Say a priest is assigned as pastor in a parish, and he comes into an environment that is clearly obscenely rampant with liturgical abuse and comes close to even being sloppy with the sacred species, among other things, which was tolerated by the last pastor. Is he morally bound to forcefully correct all such abuses, even if it will cause upset to the parish?
Please note that I am not confronted with such a situation. I’ve just been thinking about it.
I think he is, but a ton of care has to be taken to ensure that no parishioners’ feelings are hurt.
One technique is to defer blame: It’s not my fault that the rules are like this but I’m just doing my job. Problem with this technique is that it would be as if you’re blaming the Vatican for the rule – and you create a whole nother problem there. It enforces the “those guys in Rome are so rigid” mentality. In such a case, I’d rather absorb the blame myself than pass it on to them.
Best thing for him to do in such a case is explain why the abuse is problematic, and never to say “
You are doing this wrong” but instead “I think
we need to work on this.” As its pastor, indeed, he should consider himself as one of them; plus saying “we” takes the edge off and doesn’t make it look like finger pointing.
I can give a good example. At my parish, they used to have chalices made of glass, which is an abuse. Say that those chalices were a present from a parishioner and weren’t cheap. The pastor might thing, heck, nobody knows it’s against the rules anyway (I even saw video footage of a Mass with Cardinal Mahoney and he was consecrating with a glass chalice). In some countries, people might be sensitive to the point where they’d feel slighted and hurt that their gift wasn’t used. A lot of care has to be taken to deal with it. But you gotta do what you gotta do and switch to the correct vessels. The priest needs to work humbly and caringly to explain why it can’t be used.
Unfortunately that doesn’t always work out. Oftentimes the priest is aloof and frankly needs better people skills, so the message isn’t conveyed correctly. Being a priest is very much a political job, in the broadest sense of the word. And frankly not everyone is born with the interpersonal skills to be able to do it well. Last month or so, I read an article about how a big chunk of people who leave Catholicism cite how the priests are aloof. We all know at least one priest who you can call aloof.
Do seminaries need to train priests on interpersonal skills too? We’re in the age where businessmen do it at seminars. Why not have the same sort of thing for seminarians and priests? Should Dale Carnegie be part of the reading list? Not a bad idea, I think.
But you came onto a very real problem here: People don’t understand why the Liturgy is the way it is. We have a lot of rules, but the rules become useless when the reasoning for them isn’t understood. On the glass chalices rule, for example, most people don’t know about it much less the reasoning for it. Our pastors do need to do a better job at this. Perhaps the resources are already out there to learn, but your average Catholic won’t go that far out of his way to comprehend the liturgy and wouldn’t even know where to look. In such cases, the priest has to bring the message to them, rather than expecting them to find it on their own, because they’re not even that likely to look for it anyway.
