When speaking of friars you can’t just say that there is a bundle of available priests who should be farmed out. You can’t farm them out, because they are brothers. If you farm them out, you run the risk of doing irreparable damage to the fraternity. The Church between Vatican I and Vatican II almost destroyed Franciscan life.
It did just this. There was a need for priests. Superiors caved to the requests of bishops and began to call forward men for Holy Orders. By the 1960s, 90% of friars were ordained. This was not supposed to happen.
As a result, these men lived and worked as if they were diocesan in Franciscan habits. The non-ordained brothers were labled “lay brothers”, which is a term that appears nowhere in early Franciscan writings. A lay brother is a cooperator brother whose vocation is to provide for the material needs of the community so that the priests can take care of the outside world.
The ordained friars took over the order. Only they could hold office, vote, do formation work, study theology, do such ministries as spiritual direction, preach retreats, teach, preach, and be administrators of our facilities. There were two chapels, separate tables in the dining room for the priests and the lay brothers. Each house had two recreation rooms. Every province had two novitiates running parallel, as if they were joining two religious orders. The lay brothers were not allowed to speak to the ordained unless spoken to first. A brother with 50 years in the order could not address a younger priest.
Priests had access to money, cars, outside friends and were free to miss community functions because they had to hear confessions or celebrate mass, visit with a family in the parish etc. The lay brothers kept the religious life going by continuing the community functions. In everyone’s mind, there was a Franciscan life going on, because 10% of the order was living it.
When Vatican II said that the orders had to return to their origins, the number of ordained Franciscans who left was catastrophic. These men had not joined the order to wash dishes, do their own laundry, but subject to the authority of a lay brother who was now the superior of the house. They were not willing to give up their freedom to come and go. Nor were they willing to return to placing the fraternal life before the apostolic ministry. When told that they had to end confessions by 5:00 and report for community meal, they balked. Let’s face it, the order that they were being asked to live in was the order that Francis founded, not the order that they joined before Vatican II.
Many left. Many stayed whom we feel should not have stayed, because they were miserable and made life miserable for others. Others stayed and sighed a sense of relief because they could relax. They are no longer responsible for every soul that cross their path. They are primarily responsible for their own brothers and the few people whom they serve where they are assigned and they have a fraternal and colleagial relationship with the non-clerical brother or what Francis calls the laics, which is not the same as a lay brother in the Dominican tradition.
There is nothing wrong with being a lay brother, if that’s what you’re community is about and that’s your vocation. There is something wrong, if that’s not what your community is about and if that’s not what the founder had in mind for you.
There is nothing wrong with being a parish priest, if that’s your vocation. There is something terribly wrong, if being a parish priest separates you from your brothers or singularizes you in a way that you’re not supposed to be singualized…
Many fraternities are taking it one step further. No priest may ever refer to himself as Father. He must be either Friar or Brother. Only the superior is Father. This way, there is no distinction among the brothers. When the layman comes to the door and says that he needs to speak to someone, he speaks to the friar who opens the door. If he needs confession, then the brother hears his confession, if he’s a priest or gets a brother priest to do so.
In my community, only the superior is ever called Father. Everyone is Brother. The superior is not a priest. But the laity are not allowed to call him Brother or to call the priests Father. They are gently reminded, each time they make this mistake. They are not used to it. We work among many laymen in our pro-life work, also with a number of priests and sisters. Even the bishop calls the superior Father and the rest of the men Brother. I believe that it’s the Conventual Franciscans who have moved to Friar.
The reason is that if you have everyone by the same title there are not these kinds of discussions and discomforts about the number of priests over here vs the shortage over there.
Religious life takes priority over everything. Some Trappist monasteries have 10 to 20 priests who have never heard confessions, baptized, preached a homily, witnessed a marriage or celebrated a funeral.
I believe that it was Merton who said that the first time he heard a confession he had been a priest for more than 10 years. In those days, they monastery had assigned confessors. You didn’t just hear confessions because you were ordained. The abbot had to give you faculties. He only gave faculties to a small umber of priests among the monks.
We must be very careful when looking at communities like that at EWTN not to do to them what we did to the larger Franciscans from the 19th century to the 20th century and set them up for a catastrophe in the future.
It is the local people’s vocation to promote vocations for their diocese, regardless of how m any priests there may be in a religious house. Finally, remember that the religious houses do not have any ties to bishops or dioceses, unless they are of diocesan right.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, FFV
That when they are not chosen to say Mass on TV, they have other meaningful task to perform.