The problem of the rigid seminarian

From off the record at Catholic World News, reprinted in its entirety

Over the past thirty years or so we've often heard concern expressed by bishops, theologians, seminary rectors, and vocation directors that many candidates for the priesthood are unsuitable on account of their "rigidity." In these circles it goes without saying that rigid is bad.

But suppose, in place of the word rigidity, we substituted the word tenacity. Immediately we see that tenacity can be a positive quality, something martyrs and confessors had, something laudable in any believer and eminently desirable in a priest.

Whereas rigidity is kind of a directionless term, negatively descriptive of its subject, tenacity is incomplete until we ask, tenacious of what? In the context of discipleship, we mean tenacious of principles, values, standards: in short, the truths of the Faith. So how is that a Catholic who would have been commended as tenacious before, say, 1945, has come to be disqualified as rigid?

The kind of officer who excels in wartime often founders in times of peace; finding himself at a desk, he lacks the suavity, affability, and fondness for compromise that mark the managerial bureaucrat as promotable. When the game is no longer victory on the field of battle but cutting deals with patrons and rivals, the combat veteran turned office hack appears uncouth, awkward, and sometimes counter-productive in the eyes of his smoother colleagues. Since the Council, the Catholic clergy in the prosperous West has effectively transformed itself into a peacetime army, concerned not with fighting threats to the Church but with making life comfortable and consolidating political gains. The term "rigidity" belongs to the negative vocabulary of a peacetime army, "tenacity" to the positive vocabulary of a wartime one. The qualities that made Edmund Campion a hero in anti-Catholic England would make him a pastoral liability in Malibu.

Or so it may have seemed. Psychoanalyst Karl Stern, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who converted to Catholicism, remarked how the experience of the concentration camps falsified many assumptions of pre-war psychology. Stern says it was the conservative Catholics, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who endured extremes of stress without selling-out, going mad, or collapsing, whereas the enlightened bourgeois typically lost all sense of selfhood and integrity in the maelstrom. Stern's point was that his fellow psychiatrists didn't realize the extent to which their model of psychological health was conditioned by the context of peacetime upper-middle class urban life, so that the types judged by agnostic academics "most likely to succeed" crumbled disastrously in the camps, while non-adaptive persons, well accustomed to marginalization through tenacious -- did someone whisper "rigid"? -- adherence to principle, maintained their equanimity and character.

The Church in the West has enjoyed a half-century of comparative ease, in which the agenda has largely been set by professorial Catholic clergy -- men who dress, dine, recreate, and vote in ways indistinguishable from their heathen faculty colleagues, men who have had almost no price to pay for their highly adaptive Catholicism. It's not surprising that they should be alarmed by "rigidity" in their juniors. It's not surprising to read Fr. Richard McBrien lamenting a survey of seminarians that finds "many students resist 'the learning enterprise' because it threatens their 'preconceived ideas about theology.'" Yet, with some few exceptions, it's the professoriate, not the students, that feel threatened, and the source of the threat is not the students' inflexible ideas about theology (indicating rigidity), but their stubborn adherence to Catholic doctrine (indicating tenacity). These aren't 18-year-olds arriving dewy-eyed from a 1950s high school sodality; they tend to be college grads, sometimes converts, with personal experience of the false promises of the secular world, who have made an existential alignment with Catholic teaching. Regardless of theological maturity or naiveté, they know what they're saying No to.

We have to admit that some seminarians, by temperament, are wrapped too tight and can't handle conflict. I wouldn't call them rigid, but brittle. Many are conservatives, but many aren't: brittleness is a characteristic of one's psychological endowment rather than one's convictions. Few would argue with the contention that brittle candidates are unsuited for the priesthood. But most of the men disparaged as rigid earned the label because they refused to join their professors and superiors in the doctrinal compromises that have guaranteed them such a comfortable life -- perhaps the most comfortable life any Catholic clergyman has ever enjoyed. Like the blunt language of the combat vet, the intractability of the doctrinally tenacious Catholic is both an embarrassment and a threat to the accommodationist. And just as academic psychiatrists gauged mental health by adaptivity to their own bourgeois environment, so the seminary gatekeepers have measured "fitness for ministry" by the standards of success current in the faculty lounge, the theatre lobby, the embassy reception. Blessed Rupert Mayer held his own in KZ Sachsenhausen, but he wouldn't go down well at Georgetown Law.

But we're preparing contemporary American men for contemporary American ministry, someone might object, and Malibu isn't Dachau. True. But Dachau wasn't Dachau until 1933, just a drowsy Munich suburb. Times change. And times are changing. Has hatred of Christianity faded in the last twenty years, or increased? Has the secular world grown fonder of Catholic doctrine or less so? Are your grandchildren likely to find their faith easier to live, or more difficult? Having answered these questions, ask yourselves which quality is more necessary in the priests who will minister to your grandchildren - tolerance, or tenacity?

The problem discussed here is not peculiar to the RCC. I have seen several people crumble when exposed to the local ECUSA seminary, and only the “rigid” seem to survive with their faith intact. Others quickly buckle the theology of expedience around their waist, arm themselves with the breastplate of tolerance, and fit their feet with the gospel of inoffensiveness.

The truth of the author’s last paragraph is likely to be exposed, if not in my lifetime, then certainly in Beloved-but-Expensive Daughter’s. And to answer his last question, I expect that tenacity will be required not only of my grandchildren’s priests, but of my grandchildren themselves.

There is always a temptation to see our little slice of history as unique, with unprecedented issues –what Lewis referred to as “chronological snobbery.” I think that is a root cause of the periodic end-times manias that seem to grip the Church at large. Surely events happening today, unlike all those that have happened before, are Signs and Portents of the times prophesied in Scripture? But prophecy comes in two flavors. There are prophecies that point to future events, like those pointing to the First and Second Comings. But there are also prophecies that are based on the very nature of human evil and sin and the societies produced thereby. We see those signs and portents in every age of man. Civilizations rise, and civilizations wither, and the Church survives as Israel survived. God preserves His remnant, and in the end, His will is done.

Jesus talked about those who lack “rigidity,” be they lay or cleric. But since he has no root, he lasts only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, he quickly falls away. (Mat 13:21, NIV)