The Malaise of the New Generation of Priests
A very interesting – and significant – collective work, Les sacrements en question. Qui peut les recevoir ? Pour quels fruits ?(The Sacraments Reassessed. Who can receive them? For what benefit?), under the direction of the priests Thibaud Guespereau and Henri Vallançon, and the philosopher Thibaud Collin[1], depicts the suffering of priests when “seeing how the sacraments they give are received”. They note, for example, that many baptized adults do not return to Mass on the Sunday following their christening, and that spouses whom they had prepared for the sacrament of marriage separate one year afterwards. Add to this the fact that all Mass-goers always receive Communion, whereas only an infinitesimal number ever go to Confession. Hence the eternal pastoral question, but a burning one, given how ailing the Catholic world is and how porous its borders are with regard to the religiously indifferent society encircling it: “[Should a pastor] discern and refuse the seekers [of sacraments] who have no faith and/or live disordered lives? Doesn’t he then run the risk of creating a Church of the pure? Or, conversely, if he acquiesces too broadly, doesn’t he risk offending God and harming the Church, along with those who are seeking [the sacraments]?”
This book includes timely considerations on the dearth of preaching on the Four Last Things, the distortion of the notion of mortal sin in contemporary theology, as well as the example of a parish in the south of France where serious discernment is applied to requests for the sacraments – apparently applied to requests for marriage and baptism for oneself or for a child; at least, that’s what the reader presumes, as the book often remains allusive. Nevertheless, the need for prudence in a work intended for the general public is comprehensible. As things stand, in today’s Catholic world, this book constitutes a kind of bombshell, as it calls into question the prevailing pastoral laissez-faire, laissez-passer. Yet, it is especially so due to the following highly revelatory fact: not one single bishop is to be found among the authors or preface writers of this book, which does nothing more than simply explain what the state of grace is, along with the mortal sin that takes it away.
The point which, precisely, is so painful is this: there’s a gulf of incomprehension between the bishops and many of those who form the younger generations of priests. It is a well-known fact that the faithful who constitute the still-persisting lifeblood of the Church, feel like sheep without a shepherd. Yet, a not inconsiderable number of diocesan priests are in a similar situation. Hence the deep malaise of these clerics, dubbed as “conservative”, who form the new generation of priests, who are abandoned or even the object of suspicion on the part of their superiors.
Abbé Claude Barthe
[1] Pascal Ide, Mgr Christophe J. Kruijen, Abbé Guillaume de Menthière, Gabrielle Vialla (Artège, 2024).