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

Abstract

T ARTICLE has a simple thesis: categories with which we customarily think about religious life are inadequate to historical reality and that inadequacy is to a large extent responsible for some of confusion in Church today about religious life, especially about relationship to priesthood and of 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 congregations, even those that do not have ordained members, and is also harmful in long run to 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 implications and implementation of certain documents of Vatican Council II, especially Presbyterorum ordinis on ministry and life of priests, Optatam totius on training of priests, Christus Dominus on 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 of Church? If we turn to Council, we do not find an altogether satisfactory answer, although we are left free to infer that specific difference between religious and diocesan priests lies in fact that former take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, whereas latter do not. The ideals that these vows entail, however, are so vigorously enjoined upon diocesan priests themselves in Presbyterorum ordinis that in long run difference seems to be at most one of emphasis or consists simply in juridical fact of public vows, or perhaps life in community. The difference seems thus reducible to some rather subtle particularities of spirituality which in fact are almost impossible to define. The conclusion that seems to follow is that there is one priesthood, but priests can be animated by different spiritualities. There are no further differences. Although Presbyterorum ordinis concedes that its provisions are to be