The Priest as Victim – Part I

Venerable Fulton Sheen in Those Mysterious Priests speaks about the “great divorce of priest and victim.” We Catholics have so long been exposed to this divorce it would seem impossible to imagine what a priest-victim looks like.

How is the Priest a Victim?

From the beginning, the sacrifice of a victim was required to cover the sins of humanity. After the Fall and the dawn of original sin, God Himself made clothes of skin to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness which entailed the sacrifice of an animal. (Cf. Genesis 3:21). which

The victim would be an animal, with a pagan or Jewish priest officiating the sacrifice. The relief from sin however was temporary, before long requiring a repeat animal sacrifice. However, with God sending His only begotten Son Jesus Christ—the ‘Lamb of God’—to atone for the sins of mankind, the sacrifice would be once and for all.

“All other priests offered a victim distinct from themselves; e.g., a goat, a lamb, a bullock, but Christ offered Himself as a victim. “He offered Himself without blemish to God, a spiritual and eternal sacrifice” (Hebrews 9:14).”

Unlike the animals, Christ’s sacrifice is out of self-surrender. No one takes His life from Him, but He lays it down on his own in response to the command from His Heavenly Father (Cf. John 10:18).

We refer to the round wafers used for consecration as ‘host’. The priest who seems to be a mere presider at Holy Mass seems to be ‘hosting’ some Christ-banquet. In fact, ‘Host’ from the Latin ‘hostia’ means the ‘sacrificial victim.’ The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the sacrifice of Christ, the Priest-Victim. He is both Offerer and Offered.

Recognizing the Priest-Victim Divorce

Fulton Sheen shows how Christ’s priesthood and Christ’s victimhood stands divided within the priest. There are priests who have the spirit of Christ and others who do not.

How many Catholics have a memory of priests as spiritual fathers who identified with the pinings, problems, and perversions of the common people? Many are the pastors who will never be written about except in the souls of the faithful they taught, inspired, admonished, and formed—often one person, one family at a time. In the present, the tender woundedness that must accompany priesthood lies buried under the perennial heap of news stories of financial corruption, sex abuse, and liturgical degradation.

We hear of priests like Father Gordon MacRae and Cardinal Pell, innocent victims of moral corruption within the Church. We hear also of priests like Father Paul Kalchik and more recently, Father Theodore Rothrock, victims by standing up for the Church before a fallen world. Do these victims—“co-crucified Christs” call out to our own deepest woundedness, or are these just ‘good-priest’ news stories?

For the average Catholic with only a street-view of one’s parish, all that matters might be whether the pastor pleased their sentiments, acted in accordance with custom and culture of their particular parish and toed their political line. “Good job, Fr.!” they comment during their favorite live-streamed Mass.

Some show off photos on social media of outings with their pastor. Others lament that the pastor has his circle of friends. One woman on a Catholic forum complained no pastor proclaims the Faith or teaches the Truth anymore (They do not want to be ‘preachy’ or ‘teachy’). Instead, effective preachers and teachers run profit-making Catholic media businesses.

A Catholic couple under the danger of divorce never approached their pastor together. The man hobnobs with the priest. The priest avoided an appointment to hear the woman out. The diocese had no offering for Catholics in strained marital bonds. A faraway confessor asked the woman, “Have you spoken to your pastor?”

The faithful get sweet notes and professional emails from the parish. They receive a call from the pastor only to realize it to be broadcast for mass consumption. They get “blessings from the parish staff.” They must make reservations for attending Mass, with TSA-style check-in counters. Worship is communal and public, although faith is still private. The mission of the parish is more about solving problems and hosting events; less about saving souls.

Someone noted that the most personal the pastor got was when he hinted to his parishioners to donate their stimulus check. Not a few felt that parishes have no reason to engage with parishioners as they may receive financial assistance from the government during a crisis like COVID-19, or ungrudgingly get ‘consolidated’ or closed down.

The sheep go all over the countryside looking to be tended, fed, and led, while the shepherd keeps the house at the sheepfold with the gatekeepers. Sheen compares such priests to Cain, who unlike his brother Abel, refrained from pleasing God with a victim offering.

“He offered fruits which cost him nothing, or in modern language, the products of technology.”

The priest on “a job” cannot be the presence of Christ the Healer in the world. “An eight-hour day, the five-day week is not prescribed in the Scriptures.”* The ‘job tensions’ a priest faces are not the same as the ‘agony of the Cross’. On the job are occupational hazards that do not possess the transformative power as does the Victimhood of Christ—the Christ of the Cross.

Outside of Christ

At a healing retreat, I came across a small group of religious priests in their cassocks. Delighted, I greeted them only to be met with a distant blank stare—“I don’t exist to them”—Yet, very fairly so. As I soon realized, those priests were there not to minister, but to be ministered to. They were there not to find lost sheep, but as lost shepherds seeking Christ, their Master, and Healer.

“A retreat that centers on Christ and the Cross throws the burden on the individual soul and especially when he is in contemplative isolation.”

It had become more important to those retreating priests to acknowledge themselves as “regular guys” before the Lord before they could be “the other Christ” to His flock. Those priests at the retreat ‘humiliated’ themselves by being seen among the congregation even during Holy Mass, as well as by approaching the confessional.

“Each priest must first win the spiritual victory alone and within himself before he can repeat that victory in the lives of others.” —Fulton Sheen, The Priest is Not His Own

Priest retreats, on the other hand, are not so much devoted to retreating into the inner desert of one’s heart, than they are given to discussions and debates.

“Discussions never obliged religious or priests to open their wounds to Christ, but only to reveal their points of view to one another.”

Had he looked at his own wounds together with the Lord, he would have encountered the reality that the redemption of the world was in Christ’s breaking up, and therefore his. Each guards his heart from his brother priests as well. Therefore, their retreat has a different starting point, with an exchange of ideas to ‘fix’ problems of their time.

“Race issues, student rebellion, prison reform, ecology, increase in clerical salaries, decrease in clerical celibacy became such important subjects of discussion on retreat that Christ was forgotten.”

With the disease of personal sin untreated, his brokenness untransfigured, and no one to remind the priest of his Christly-victimhood, he returns to his flock with a quiver-full of solutions, not ready yet to preach the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

The priestly victimhood of “the other Christ” remains dormant, for what sin is there that this ‘victim’ must expiate? All there are are problems to be solved. The Cross—the true weapon against the world’s sins, and the balm for its ills—remains but a little accessory to the Rosary in his pocket.

Priest Aside from Victim

How does it matter if the priest stands outside the reality of his victimhood?

I once approached the Principal of a Catholic school, a priest, in dire need of admission for my son in the middle of the year after his school abruptly closed down. The priest said he was unable to help since I had not submitted an application form. I found myself saying, “It is within your control to do this for us, Father, if you wished.”

“Am I Jesus or what?!” snapped Father Principal.

More recently, a priest I called to inquire after, unexpectedly shared about a parishioner grumbling that their ‘very hospitable parish is not so anymore.’ To this, he mentioned as responding, “It is not me inviting you to come to Mass. It is the Heavenly Father inviting you to the sacrifice of His Son. I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

Is not that theologically true?! Yet, somehow was not that parishioner’s lament about ‘hospitality’ reasonable? The giveaway: “I’ve got nothing to do with it.”

The Catechism teaches that the “whole community, the Body of Christ united with its Head that celebrates” the sacred Liturgy (CCC 1140). How can the Head—the priest who acts in the person of Christ the Head (in persona Christi capitis), state he has “got nothing to do with” the Body of Christ who finds herself cut off?

The priest has everything to do with playing the part of Christ among His people, for who but Christ could supply the wine at the wedding at Cana when they ran dry.

Fulton Sheen writes of an experience as a parochial vicar, in his autobiography Treasure in Clay:

“I began pleading in the confessional for daily attendance at Holy Mass and happily saw the number at the communion rail increase from four to ninety.”

Priests “are bound to humanity, to nations, to missions, to country, to diocese, to parish, to friends and enemies.” A theological comeback or a smart repartee has no place in a man continuing Christ’s mission on the Cross of today. In this, we meet the “regular guy” that Sheen contrasts with ‘the other Christs.’

“Regular guys” are missionaries of political correctness—polite in matters of sin and evil, hesitating to preach the truth. Abortion, for instance, is a commonly avoided topic—“It might hurt someone who has aborted.” In recent times, we note that he enforces the mask because the State requires it but might shudder at the suggestion of enforcing modest dressing among parishioners who follow an ‘understanding’ feel-good God who “accepts you as you are.”

The ‘Suffering Servant’

Suffering is precious to Christ, for through it He unites all to Himself. Anyone aspiring to be His disciple must take up His cross daily and follow Him (Cf. Luke 9:23). Yet, the secret of the ‘Suffering Servant’ (Cf. Isaiah 53:1-12) He entrusts to a select few, his Apostles—And His future priests who He calls to be ‘suffering servants.’

The Cross (suffering) has two contradicting dimensions—The vertical bar of a life of holiness conflicting with the horizontal bar of sin and death.

The basic reason for the confusion in the ministry of Christ in the last few decades has been: the identification of the priesthood with liturgy and ceremony instead of with holiness; and the identification of victimhood with social action rather than with human guilt.

The victimhood of the priest, it seems, been farmed out to the parish staff, the many ministries, branded retreats, and syndicated programs. The reality of non-priestly collaborators carrying the horizontal bar of “the good works” in close proximity to a vertical bar carried by the priest in the celebration of the Sacraments, has long given the false impression of the intactness of Christ on the Cross. The lack that first bred the divorce perpetuates it—the lack of prayer.

“In almost every instance where priests and religious have divorced the Christ Who is Offerer and Offered, it has resulted in a decline of prayer, a betrayal of revealed truth or apostasy.”

Unaware of its own affliction, the parish continues to devote itself to administering solutions from the natural realm to problems in the supernatural order.

To be concluded…