As we intentionally explore the Sacrament of Holy Orders, it is important to reflect on the role of the ordained in the contemporary life of the church. In the early centuries of Christianity, a distinction came to be made between laity and clerics. Ignatius of Antioch and Tertullian both use terms related to “clergy” in discussing church leadership and ministries in the community.
The words “clergy” and “cleric” are drawn from the Greek word “klêros,” which is connected to the casting of lots and the sense of something or someone being “chosen,” or “apportioned,” whether by fate, destiny, or providence. For readers of the New Testament, the word thus can bring to mind both the soldiers determining on whose lot the right to Christ’s seamless garment would fall (Jn 19:23-24, Mt 27:35), and the choosing of Matthias to replace Judas after the betrayal (Acts 1:23-26).
In our day there is an increased attention on the co-leadership of an educated and competent laity in response to critiques of an overly clericalist culture in the church. But it’s important to remember that we can respect and honor clerics, while detesting clericalism; in much the same vein that we can revere public service, while finding partisanship and tribalism loathsome. As Yves Congar puts it: “The Church of God is not built up solely by the actions of the official presbyteral ministry but by a multitude of diverse modes of services, stable or occasional, spontaneous or recognized, and, when the occasion arises, consecrated, while falling short of sacramental ordination.”
An eminent retired theologian once told me that in the course of her lifetime, she has seen the Holy Spirit remove the mantle of theological expertise from the overtaxed shoulders of bishops, priests and religious, and gently rest it upon those of a growing number of lay, married theologians, who can offer complementary perspectives from a wide variety of life experiences.
All of this is meant to recalibrate and promote a healthy appreciation for priests and deacons in the church, not in any way to diminish our gratitude for them. But that appreciation is more authentic when it can be contextualized and divorced from the historical usurpation of the structures of the secular Roman Empire, and its resulting sacerdotalization of ministry.
As any of us that know outstanding and holy priests can attest, there is more to Sacred Orders than implied in Vatican I’s rejected schematic text Supremi Pastoris: “No one is unaware that the church is a distinct society in which God has decreed that some are to command and others to obey. These are seculars; the others are clerics” (No. 10). This draft was thankfully rejected by the bishops of the world in the 19th century for its anemic ecclesiology, even in that ultramontane period.
Authority, office and charism can and should always be understood in a much more robust and transparent sense of mutuality and exchange, where each voice in the community is heard and each member recognized for their inestimable worth and dignity. It is in welcoming these excluded and diverse voices that we can more clearly hear through the church the Word of our only Teacher, the Anointed One (cf. Mt 23:10).
Good priests who offer their very lives as one long Christian witness (from which we get the English word “martyr”) are essential to the health and durability of the community. And we must also remember what John Henry Newman, himself a priest’s priest, reportedly once said when asked about the role of the laity in the church: “Well, we would look rather foolish without them.”
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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