Priesthood, Ministry, and Religious Life: Some Historical and Historiographical Considerations John W

Theological Studies 49 (1988) PRIESTHOOD, MINISTRY, AND RELIGIOUS LIFE: SOME HISTORICAL AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSIDERATIONS JOHN W. O'MALLEY, S.J. Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass. HIS ARTICLE has a simple thesis: the categories with which we Tcustomarily think about religious life are inadequate to the historical reality and that inadequacy is to a large extent responsible for some of the confusion in the Church today about religious life, especially about the relationship to priesthood and ministry of the "regular clergy," i.e. priests living in a religious order or congregation under a rule. This confusion, I further maintain, is harmful to religious orders and congre gations, even those that do not have ordained members, and is also harmful in the long run to the Church as a whole. The confusion has roots deep in our past, but it remained latent or at least virtually unnamed until quite recently. Forcing it ever more into our awareness have been the implications and implementation of certain documents of Vatican Council II, especially Presbyterorum ordinis on the "ministry and life of priests," Optatam totius on the "training of priests," Christus Dominus on the "pastoral office of bishops," and Perfectae caritatis on "the renewal of religious life." An altogether crucial question has emerged: How do religious priests fit in the ministry of the Church? If we turn to the Council, we do not find an altogether satisfactory answer, although we are left free to infer that the specific difference between religious and diocesan priests lies in the fact that the former take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, whereas the latter do not. The ideals that these vows entail, however, are so vigorously enjoined upon diocesan priests themselves in Presbyterorum ordinis that in the long run the difference seems to be at most one of emphasis or consists simply in the juridical fact of public vows, or perhaps life in community.1 The difference seems thus reducible to some rather subtle particularities of spirituality which in fact are almost impossible to define. The conclu sion that seems to follow is that there is one priesthood,2 but priests can be animated by different spiritualities.3 There are no further differences. Although Presbyterorum ordinis concedes that its provisions are to be 1 Nos. 15-17. 2 See ibid., no. 7. 3 See Christus Dominus (henceforth CD), no. 33. 223 224 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES applied to regular clergy only insofar as they "suit their circumstances," the document seems to assume that they in fact "suit their circumstances" quite well.4 The topic sentence of the opening paragraph sets the tone for everything that follows: "What is said here applies to all priests."5 Some things surely do apply to all. The Council, for instance, locates priestly identity to a large extent in ministry, a location surely pertinent to both diocesan and religious clergy.6 Yet it is with this very issue of ministry that the problem begins to manifest itself. The basic design in Presbyterorum ordinis for priestly ministry, implicit though it is, has three essential components: it is a ministry by and large to the faithful; it is a ministry conceived as taking place in a stable community of faith; it is a ministry done by clergy in "hierarchical union with the order of bishops."7 This design corresponds to the ministerial traditions and situation of the diocesan clergy. But does it correspond to the traditions and situation of the religious clergy? Not so clearly. In fact, it practically contradicts them—as I hope to make clear in this article, if it is not clear already. Moreover, we must note that the Council ties ministry to questions of church order when it speaks so repeatedly and insistently of "hierarchical union with the order of bishops." Yet, the major religious orders and congregations have lived in a tradition of exemption from episcopal jurisdiction, to a large extent even for their ministry. If we are to understand the sense of dislocation in some religious at the present time, I therefore contend, we must direct our attention not so much to issues of spirituality, in the conventional sense of the term, but to issues of ministry and church order. As a background to Vatican II, I will review these two issues in the history of religious life from about the 13th to the late-16th centuries, when traditions that affected the modern Church were set. I deal explic itly with clerical orders and congregations of men, for it is only with them that the question of ordained priesthood arises. Ministry is, how ever, an issue also for most orders and congregations of women and for nonclerical congregations of men. It is an issue for the laity. For lack of 4 Presbyterorum ordinis (henceforth PO), no. 1. Unless otherwise noted, English trans lations are from Documents of Vatican II, ed. Austin P. Flannery (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975). 6 Ibid. 6 On the unresolved conflict in PO between the "classic" theology of priesthood and a "poco tradizionale" presentation of ministry, see Christian Duquoc, "La riforma dei chier ici," in II Vaticano II e la chiesa, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Jean-Pierre Jossua (Brescia: Paideia, 1985) 399-414. 7 PO, no. 7. The idea recurs, e.g., ibid., nos. 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12; CD, nos. 28, 34; Optatam totius (henceforth OT), no. 2. PRIESTHOOD, MINISTRY, AND RELIGIOUS LIFE 225 space and competence, I do not address these aspects of the problem, but I assume that where my observations and conclusions might apply to these women and men will be clear. For the same reasons I have had to restrict myself almost exclusively to the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, but I believe that what I say applies mutatis mutandis to others. SOME HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TRADITIONS We cannot examine "what happened" until we examine the categories in which we frame what happened. We must therefore examine certain historiographical traditions. I am convinced that the origin of part of our confusion about priesthood and ministry in religious orders and congre gations lies in some inadequate but popular and widely appropriated historical grids. That is to say, whether we realize it or not, we think about these issues in historical frameworks that we do not question. The historiography of any phenomenon falls into patterns that form at certain moments and then tend to persist for decades, generations, or even longer. This is especially true for standard and general histories, for it takes a long time for monographic studies to challenge the received wisdom that such texts tend to repeat without re-examination. Moreover, the historiography of any given phenomenon tends to take on a life of its own, isolated from the historiography of even related phenomena, so that integration of the results of research from different areas or disci plines is a slow and usually imperfect process. We are in fact dealing in this article with the history of five imperfectly distinct phenomena: (1) ministry and priesthood, (2) church order, (3) religious life, (4) spirituality, (5) church reform. Although in some of their basic premises the historiographical traditions of these phenomena are quite valid, they suffer from certain defects along the lines I indicated above, which in many instances can be reduced to the fallacy of misplaced emphasis. At this point I want simply to describe the patterns, in as brief and clear a manner as possible, and to suggest how they might need to be modified. My critique goes somewhat as follows. 1. Histories of priesthood and ministry, as we now have them, deal almost exclusively with data from the biblical and patristic periods, to the almost complete neglect of the traditions of the Church during the Middle Ages through the modern period up to Vatican II.8 That neglect 8 Typical of this tendency is the otherwise excellent survey by Nathan Mitchell, Mission and Ministry: History and Theology in the Sacrament of Order (Wilmington, Del.: Glazier, 1982). See also Edward Schillebeeckx, Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus Christ (New York: Crossroad, 1981); Joseph Lécuyer, Le sacrement de l'ordination (Paris: Beauchesne, 1983); Albert Vanhoye, Old Testament Priests and the New Priest according to the New Testament (Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede's, 1986). In his second book on ministry, Schillebeeckx' treatment of our period is still brief, but especially perceptive and helpful: 226 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES of some 1500 years, I propose, gives us a curiously unbalanced and incomplete picture of our traditions of these important institutions. 2. The scant attention that these histories sometimes concede to that long period consists almost exclusively in ideas about priesthood or sacred orders that Aquinas or the Council of Trent, for instance, proffered. They thus do not deal with what was actually happening in ministry, in church order, in culture at large, and therefore, for this portion of their presentation, woefully brief, they fall into simply a history of ideas. I propose that what Aquinas and Trent said about ministry and priesthood did not necessarily correspond to the experience of ministry and priest hood even for their own times. What we desperately lack at present is a comprehensive study of the history of ministerial practice from the 12th to the 20th centuries, although we are now beginning to possess the monographic studies in social history that would make such a synthesis possible.9 3. Whereas histories of ministry do sometimes deal with institutions as well as ideas when they discuss the biblical and patristic periods (though not subsequent periods), general histories of spirituality for all periods have fallen almost exclusively into the pattern of the history of ideas.

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