The Cure of Souls

Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #41, February 2004

I have always been a sucker for a book with a beautiful dust jacket; the same holds true for CDs and I often tend to make my first judgment of women mainly on frontage. I often get trapped by such a reductionist criterion, but sometimes I hit gold. The book I want to tell you about is called “Histoire des curés” (Paris: Fayard, 2002) and the cover shows an endearing painting by Josseline Rivière entitled “La maison du curé”
which depicts a white-haired priest in cassock, black cloak, biretta, silver-buckled shoes, and pince-nez strolling in his garden reading his breviary. The book was written under the leadership of Nicole Lemaître, a respected university professor of religious history in Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), and three colleagues from Rennes, Strasbourg and Rouen who each wrote 4-5 of the 18 chapters. I immediately realised that I could hardly live without it.

As the title implies, the book is meant to be a history of Western European Roman Catholic parish priests, more specifically rectors. It follows through the institution from its onset during the twilight of the Roman Empire to the present crisis. It is a goldmine of information, but it is too often written in an elliptic style in which facts and events are alluded to, but without enough detail for the avid reader and since the book has only about two dozen pages of endnotes, it is not always possible to follow up the information (the pox on French editors who do it every time to save money). As you know, rectors are powerful figures in the history of the church and they are characterised by two essential features: the rector has a certain degree of stability and authority (particularly on the sacramental and liturgical life) and he cannot be removed easily from a parish entrusted to him; he is typically named for life; secondly, he is personally responsible for the care and salvation of the souls of his parish, the neglect of which entails his own personal damnation. A difficult and dangerous calling, in which responsibility and personal peril vastly outweigh any power or prestige. The Prayer Book Ordination Service (which is meant to ordain only rectors, it seems) gets it right when it warns the ordinands that they will be responsible for “the sheep of Christ, which he bought with his death, and for whom he shed his blood”. Should any hurt or hindrance occur to them, because of negligence, the priest should be aware of “the greatness of the fault and also the horrible punishment that will ensue”.

Bishops, who are terribly jealous of their God-given authority and assumed prerogatives (they have always been in the Roman Church and have sadly become so in the Anglican Church in a perverse consequence of the Oxford Movement), do not particularly like rectors as an institution and are trying quietly to do away with, and indeed succeeding in gradually eliminating, rectorships. Even our own bishop has been at work on the issue, and in his message in the May 2002 Montreal Anglican, his position is clear: “We are moving gradually in the direction of incumbencies rather than rectories”. He continues by citing three arguments in favour of the move, none of which appears compelling except perhaps to fellow bishops, but none against it. Indeed, the abandonment of the rectory system for the RC model instituted by Vatican II continues to centralise power into the hands of diocesan authorities and priests will be expected to dance even more to the tune played on Union St. The people will lose their power to hold “selection committees” against the vague promise of being consulted that depends on the good will of the Ordinary. I wonder if there would still be a S. John’s today, had not Fr. Wood, in his days of persecution, been protected by his status of rector.

Rectors will therefore be replaced by incumbents, and all agree that it is not a happy change, if only for reasons of euphony. While we are keen to address Fr. Keith as “Rector”, we would be embarrassed to call him “Incumbent”. To me (and to Alice), words have meanings, and the rector is the person who guides his people (it is an active and positive title and it implies authority and responsibility); it emphasises the relation of the priest with his people which he is expected to lead (regere) in the right way (via recta); indeed, Psalm 23 “The Lord is my shepherd” is in S. Jerome’s Latin “Dominus regit me”, literally, “The Lord is my rector”. “The Lord is my incumbent” makes no sense whatsoever and it would not do. Incumbent, indeed, is a passive and negative word; it refers to the charge that lies on someone as a weight and it emphasises the relation of
the priest to his bishop and the hierarchy – in fact, an incumbent is someone who is lying down (the key root is “cubare” to lie down) on the ground squashed under a great burden handed down to him by authority.

Rector is the equivalent title to the French “curé” (in Britanny, the title “recteur” is also used). The implications are the same; the “curé” is he that has the charge or cure of the souls of his parish; it is also an active and positive title relating to the parishioners. Unfortunately, the word “curate” in English has lost its original meaning and has come to mean an assistant priest.

A simile comes spontaneously to mind from the Parable of the Good Shepherd. Cannot the Rector be assimilated to the shepherd who must give his life for his sheep (and worse, must put his eternal life on the line) and is not the incumbent more like the hireling for whom the care of the parish is more of a job than anything else? Surely, I hope that I am exaggerating; indeed, if I were a bishop, I would like to have as many rectors as possible to share with me the awful charge of the cure of souls and not take on my own back all the responsibilities it entails. But modern bishops do not seem to fear to put their eternal salvation on the line. I wonder if there are many bishops going to heaven these days, given the new rules of the game? A very sad business indeed, methinks. But what can I do about it except groan?

But back to my book. It paints the development over the centuries of the parish that soon became the hub-pin of the pastoral work of the Church, later to be in competition with the mendicant orders and the lay devotional confraternities. The role of the rector was periodically refined during Church history, particularly at critical times: the Gregorian Reform (1074-1075), the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), and the
Council of Trent (1545-1563). The rector basically takes on a triple responsibility: sacraments, teaching and social control – not merely “hatching, matching, and dispatching”, as some cynical modern priests would have it. He is expected to lead an ascetic life to edify his people and to refrain from ordinary labour, so that he can constantly be available to his flock; taken from the people, he must be different from the people; he therefore wears a distinctive garb, the cassock. He must also reside in his parish and his parishioners must feed him and care for his material needs. The priest is expected to die at the altar. This ethos of the priesthood (“the good priest” who spends his life “doing good”) became universal after Trent and it was fostered by the establishment of seminaries for the training of priests managed by specialized communities, such as the Sulpicians, the Oratorians, and the Lazarists... The golden age of this idealised priest culminated in the 19th c.; after the Great War, modern ideas started penetrating the rectories and the old ways were slowly eroded. The only seminaries today forming priests in this manner are those under the influence of the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, still making “priests as God likes them”, as the archbishop liked to say.

The book deals as well with the various forms of anticlericalism that developed everywhere in Europe and it describes the repeated attempts by civil authorities to take control of the rectors, such as Bonaparte’s use of the Concordat in France and the development of Josephism in Austria.

I was particularly interested in a chapter on Irish Catholicism. The great problems of 19th century Ireland were unknown to me: the lack of clergy and their scandalous lives (Irish priest were universally known for their drunkenness, their lechery and their avarice), the reduced lay practice, the absence of decent churches (taken away by the Anglicans) replaced by meetings for confession and communion in lay settings (the so-called “stations”) often followed by drunken meals; after the Great Famine, the onset of the “Devotional Revolution” based on widespread parish missions instituted by Archbishop Cullen of Dublin, gave us the fervent Irish population and holy priests that we all know.

The final chapter tackles the great changes in operation since the Council: decline of religious practice and dearth of vocations. The rector has virtually disappeared and his role has been variously taken over by incumbents, detached members of religious orders of both sexes, lay pastoral committees, permanent deacons, and even lay women. In this new diversity of action lies the hope for the future, if any. One thing is sure and that is that only the local faithful can save their parishes, despite the hierarchy’s concerted efforts, wittingly or not, to destroy them. The void left by the demise of the rectors needs to be filled by the congregations themselves, for the old ways, efficient as they were, are no longer possible.

When all is said and done in the book, the image of the lowliest, yet the greatest, of all priests, emerges as a beacon. It is that of Saint Jean-Marie Vianney, the legendary Curé d’Ars. Remember that he predicted that, in a parish left without a rector, the people would soon be adoring beasts... as indeed they are!