Holy Orders in an Unholy Collision with a Disposable Culture

Raymond Cardinal Burke at the imposition of hands as he ordains a candidate for priesthood.

Dealing with the sex abuse crisis has led many bishops to now treat priests as disposable for any infraction resulting in a serious erosion of Catholic theology.

February 1, 2023 by Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL

Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  A few weeks ago in these pages I published, “Priests in Crisis: The Catholic University of America Study.”  Because it was highly recommended to the huge membership of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, it was one of our most read posts of the year.  I then invited Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL, a priest and canon lawyer who serves as advisor to this blog to present a guest post analyzing the same topic and its importance to the Church.  Father Stuart’s last post here was “Bishops, Priests and Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

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I finally went, reluctantly, to a performance of the musical Hamilton.  Neither American history nor rap are my particular interests; however, a friend convinced me to go.  I am unqualified to offer any observations on the theatrical performance; however, I was indignant at the final message of the show and the audience reaction to it. In a nutshell, if you haven’t seen it, Hamilton is the story of Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States of America and the author of a large number of the Federalist Papers. He was perhaps the first American politician to become involved in a public sex scandal involving marital infidelity. The musical suggests that history has been unkind to Hamilton and that his infidelity played a role in this.  It concludes with a rousing song about one’s reputation and posterity.  In other words, Hamilton was a great guy and how silly of us to judge his whole career by a single moral failing.

I could not agree more.  But let’s face it, the hypocrisy of modern, woke, me-too movement aficionados rapturously cheering this message is comical.  In less than a decade, North American culture has accepted as unquestionable the notion that it is unacceptable for leaders of any kind to have lapses in judgment or moral failings.  When they do, in the current me-too mindset, they deserve to be cancelled, obliterated from history, never to be seen, heard from, or discussed again except, I realize, when it comes to Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton, the play, is a huge success being performed in several places throughout the world. Does no one else see the hypocrisy? Do people not think anymore? (No, don’t answer that question yet.)

Most readers are aware of the National Study of Priests conducted by The Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America.  Father Gordon MacRae wrote of it with his usual aplomb in the link atop this post. What some of you may not have seen is an equally worthwhile analysis of it in Catholic World Report, entitled, “The National Survey of Priests Suggests a Deep Crisis in Catholic Theology,” by Msgr. Thomas Guarino.  Father MacRae and I both highly recommend it and we will link to it again at the end of this post.

The import of the study, and the two articles linked above, is the fact that priests, not just in the United States to which all of the above-noted articles are limited, are suffering from a fear of the modern, woke, me-too movement aficionados who seem to be as prevalent in the Church as they are in the world. I do not need to reiterate the scenario of a priest being accused, removed from ministry and either being dismissed from the clerical state or left in limbo on so-called administrative leave.  In cases too many to count, priests are abandoned, having been prohibited from exercising any priestly ministry, save the celebration of Mass in private.

Let me be clear, I am not referring to priests accused of sexual abuse of a minor. While the scourge of the sexual abuse crisis is going to be with us for a long time yet, the unfortunate and concomitant truth is that priests are now sitting ducks for any type of accusation.  It is specifically to the other stuff that I am referring.  Dealing with the sex abuse crisis, however, has led many bishops and Church leaders to think that priests are now like chattel, pieces of property who can be used or discarded at will. The praxis in the Church these days is that a priest can act as a priest only with the explicit permission of his bishop or superior.  To put it another way, it is as if a priest is ordained and receives the sacrament of Holy Orders, but the power of those orders is like a tap is turned on or off by the bishop.

Perhaps Father has fallen into sin with a woman, someone doesn’t like Father’s preaching, or maybe Father is insisting on his right to offer Mass ad orientem, or, Heaven forbid, Father uses vulgar language in a fit of anger or impatience (pace the news reports, if indeed true, of Pope Francis’ recent tirade with seminarians from Barcelona).  Any of those things, to name just a few, can lead to a priest’s removal from ministry cast into a form of canonical limbo with no defense and from which he may never emerge.  The idea seems to have taken over the collective episcopal mindset that a priest exercises his Sacred Orders at his bishop’s unfettered discretion.  As Father Thomas Guarino points out so well in his article at the end of this post, this has serious consequences for the Catholic theology of priesthood.

The Expulsion from Eden by Gustave Doré

Catholic Crime and Punishment

Of course, the Church and bishops need to maintain discipline and authority among clergy and religious.  No one questions that.  But one does rightly question the overreach of control that has crept into our day to day living.  Not every bad behavior, or even sinful behavior of a priest is an ecclesiastical crime for which he can be punished or even destroyed.  Clearly, if a priest violates his promise of celibacy by sexual acts with an adult woman who is not his parishioner, he commits a mortal sin for which he must repent and do penance like all other sinners.  But the Church does not say he has committed a crime. A crime exists, in these specific circumstances, only if he begins to live with her in a married fashion (it doesn’t mean he literally has to live in the same house with her).  That is the sin and crime of concubinage.

The last punishment meted out to a priest guilty of that crime is dismissal from the clerical state.  It is not the automatic penalty.  Clearly, the mind of the Church is that clerics are capable of very serious sin, and the greater is their fall when that happens; but it is naïve to think that clerics are not going to sin, or that some clerics will never commit sexual sins.  There is a reason why the Church has had laws against such behavior from the earliest days of her existence.

So, what is happening today?  The public backlash from the sexual abuse crisis has placed bishops and religious superiors on edge.  No one likes to be unpopular. In an effort to re-instill confidence that the Church is no longer turning a blind eye to the nefarious actions of some clergy with minors, bishops are just appearing ‘tough on crime’ in general.  Therefore, anything that a priest does which might reach the ears of the bishop is now fodder for tough disciplinary action.  Notice the change in terminology.  It is not crime, which would involve inflicting penalties (like suspension, excommunication) using penal law and processes (like criminal law, trials, and sentencing in the civil sphere). Rather, it is disciplinary action for behavior that is not a crime.

The priest who has grievously sinned with a woman, and who has repented of his sin which remains unknown to the public, is now removed as pastor, has had his faculties for preaching and confessions revoked, is forbidden from celebrating Mass in public, and cannot present himself as a priest.  All of that for something that is not a crime. No one would tolerate that in the civil sphere.  Let me remind you, as Father MacRae has written elsewhere that Saint Padre Pio was falsely accused of all these things and spent years under the unjust cloud of suspicion.

Analogies always fail in some way, I realize, but imagine that you are a manager of a large store of a famous brand name and your supervisor finds out that you committed perjury in court over a traffic accident.  Would the supervisor be justified in terminating your employment over actions which did not directly encompass your work duties? Does the priest deserve reprimand? Yes. Should he be advised that any future fall will constitute a crime for which he will be punished? Certainly. Does he deserve immediate dismissal? I don’t think so, no more than the store manager deserves to be punished by his employer.  Does his dishonesty raise a red flag about his integrity? Yes. Should his supervisor monitor dishonesty in the workplace? Yes. But it is difficult to imagine that he should be terminated.  When priests are terminated or cancelled in this way, the Sacrament of Holy Orders is much diminished, reduced to mere employment from which a priest can be discarded.

It is precisely this situation that has caused the angst so prevalent among priests as described in the articles by Father MacRae and Msgr. Guarino.  It is naïve to think in these cases that a bishop’s first interest is going to be the priest. It really should not surprise us, however, that we are in this state.  Just as seminarians are the product of the culture whence they come, and the Church must take pains to purify them of all that is wrong with the culture, so the Church, our bishops, are products of the culture in which the Church lives.  We are living in the midst of the me-too movement, of the culture of ridiculous wokeness in which some believe five- and six-year-old children need to be educated about transgender ideology and sexual identity.

This dominant culture seeks rogue justice, not repentance. It seeks conformity, not diversity.  We claim rights, not just the fulfillment of duties.  We live in an age of wicked hypocrisy. Priests are labelled as dirty child molesters, not men of learning on a mission.  Bishops steer the difficult course of confronting all that is evil in culture while trying not to make themselves and the Church irrelevant.  But at what cost? With what methods?

Pandering to the mad mob is not the answer.  Rather, we need to re-claim and re-publicize that the Gospel message is one of repentance and forgiveness and a call to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.  We are bound to fall along the way, which is why the Second Person of the Trinity humbled Himself to be born of our human flesh.  When we can regain our equilibrium after the scandals, we will be a much healthier Church, but less so if we simply discard those who have sinned but have embraced the grace of repentance.  For now, as with so many other scandals and confusion in the Church, we ought as priests and laity to keep our heads down, say our prayers, and keep our Faith.  This, too, shall pass.  God knows when, but it will pass.  How long, O Lord, how long?

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Fr. Stuart MacDonald, ordained in 1997, is a priest of the Diocese of St. Catharines, Canada. Pastor of a parish, he is currently a canon law doctoral candidate at St. Paul University in Ottawa and assists accused priests with canonical counsel. Previously, Fr. MacDonald studied canon law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and served as an official for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Most recently, he has been asked by Fr. MacRae to be the Canon Law Advisor for Beyond These Stone Walls.

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae:  I thank Father Stuart for this candid and most important post on the state of priesthood in this troubled time.  Both he and I want to urge readers to visit and ponder the posts cited herein by Msgr. Thomas G. Guarino in The Catholic World Report entitled, “The National Survey of Priests Suggests a Deep Crisis in Catholic Theology.”

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Father Stuart MacDonald, JCL at the Vatican

One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanow. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap the image for live access to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

The Annunciation and the Consecration of Russia and Ukraine

The world is changing, and not for the better. The Annunciation proclaims an eternal truth: “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)

Forty years ago, at my priesthood ordination on June 5, 1982, I received a number of gifts from a multitude of friends who had entered my life at various points along its path. Not a single one of them is a part of my life today. Many have left this life, almost all in God’s friendship but some also at various stages of doubt. It is not easy to keep the company of a friend you constantly doubt, but in the case of God we should just be thankful that it was never mutual.

One of the gifts I received on that day was from one of the greatest of my lifelong friends, Fr. Tony Nuccio, CSS. A priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata, he served Holy Family Parish in Lynn, Massachusetts, a rather rugged industrial city on the North Shore of Boston. I was a 17-year-old lost, faithless, fatherless teen, a condition which had not yet become so common, when Father Tony arrived to rescue me from the path of the Prodigal Son.

Father Tony filled in some very empty space in my life. He was present fourteen years later for my priesthood ordination. Tony died a year later from complications after a heart transplant. I have missed him ever since, but thanks to him that empty space in my life remained filled. I thank him, and thank God for him, at every Mass I have offered ever since.

The ordination gift that Father Tony gave me was very special. It was a wood panel reproduction of The Annunciation, a famous painting by the 15th Century Italian artist and Dominican friar, Fra Angelico. Father Tony brought it back from Rome and it was one of my great treasures, gracing the wall of every place I have lived since — except the place where I live now.

The scene depicted in the Annunciation, which is honored by the Church on March 25, is that of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that the Messiah is about to enter our world through a union between her and the Holy Spirit. I wrote of that scene with all its meaning in “Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us.”

The Archangel Gabriel appears in only two places in Sacred Scripture: in the scene above and in the Book of Daniel (8:16 and 9:21). The two appearances are like bookends. In Daniel, Gabriel is an interpreting angel who explains to Daniel events that will accompany the Messiah to come (9:21-27). This places the Archangel at both ends of Biblical prophecy. Having foretold the Messiah’s coming in the Old Testament, he now heralds in the New the arrival of Jesus and John the Baptist, his forerunner.

I have pondered Father Tony’s gift for most of the years of my priesthood. There is no doubt in me that the scene of the Annunciation took place on Earth, but, like the painting itself, it seems to have been made in Heaven. In the landscape, you can see Adam and Eve in a side panel that depicts their exile from Eden, an exile mended by the Birth and Cross of Christ.

Then one day, through the betrayal of false witness, the bottom fell out of my world. I never saw Father Tony’s gift again. For a long time, I had no idea what happened to it, and to all the other signs and symbols of my priesthood. When this miraculous blog took shape from behind these prison walls, I wrote of that loss and many other losses in “The Holy Longing: An All Souls Day Spark for Broken Hearts.”

That post was read by many around the world, including some who had become misplaced from my life by the cruel waves of time and circumstance. I learned that Father Tony’s gift had a chain of custody, ending up in the home of another priest and dear friend who took it into his heart without fully knowing from whence it came or what it meant to its owner.

Saving a World in Crisis

I was overjoyed to learn all these years later that Father Tony’s gift awaits my return to the land of the free just as Father Tony himself awaits my life in his company in a place where justice reigns and loss is unknown. Father Tony knew that his Redeemer lives, and he passed the surety of that knowledge onto me just as a real father should. And for those who doubt whether there is any real plan in place here, it was because of what Father Tony passed onto me that I passed onto Pornchai Moontri that same surety of faith. You can read about it, if you haven’t already, in “To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

In the few decades just before the Birth of Christ, the Roman Empire adopted a calendar introduced under the authority of Julius Caesar. It was the first calendar to observe a solar year, the 365-day passage of one revolution of the Earth around the sun. The Julian Calendar also included a leap year, an additional day observed every four years on February 29 to compensate for the six extra hours of Earth’s yearly revolution. The Julian Calendar was observed throughout most of Europe until it was replaced by the Gregorian Calendar introduced by Pope Gregory VIII in 1562.

The “New Style” Gregorian Calendar observed the New Year as beginning on January 1, but in the “Old Style” Julian calendar, March 25 was New Year’s Day. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, New Year’s Day came to be called “Annunciation Day,” a tribute to the centrality of its meaning and message.

The world is once again in a time of great political and social upheaval. After writing a week ago here of the latest grim manifestation of evil in our midst, I wanted to follow it with something that may give hope. This is not the first time the world has been under the dark cloud of a regime spreading war like a plague.

In 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to three peasant children, I received a letter from Craig Turner. An accomplished journalist and historian, Mr. Turner had been working on a CD presentation for Lighthouse Catholic Media that placed the Fatima appearances and all that followed into a context against the backdrop of history.

The result was fascinating. Having read some of my posts, Craig offered his CD presentation to me for a guest posting at Beyond These Stone Walls. He placed it into a narrative format that on its face may seem a little daunting. It turned out to be the most read and shared post of that year and one of the most read in the five years since.

After I wrote my recent post, “Beyond Ukraine: The Battleground Against Tyranny Is Us,” many readers asked why Pope Francis has not consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as was once requested in her appearance at Fatima. At one time, I joined some of the rest of the world in not taking this very seriously. It is serious now. So I posed the question to my friend Father George David Byers. He in turn posed the same question to a close contact in Rome. On March 16, Father George received a response which he passed on to me.

His friend confirmed that the Holy Father, Pope Francis, intends to consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at 5:00 PM Rome time on the Feast of the Annunciation, Friday, 25 March, 2022. The Holy Father had said he was going to be doing this in union with Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the Papal Almoner sent to Fatima for this purpose. Father George asked his friend to request from Pope Francis that this consecration be made in union with all the other bishops in the world. Having made this request with the Holy Father about 12:00 Noon Rome time, 17 March, 2022, Pope Francis affirmed that all the bishops — “every bishop around the world” — will be joining him for the consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Five minutes later, at 7:05 AM EST, on 17 March, Father George received this email from his friend:

“Dear George, I have just asked the Holy Father about the Consecration with all the Bishops of the world. He confirmed that that is the way it is going to be: He will do it with every bishop around the world. Let us pray to Our Blessed Mother to stop the devil’s work …; and I also pray to her to stop the ongoing cultural revolution. God bless you!”

Much later that day, seemingly in response to what was set in motion here, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States sent this message to Archbishop José Gomez, President of the U.S. Conference of Bishops:

“In the context of the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine, the Holy Father, Pope Francis, will lead an Act of Consecration of Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25 next. The Holy Father intends to invite each bishop, together with all priests, to join in this Act of Consecration at an hour corresponding to 5:00 PM Rome time.”

Mary is at work here, not in the human sin that lies beneath Vladimir Putin’s horrific assault on the people of Ukraine, but in the spiritual warfare that all human beings face. In the end, the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph. On the 100th anniversary of Mary’s apparition at Fatima, I was immersed in a time of spiritual warfare of my own as chaos descended all around me. I was unable to write. It was at that time that I was contacted by Craig Turner and made a decision to host his guest post which opened my eyes and the eyes of many to our need to submit to the Immaculate Heart of Mary the knots of a screwed up world. Please do not miss:

“How Our Lady of Fatima Saved a World in Crisis.”

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You may also like these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls:

Act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary

Saint Gabriel the Archangel: When the Dawn from On High Broke Upon Us

To Christ the King Through the Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God

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