Sarah just distilled exactly why people are drawn to mendicant spirituality. An atheist understands these concepts better than several Catholics I’ve met, go figure!
There was a time when the mendicants traveled with the immigrants, especially the Dominicans and Franciscans. The immigrants were poor and the place of the mendicant was with the poor. I can’t say how well people understood mendicant spirituality. However, they were familiar with the way that mendicants did things. A situation like this would not have surprised those people.
Today, this is no longer the case, In the Northern Hemisphere, the majority of Catholics belong to the middle class. Most mendicants do not minister to middle class Catholics. People don’t get to see them closeup. After years of distance, many Catholics have forgotten about mendicant practices, mendicant traditions and even the place and purpose of the mendicant in the Church.
We’ve created what I can only describe as a clerical blob. A blob is an undefined object that has little or no structure to it. One blob is as good as the next. We are doing this in the Northern Hemisphere.
Just observe the thinking of the average Catholic. Every man who wears a Roman collar, cassock or habit is a priest. All priests follow the same rules. WRONG!
Now watch this other mindset, which also contributes to the blob. The General Instruction in the Roman Missal says that you must do A, B, and C. Every priest must do A, B, and C, because every priest uses the Roman Missal. WRONG AGAIN!
Finally, another blob example. That’s a religious order. There are two kinds of men in a religious order, a priest who ministers to the people of God and celebrates the sacraments and the brothers who do the manual labor and make sure that everything works so that the priests have time to take care of more important things. True in some cases, but not always. For example, I’m not a priest. However, I have doctorate in theology. The local diocesan pastor is a 50 year old gentleman who had decided to get his theology degree. He has an M.Div. Guess who is tutor is?
What’s happening here?
We’ve taken the priest and turned him into a blob. How so? In our mind, every priest functions the same way, follows the same rules, has the same duties, has the same vision and mission, and every priest should do things by the one book.
What we have done is something that the Church never intended or wanted. In our minds, we have created am image of the priest and rules for the priest that every priest must follow. There is no room for individual personality and no room for religious life. When you oppress the individual’s personality, you also dampen his spirit and you can even deprive yourself of some good ideas, because the person simply turns off and functions coldly. The Church wants the priest to cultivate a solid spiritual life, but it must be according to the context in which he lives. If he’s a Capuchin, his spiritual life must be Capuchin.
When you suppress the religious life in favor of the priesthood, you deny the priest who is a religious his right to be a religious. You deny him the right to live and do things according to the mind of his community, his founder, his constitutions. You have stripped him of his identity. He’s just another priest. He’s no longer a Carmelite, Benedictine, Redemptorist, Franciscan and so forth. This is very dangerous. In certain religious orders, the priesthood is considered to be accidental not essential to the life of the order. The men enter the order not to be priests but to be religious. However, if you take a religious who is also a priest and you ignore his religious calling, you have turned him into a secular priest. There is no difference between him and the local diocesan priest. They both dance to the same tune. What we do is to deprive the Church of the beauty of diversity. In addition, we drive a wedge into that religious community.
How so? Well, when you insist that a Capuchin must do this and this, because he’s a priest, but this priest lives in a house of friars where there is only one priest and where the superior is not a priest, what are you doing? You’re demanding that this man singularize himself, that he stand out from his brothers. You’re inadvertently giving him license to do as he pleases, not as his superior pleases. We create a clerical blob. He’s no longer a Capuchin brother. He’s a priest. That’s all that we see.
The reaction that some people have had to this flash mob has been interesting. For the most part, people were spiritually moved. There are some people who have been disappointed with the priest in the event. I once found myself trying to explain that the superior had given permission. The argument that was thrown at me was that the superior had no authority over the Eucharist, because the superior of that house is not a priest.
In that person’s mind, this friar belongs to this collective blob that we call the priesthood. His religious identity is not factored in. In the same person’s mind, the superior is not someone to be respected and obeyed, because he does not belong to the elite, the priestly mob. In this person’s mind, he has stripped another person of his authority and has inverted the order. The subordinate is looked at as the alpha and the alpha is expected to be the subordinate. The person that I’m thinking about was very disturbed, because in that person’s mind, the order of things was not what they should be.
a lot