even as the number of Catholics has increased by 24 million, according to Franciscan Sr. Katarina Schuth of the St. Paul Seminary School of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Today, more than a third of priests serve multiple parishes, Schuth said.

In many seminaries, younger, less experienced seminarians are separated from the more experienced, older lay students, leading to problems working together in parishes, she said.

Working collaboratively with laity and encouraging lay leadership was a theme at the NFPC convention, yet such collaboration is stymied by clericalism, speakers said.

Gregory called clericalism, a “particular hazard for those who are bishops in today’s church,” he said.

A “healthy presbyterate” should take pride in unity and its successes, he said. “Yet we can never do so at the expense of our friendship with and our respect for all other members of the church. Clergy and laity are meant to work together for the building up of the body of Christ.”

Concerns about clericalism were echoed by Jesuit Fr. Allan Figueroa Deck of Loyola Marymount University, who called for a shift from the “defensive and self-referential posture that characterized ‘Fortress Church’ for centuries” to a new posture of encounter that includes a priesthood of missionary and pastoral discipleship.

“The shift has been going on for more than half a century now, and many would say that it is reaching a moment of truth, a turning point, with the bold and energetic reform in attitudes and developments in teaching championed by our first Latin American and Jesuit pope,” he said.

But too often the church has ignored Vatican II’s call for dialogue and listening and has instead focused on judgement and legalism, Deck said.

“Some of us all too often allowed ourselves to come across as customs and border agents, ecclesiastical functionaries and sacramental dispensers at the cost of losing contact with the flesh and blood of God’s holy people whom we were called to shepherd, to love and serve,” he said.

Priests with a sense of “entitlement” or “narcissism” are a “formula for disaster” for diocesan personnel boards, he said.

He also lamented the “toxic attitude” of priesthood as a “niche to be occupied,” which results in defending turf rather than sharing ministry with all the baptized.

“As long as we priests focus more on limiting our job description, circumscribing our labors, or take on an ‘I-don’t-wash-windows’ mentality, the more we become obstacles to doing what really needs to be done,” he said. “We must roll up our sleeves, do what needs to be done or actively find and enable coworkers, sometimes deacons or religious but usually laity, to do it.”

Citing Pope Francis and several Vatican II documents, Deck said mission and evangelization must be the starting point for reconfiguring the priesthood. “We must put the demands of mission first rather than make mission the application of a changeless organizational scheme cast in granite,” he said.

That will require an expansive, more robust vision of priesthood, he said, noting that religious order priests have regularly ministered outside parish or diocesan structures in schools, hospitals and missions.

Instead, diocesan priests have become increasingly identified with the parish, “a fundamental instrument of evangelization but a rather static one that simply cannot respond to all of today’s pastoral challenges,” he said. “The times require a more flexible and wider range of ministries, a differentiated outreach that parishes often cannot deliver.”

Such “epochal” change will be painful, but the church needs to bring the tradition forward “with fidelity, creativity and apostolic boldness, rather than retreating into little niches, comfort zones or nostalgia,” he said.

Instead of a “circling the wagons” approach or a resignation to an “elite remnant” of conformity, priests will need to build bridges across diversity through dialogue and mutuality, he said. The model should be shepherds and servant leaders in an organization that is more horizontal than vertical.

Priests need look no further than Francis for inspiration, said Basilan Fr. Thomas Rosica, who was honored with the NFPC’s Touchstone Award. He is the founding CEO of Salt & Light Television in Toronto.

“I firmly believe that we are living a moment of kairos in the contemporary church, the appointed time and hour, when the Gospel story is unfolding before us in Technicolor 4K and Dolby sound in the life of Pope Francis,” he said.

As this pope models, there is no place in the church for “haughty clericalism,” abuse of one’s position or climbing the “ecclesiastical career ladder,” Rosica said.

Instead, he said, “Pope Francis is teaching us that our authority derives not from worldly power and prestige but from simplicity of life, personal integrity and humility in imitation of Christ.”

[Heidi Schlumpf is NCR national correspondent. Her email address is hschlumpf@ncronline.org. Follow her on Twitter @HeidiSchlumpf.]

COLUMBUS, OHIO — Participants at a diocesan listening session on racism in Columbus spoke about hurtful experiences both inside and outside the church, but also expressed optimism about efforts to recognize the problem and respond to it.

The June 19 session at the Pontifical College Josephinum was sponsored by the Catholic Ethnic Ministries office in the Columbus Diocese. It was the seventh such event conducted nationwide in response to the U.S. bishops’ 2018 pastoral “Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love — A Pastoral Letter Against Racism.” Other sessions were in St. Louis; St. Petersburg, Florida; Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Schriever, Louisiana; and Baltimore. More sessions are planned.

About 150 people attended the Ohio session, which featured brief reflections from 15 speakers who spoke about how racism has affected their lives and about the Catholic Church’s response.

Bishop Shelton Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana, chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, attended the gathering and was joined by Columbus Bishop Robert Brennan.  Devin Jones of the Catholic Ethnic Ministries office was one of several speakers whose reflections offered a mixture of disappointment and hope. He spoke about attending a nearly all-white Catholic boys prep school in Chicago and said that although he grew up in an all-white Chicago Baptist church, he never heard the most familiar racial slur until his first day at school.

He also said that at a Mass in Florida where he was the first to receive the blood of Christ at Mass, the woman who gave him the cup immediately took it back to the sanctuary after he drank from it and poured the contents out.

A priest once told him to stop evangelizing black people because “they were not intellectually capable” of understanding Catholic teaching.

Jones, 33, said such incidents were not enough to deter him from recognizing the truth of the church’s message. He challenged members of his age group to spread that word to others.

“If we truly believe this is the church Jesus Christ founded, we should feel empowered and energetic and be excited to evangelize,” he said. “Until this becomes ingrained in the culture of the church, we will never see an end to racism and the sins that result from it.”

Several African American speakers mentioned times during the sign of peace at Mass when they felt unwelcome because whites seated near them appeared to be making a conscious attempt to avoid recognizing them.

Grace Neely, wife of the late Deacon Bob Neely, who served St. Dominic Church for 25 years, said her husband also was often asked when he joined the Catholic Church and his response was always: “When I was born.”

“People just had no clue a black person could be a deacon,” she said. This was particularly noticeable during one experience early in her husband’s diaconal service when he went to a parish in a rural area of the diocese to deliver a talk. The Neelys arrived early “and the woman at the door started asking, ‘Who are you? What do you want? When does the program start?’ Once he said, ‘I’m Deacon Neely,’ then her whole attitude changed,” Grace said.

Since the deaths of Deacon James Davis in 2015 and Neely in 2017, there have been no African American deacons in the Diocese of Columbus, nor are there any in the current diaconate training class. Mark Huddy, diocesan moderator for social concerns, said this is a great disappointment.

Huddy said he experienced racism while growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but in a different sense.

“My early experience set the default for what I considered normal,” he said. “Almost no people of color were present in my world, and that didn’t seem odd. Therein lies the problem that is the descendant of privilege — a form of racism that’s so institutionalized that it’s invisible. Eventually, I learned about things like redlining, school segregation, hiring discrimination and barriers that make it harder for intergenerational property transfer among minorities,” he said.

Huddy noted that when “defaults are built into the system, we have to be intentional about overriding them. Efforts such as the bishops’ pastoral on racism and this listening session are important because they continue to call us to relationship, so we can learn what we do not know, to confront racism in our family, friends and church so we can truly be the body of Christ.”

Deacon Augustine Ampofo of the Archdiocese of Kumasi, Ghana, attending the Josephinum for his final two years of study for the priesthood before returning to Ghana, stressed that “color is just an accident. No one chose to be born any race. Color does not define a person.”  He urged participants to “unite in the fight against racism and build a world devoid of fear, hatred and suspicion.”

His own encounter with suspicion occurred when he arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. In the baggage claim area, two Transportation Security Administration guards seized his belongings, asked where he was from, took his passport, brought him to a small room and detained him for about three hours while searching his luggage.

He eventually was told he was free to leave, but by then he had missed his connecting flight to Columbus and had to sleep at the airport. He said he never was told the reason for being detained.

Fabre said in his closing remarks that it will take “perseverance, patience and perspiration” to be successful in overcoming lingering racism in the church. He noted that the U.S. bishops had issued documents against racism in 1958, 1968 and 1979, then took 40 years to address the subject again.

He pledged that it would not take them another 40 years to return to the topic.

“I learned a lot tonight,” Brennan said. “Thank you for your courage and your generosity. These are not easy conversations to have, but we end with a profound respect for one another. We need to continue to listen deeply.”

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Puet is a reporter at The Catholic Times, newspaper of the Diocese of Columbus.