A case for the priesthood: though ordained ministry brings a suffering all its own, the reward is great for those with a passion for ministry and a love for God's people.

When playwright and diplomat Claire Booth Luce as considering becoming Catholic, she would look at Catholics and say to herself, "You say you have the truth. Well, the truth should set you free, give you joy. Can I see your freedom? Can I feel your joy?"

Good questions.

Can the people priests deal with see their freedom? Can they sense priests' reassuring loyalty to the hierarchy--without it being numb-brained acquiescence? Do they know in their hearts that priests must at times yield to the law--but also that at times the law must yield to mercy, to basic human compassion, and to common sense, as it did when Jesus dealt with the Samaritan woman, the adulterous woman, and the Sabbath customs? Loyalty and the freedom to think for oneself are uneasy bedfellows.

Can the people priests deal with feel their joy? Do they say, "Why is that man who doesn't have sex or a family happier than I am?" Do they allow priests to be more than dried-up spinsters? Do they mind that priests haven't squeezed all the passion from their lives? Do they leave liturgies and homilies more energized, filled with the exuberant God-life unleashed on the first Easter? Are they less fault-finding, more confident, filled with the contagious hope ignited by the Eucharist?

The root of "religion" is religare, "to bind fast." Religion is a person-to-Person connection with the aliveness of God. And priests are meant to be agents of that connection.

The wisdom of suffering

The one symbol that distills what Christian means is the crucifix, a statue of a corpse on a gibbet, a suffering reserved for runaway slaves. Christians look at it and say, "There is the most perfectly fulfilled human being who ever lived, caught at the moment of his greatest triumph. I want to be like him."

In our pampered society that's not an easy product to sell. There are so many easier ways to seek fulfillment: drugs, money, fame, sex, power. But apparently in the mind of God, as the crucifix is meant to remind us, lasting freedom and joy come only at the price of suffering--which is of its nature opprobrious and therefore repellent.

Yet suffering is inevitable. Our whole lives are suffering, at least in the sense of giving up a situation we've become accustomed to at the risk of finding something better. Even getting up in the morning is suffering, leaving the warm womb of the blankets. Becoming an adult is suffering; so is learning, which is why neither occurs too often. Being a priest is suffering, but my conviction is that the priestly vocation crisis would reverse if more priests made their suffering an evident source of freedom and joy.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The value of unmerited suffering [calls us] either to react with bitterness or to seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. If only to save myself from bitterness, I have attempted to see my personal ordeals as an opportunity to transfigure myself and heal the people involved in the tragic situation that now obtains. I have lived these last few years with the conviction that unearned suffering is redemptive."

There are only two options: bitterness or transfiguration.

In a true sense, priests did, in fact, impose whatever suffering the priesthood entails on themselves. Yet just as a couple getting married knows only more or less what lies ahead, no priest had the slightest idea when he first walked through the seminary doors exactly what he was getting himself into. But today every priest knows immeasurably more about what being a priest means than he knew when the bishop imposed hands.

It means passion, not only passive endurance but passion in the active sense of facing challenges fiercely, with the same ardor a priest felt when he first fell in love with God.

A hard sell

How much easier it was for priests in a church of unlettered, unquestioning peasant faith when the pastor was right even when demonstrably wrong! Seminaries were bursting with students, which led us to build bigger and bigger barns. When I was a seminarian teaching tough Brooklyn kids in the late '50s, there was a grudging awe of a boy with a religious vocation, as the whole world sang the Boy Scout values with us--honor, responsibility, thrift, generosity, forgiveness.

But if Grandma Walton were allowed back from her Depression grave, she'd scoot back to heaven with all deliberate speed before she died again of cardiac arrest. What would she make of Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears or the morality schools of Sex in the City and Friends? Could she comprehend Survivor, whose premise is betraying the people who've helped you for weeks? Could she cope with a world whose children have seen more deaths on television before first grade than did veterans in the army of Genghis Khan? What would she make of priests despoiling the sacredness of children? When she asked her great-grandchildren who their heroes were, how would she react to "Mother Teresa and Donald Trump"?

Try offering today's audience honor, responsibility, thrift, generosity, forgiveness. More unthinkable, try offering them a corpse on a cross as the most perfectly fulfilled human being who ever lived. Try offering resurrection as a value to people who don't believe they will ever die.

Far easier to sell Catholicism to an animist aborigine in the Australian outback than to a modern American, even a baptized one, even an educated one.

The church's mission now is to ignite life--and passion--in besotted timber.

There, I think, is a clue. The priest can no longer act the complacent repository of the sacred in a believing world. He is now a missionary, a lonely subversive in a pagan country that can't comprehend what he values and, from what little they grasp, don't want any part of it, except perhaps for the nebulous "It's good for the kids."

When I applied to the Society of Jesus, I said I wanted to be a priest "to save my soul and the souls of others." I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. In my naivete I wanted to save souls from some future fiery pit of perdition.

Today I want to save souls from atrophy here and now. I don't want people to die without discovering what life was for. I don't want their funerals to be redundant. I want to make them understand that they don't have souls, like an unnecessary appendix, but that they are souls--that the soul is everything that makes each person unique.

Life is not some test of that soul's resilience but a running start to prepare them for heaven, to enlarge their capacity for love and joy so they won't be mystified misfits in paradise. Then, just maybe, Christianity might have a chance.

The sacred self

I wonder if priests don't presume too much of their audience. How many value the soul? How many realize the soul is a potential that can be left unrealized? Do they understand in their guts that through our human natures God has invited us to evolve those souls beyond our undisputed animal natures by ceaselessly learning more and loving more? How many problems would vanish if people just took possession of their own souls--esteemed themselves not just as competitors and consumers but as eternal spirits?

I can think of no problem I've encountered in my ministry that hasn't been reducible to a lack of ownership of a sacred self: abortion, casual sex, anger, cheating, murder, despair, jealousy, child abuse. Would any self-aware person degrade something so precious?

Maybe priests' sufferings in a scornful world would diminish if they stopped treating the people they serve as formed Christians and treated them as human beings, suffused in paganism, who by their very nature crave more than mere survival. "I believe. Help my unbelief!"

There was a wisdom in the church's ancient way of teaching: Start with the humanities, then move into philosophical questions--eschewing any revelation--and only then branch into theology.

The longer I work in this culture, the more I am convinced theology is an adult activity. Unfortunately Catholic education in theology begins at an age when students can't comprehend it and ends just at the time when they could begin to understand. My guess is that most adults are educated and Catholic but not educated Catholics. Maybe we'd find more satisfaction in our work if we lowered our expectations and considered what we know are the true needs of our people, rather than limiting ourselves to what those above us tell us their needs ought to be.

The journey alone

When I met movie director Billy Friedkin so he could determine whether I could play a genial doofus priest in his film The Exorcist, we chatted for a bit before he finally broached his central question: "Why are you celibate?"

"Love isn't quantifiable," I said. "But my energy is quantifiable. If I had a wife and kids, they'd deserve my best loving. But four or five isn't enough for me. So I keep my love unfocused. Whoever comes along gets my best loving." (I got the part.)

The basic defense of a celibate clergy is the ability to love and serve with fewer restraints. I wouldn't want to subject my spouse to being "the priest's wife" nor my kids to being "the priest's kids." Being celibate gives me fewer excuses to say no.

My personal encounters with the suffering celibacy imposes are probably typical. At first, the greatest cost was sex, plain and simple. Dominating the testosterone, telling my body that I told it what I really wanted, not the other way around, was the challenge. Accepting that (to be crude) I am a man with a penis attached, not a penis with a man attached.

That message is helpful, provided people see healthy, celibate priests who haven't suppressed nor denied their sexuality and passion. The wise third pig in the ancient profundity "The Three Little Pigs" didn't bury the wolf--the beast--in him. He ate it, made it subservient, commandeered the beast's power.

The second sacrifice was realizing I'd never have a child. Who cares about carrying on the family name or the future of the race? But every priest knows he'll never be able to look at another person and say, "I caused that life. I invited that person into existence." What a sense of fulfillment!

"Oh, but you've had so many spiritual children," we might hear. Thank you. That's nice. Just isn't the same, is it? But it's a freely-chosen suffering I'll endure because I believe God wants something different from me instead.

Finally, and most tellingly: There is no other human being who shares my life. Oh, there are thousands whom I love and who I trust love me. But no one wakes up or falls asleep worrying about me. Not even my best friends will be as attentive as a wife might have been: "Bill, you're working too hard. Take some time off." People I love will be bereaved when I die, but no one will feel almost empty.

That's the reason for a spiritual director--someone to whom each priest is transparently vulnerable, as a good man would be utterly self-revealing to his wife. Someone to whom he can say not only "I'm mad as hell" but "I'm so devastatingly lonely," "I'm so tired and discouraged," "I don't know how much longer I can take it." This is a union of souls, where we invite a friend inside to see the whole chaotic mess, and he or she says, "So what. We're still friends." That's a remote metaphor for the way God loves us.

Would our suffering brothers who abused children and have unthinkingly shared with us the stigma they've put on the priesthood done so if they'd felt the freedom to expose their souls unreservedly to just one other human being?

To fend off the asphyxiating loneliness, priests have always needed to pray. Not just the Mass or scuttling through the Divine Office. Not even meditating to glean a mustard seed for the next homily. A priest needs to be alone with God, even if just for a few moments a day, to reforge that person-to-Person connection, which is the religion he embodies.

God's defender

St. Teresa of Avila told God, "If you treat all your friends as badly as you treat me, I'm not surprised you have so few." When an atheist gets "screwed by fate," there's nobody to blast away at. We believers have that heartening option.

This God to whom we offer our willing servitude doesn't play fair. How do we defend God next to the coffin of a teenage suicide, or the bedside of a young father dying of cancer, or holding the hand of a girl unexpectedly pregnant? Defending the indefensible is a great deal of a priest's job.

I no longer resort to petitionary prayers. I stopped years ago when my mother, suffering the loss of her memory and self-control, gradually became entirely inaccessible and didn't even know who I was. Once, in the hospital, when I leaned over to kiss her, she started screaming, and the nurse told me perhaps I'd better leave.

I went down to the car, put my head on the steering wheel, and sobbed. I called God every foul name I could conjure. "I've given you my whole goddamned life. Why can't you let her go?" And God refused. It was the ultimate insight he gave Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Should I check my plans with you?"

I learned from Our Lady at Cana. She didn't say, "What do you intend to do about this wine situation, young man?" Much less, "After all I've done for you." She said only, "They have no wine"--telling Jesus what he doubtless knew, letting him handle it as he chose, which God will do anyway. We just have to lower our grandiose expectations.

Revelation

One day, walking along a country road, hangin' out with Jesus, I got an epiphany from a big black Labrador retriever. She came up with a stick and sort of insisted I throw it. So I threw the thing till my arm grew as limp as linguine, then I stopped. Well, she shouldered me, apparently asking if I'd forgotten my place in her universe.

Just then a car came careening down the road, so I grabbed her choke-chain and dragged her out of the way, coughing and snarling. When the car had passed, she gave me this bitchy look and trundled off in a hairy huff. At that moment I grasped a formidable truth. I realized I understood God's motives in refusing my requests and jerking my chain about as well as that black Lab understood mine. Humbling.

As Eliot wrote, "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be." No priest is called to play the lead. Someone else got there first.

No Christian is essential, but each of us is important. We are not kings ourselves, but we are the king's adopted siblings, chosen for no reason other than love, to be peers of his realm. Ah!

FATHER WILLIAM J. O'MALLEY, S.J. teaches at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. He is the author of 33 books, including Choosing to Be Catholic: For the First Time or Once Again (Ave Maria Press, 2004).