Compiled by Cameroon Infotrend
Rev Fr Joseph A. Jum
In today’s world where those in the ministerial priesthood are into multitasking, with many other priests being versatile like a jack of all and others being ubiquitous, a fellow priest in an insightful write up recalls the intrinsic functions of the priest.
Reverend Father Joseph Awoh Jum is a Roman Catholic Priest of the Diocese of Buea, currently Vice Chancellor in the Catholic University of Cameroon CATUC Bamenda. In a lengthy but thought provoking write up, the pastor seems to be drawing his fellow brother priests who have become increasingly busy such that the zest for other duties sometimes outweigh the zeal for pastoral issues. Read the article below culled from his Facebook page; the author captions it THE “CORE WORK” OF THE CATHOLIC PRIEST
Catholic Christians who work closely with priests know that, apart from celebrating Holy Mass and administering the other Sacraments, priests do a lot of other stuff. Some priests are builders, others have charisms for the choir, for singing and song writing, for fundraising or for producing daily or weekly meditations on social media. Others engage in their hobbies – farming or gardening, sports, poultry farming, pig farming, bee-keeping, reading and writing and many others. Some others are appointed to posts of responsibility over and above their pastoral assignments in the parish. They are often attending and facilitating workshops, seminars and meetings in the Church and in the community. A growing minority socialise with their tribal or other groups including schoolmates, classmates, njangi groups, and veteran and sports clubs. A final category which seems to cut across all age groups is those of us who attend every wedding, funeral, anniversary or birthday celebration, sometimes driving over long distances to do so. This last category probably thinks that the fact they are encouraged to “become all things to all people” (I Cor 9:22) means they should serve at the pleasure of every individual and put themselves at everyone’s beck and call.
Considering the myriad things that priests do, Christians sometimes find it confusing as to what really is the ‘core work’ of the priest. Even as a priest in the context of the Ecclesiastical Province of Bamenda, you sometimes wonder what your core work is. It is probably for this reason that, when he called the Year for Priests, Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI sought to clarify the identity and mission of the priest. In the General Audience in St. Peter’s Square on the 1st of July 2009 he stated that, “Word and Sacrament, are the pillars of priestly service, over and above the many forms it can take.” In other words, the essential work of the priest is preaching the Word of God and celebrating the Sacraments. In that same audience, the Pope warned that when this two-fold core work of the priest is forgotten, “it becomes truly difficult to understand the identity of priests and of their ministry in the Church.” So, even the Pope recognised that the identity and mission of the priest can be obscured to such an extent that their key role is blurred or even neglected for other things. The priestly ministry is generally hectic and, for many conscientious priests, the twenty-four-hour day is never long enough for the work that needs to be done. When we take on work that is ‘not priestly’ and which others could easily do, we disperse energy which could be profitably used for priestly work, sometimes inverting our priorities and investing time (and maybe critical resources) in activities of lower priority. To prioritize things that matter to our work as priests, we must ask ourselves how each activity in which we engage ourselves each day enhances or distracts from our mission of proclaiming the Word of God and administering the Sacraments to the Christians entrusted to our care.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the sacraments are efficacious ex opere operato (“by the very fact that the sacramental action is performed”) because it is Christ who acts in the sacraments and communicates the grace they signify, and so their efficacy does not depend on the holiness of the celebrant (Nos. 1127-1128). However, there are many reasons why the priest needs to lead from the front, providing Christians with an example of life which confirms the authenticity of his message, because, as Fr Baker, sj (2010) argues, “the priest cannot preach Christ and give him to others if he is not dwelling already in the heart of the priest” . Second, the priesthood is not just a presidential function within a community; it is an offering of oneself as a gift, a living sacrifice in love and service and he must always be conscious that he is ‘another Christ’ and acts ‘in persona Christi Capitis (CCC, 1548). Finally, recognising that “the priest is another Christ who works daily among men and bears the Gifts of God” he must constantly connect to God in prayer and Scripture reading in order to receive those gifts and learn how to dispense them. So, in addition to preaching and celebrating the Sacraments, the priest’s example of a life of prayer and commitment to what he preaches is critical to what it means for him to be an effective minister of God.
Let me return to the key task of preaching in the life of the priest. Preaching the Word of God takes many forms. The priest preaches the Word of God when he celebrates Mass and all the other sacraments, when he counsels Christians or gives them spiritual direction, when he gives formation talks to prayer and action groups, and when he teaches doctrine. Our Homiletics course in the Seminary made it clear that preaching requires remote as well as proximate preparation and that, to be an effective preacher of the Word, the priest needs to be steeped in Scripture and in the teaching of the Church, to be widely read and to understand the social, moral and spiritual issues which his Christians are grappling with so that his preaching speaks to their lives and circumstances. This demands a lot of time and effort as priests are sometimes called upon to celebrate Mass several times a day and for occasions as unalike as funerals and weddings. The priest who recognises that preaching the Word is a ‘pillar’ of his ministry will prioritize Bible study and reading as remote preparation for his homilies for diverse occasions and would take time to prepare appropriate and effective sermons for the Sunday, weekday and occasional (wedding, funeral, thanksgiving, anniversary, etc) Mass. Regarding the second pillar of the priestly ministry which is the sacraments, the Catechism of the Catholic Church stresses that the Liturgy of the Word is an integral part of sacramental celebrations (CCC, No. 1154) which makes it clear that this second pillar is intimately linked to the first. The purpose of the sacraments is to make people holy, to build up the Body of Christ, and finally, to give worship to God, which is why they are an important pillar of the ministry of the priest.
I have said above that the priest needs to know what his core work is so that he can prioritize his many activities. We are told that St. John Mary Vianney, the Patron Saint of Priests, “knew how to ‘live’ actively within the entire territory of his parish: he regularly visited the sick and families, organised popular missions and patronal feasts (feasts of the patron saint of a church, a group, or an individual person); collected and managed funds for his charitable and missionary works, embellished and furnished his parish church, cared for the orphans and teachers of the “Providence” (an institute he founded); provided for the education of children; founded confraternities (a group of people meeting with a common aim), and enlisted lay persons to work at his side.’ (Pope Benedict XVI, Year for Priests, p. 6, Catholic Truth Society). And yet, St. John Mary Vianney is famous for a life of prayer, penance and total availability to the service of God and his people, sometimes spending as many as sixteen hours in the confessional. Like his patron saint, the priest has to start by asking himself what Christ and the Church expect from him as a priest. This is his core work: preaching the good news, administering the sacraments, leading his people by example and spending time in conversation with God since sharing the fruits of prayer, whether through homilies or through doctrine classes is at the core of the priest’s work.
In the Early Church when the apostles recognized that they could not get involved in every community activity, they had to prioritize. The community selected seven Spirit-filled men to do the mundane stuff while they focused on what they considered their core work: prayer and the service of the Word (Acts 6:1-7). This is a good template for us and should help us to focus on our core work rather than expend energy doing what many others in the parish could do, or doing something that takes us away from our core work. For instance, as a priest, how much time and energy do I invest in preparing my homilies, preparing or teaching doctrine, attending to parishioners with questions or difficulties, praying, sitting in the confessional, reading the Bible and other literature that could help with my work? And how much time do I invest in building, fundraising, socialising, attending to my hobbies, doing social media, attending the social events of friends and family? A few years ago, Christians almost went on strike in one of our parishes in Bamenda after a priest was transferred because, according to them, he was the only priest in the parish who had time to sit in the confessional and the patience to sit down and listen to them when they needed to talk to a priest. It is possible that something comes up once in a while to stop the priest from celebrating the sacrament of confession or sitting down in the office to listen to parishioners, but it should not be habitual.
The Church teaches that the “primary duty” of the priest is to preach the Faith by word and example (cf. Decree on the Life and Ministry of Priests, No. 4) and his “greatest task” for the Church and for himself is to celebrate the Eucharist, which is why he is earnestly encouraged to celebrate Mass daily (Decree on the Life and Ministry of Priests, Nos 12-15; cf. Canon 904). In practice this means that he has to do all in his power to be the best preacher he can be (by taking remote and proximate preparation seriously) and the most conscientious celebrant of the Holy Mass and the other sacraments. Following this line of thought, I think that it is wanton negligence of his core work for the priest to fail to prepare his homilies or to prepare them sloppily, and to avoid the confessional or the parish office. I think that it is neglect of his “primary” duty to make the Parish secretary copy all the Sunday reflections for the newsletter as well as the Prayer of the Faithful from some old books produced in the West, very often outdated and out of context. It is to miss an important opportunity to exercise one’s primary duty of preaching and to bring the joys and sorrows, the praise and petitions, indeed, the lives of the parishioners to God in the Prayer of the Faithful. It is irresponsible and unethical to invest our time and energies in what pleases us and our buddies rather than in what we have been called to do… and to be.
By Fr. Joseph Awoh Jum