The Priest at Prayer, May 3

The Priest and the Eternal Truths
Mortal Sin in the Priest

Sixth Meditation

Harm done by the Scandalous Priest

I. Harm to individual souls

Our passions seek a support - pretexts, excuses, at least some glimpse of good - and never have they found a more solid one than the life of the bad priest. If the person appointed to defend morality with his conduct, his words and his ministry; if he whose name and garb seem a living reproach to evil; if he who commands God's grace and God's strength to tame the unruly impulses of the heart and of fallen human nature; if he sets an example of sin, what will the other mortals do who are supposed to look up to him as their guide, their master, and their model?

The best defense, an impregnable defense, of evil living is the bad priest; he is the unwholesome yeast that leavens and corrupts the entire mass of the faithful who know him.

II. Harm to the flock

There are thousands of communities whose history is befittingly epitomised in St. Paul's cutting reproach: Sine Deo in hoc mundo; whole towns and villages that have in actual fact apostatised; that have fled from Holy Church for all time; without the Sacraments even at the hour of death; where all the efforts of the most skillful and zealous pastor to bring them back to God meet with failure; from which the very radical capacity for conversion seems to have been torn away by some accursed power.

Don't you know, or haven't you heard, of these pitiful apostasies? How many parishes there are even in countries of Catholic tradition more difficult to convert than the heathen or the followers of Mohammed! A priest will spend all the energies of a lifetime of apostleship in a parish like this, and, when presented to the Divine Judge, he will be forced to say:

Master, we have laboured all through the night and have caught nothing.

Look for the primary cause of that obstinacy, and you will nearly always come across a scandalous priest. So terrible is the power for evil of the bad priest!

III. Harm to the whole Church

Try to find a heretic, a calumniator, or any opponent of the Church, who in his attacks and diatribes does not base his hostility on crimes committed by the Church's ministers: you will not find one.

The heresies of our times - if from a doctrinal point of view they deserve the name and not that of sheer apostasy - those social and political systems that have de-christianised the masses and severed from Jesus Christ and from the bosom of His Church the nations united to Him for many centuries, what new dogmas, what great sophisms, have they brought to their own defense? Ordinarily, just one: the dishonoring of the clergy, covering them in the mire of calumny, the bringing to light of our personal shortcomings; and by that expedient alone they have succeeded in persuading thousands upon thousands of souls to renounce Christ and consider Him no longer their Saviour and their God.

Have there not been in my priestly life, dear Lord, evil deeds that in the hands of Thy enemies have become thorns to Thy brow, spittle to Thy face, a tattered cloak of derision upon Thy shoulders, presenting Thee thus disfigured to the eyes of the gullible masses with the sarcastic Ecce Homo?

Resolution
I shall make an impartial study of my life to see whether there is anything - any sinful practice, any habit of doubtful morality, any friendship - open to suspicion - whereby I am a stumbling-block to my neighbor; or at least, any sin of omission: slackness in the fulfilment of my duties, want of circumspection in my speech, etc. For I am convinced that it is not necessary to be a great sinner to be the cause of scandal. It could happen that the only basic reason for my condemnation before Christ would be my having caused the downfall of the weak by my thoughtlessness.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!