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Religious Life

How are Priests Trained?

Father Andrew Clyne

March 30, 2023 5:30 am March 30, 2023

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Seeing the priest in the pulpit or at the altar on a Sunday, it is only natural and understandable for people to have in their minds, from time to time,…

Seeing the priest in the pulpit or at the altar on a Sunday, it is only natural and understandable for people to have in their minds, from time to time, the question, “How did he get here?” The question may be considered not only in the sense of what is his own unique vocation story, but in the sense of what was the process by which the Church discerned his suitability for ministry, and what did his preparation for ministry entail.

The history of priestly formation in the Catholic Church is long and varied, but a decisive moment in that history came with the Council of Trent (1545-63), especially in its Twenty-Third Session, when the council fathers laid down the framework for the establishment of seminaries as permanent institutions for the training of clerics. While it took some time for the seminary model to take hold, the result remains the essential place of priestly formation to the present day.

Responding to Needs

While the seminary has its historical origins in the Tridentine reforms and the time of the Counter-Reformation, the process of priestly formation has not remained stagnate. What that formation looks like inevitably has been shaped by factors beyond the walls of the seminary, as the priest (at least the diocesan priest) fundamentally is prepared for ministry in the world, and that preparation can be satisfactory only if it best prepares him to face the unique pastoral challenges of his distinct place and time. Therefore, priestly formation always has had to keep abreast of developing pastoral circumstances and has had to adjust to best respond.

That said, the basics of faithful Christian discipleship and holy priesthood remain unvaried. The need for the priest to be prayerful, humble and wise; to be a man of integrity, fidelity and compassion; to be courageous, pure and detached from worldly acclaim; to be selfless and free of all ambition, save doing the will of God — these qualities are as necessary now for the Church’s ministers as they were at the time of her birth. And they will continue to be necessary until the final coming of Christ’s kingdom.

Therefore, the formation of priests always involves, simultaneously, attention to the permanent and the present. This means for those entrusted with priestly formation answering the question of how best to prepare men for priesthood, so that they will possess all the qualities which perennially have defined priesthood well-lived, along with the capacity to minister effectively to people in a specific historical and cultural context, therefore leading them to an encounter with Christ and the sharing in His divine life forever.

Given this enduring need of the Church to be attentive and responsive to ever-evolving pastoral challenges, especially in considering how priests might be best prepared to meet those challenges, it should come as no surprise that priestly formation has received extensive attention by the Church over the last half-century, in the period defined by the Second Vatican Council and its ongoing reception. From the council’s own decree on the training of priests (Optatam Totius) through the pontificate of Pope Francis, there have been constant discussions, studies and reforms, all dedicated to improving the training of priests so that they might better confront the evangelical challenges posed by the modern world and effectively lead the Church in what has been termed the “New Evangelization.”

Within the period stretching from Vatican II to the present, a watershed moment came with the 1990 Synod of Bishops dedicated to the formation of priests in the present day. The fruits of this synodal gathering were manifest in Pope St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis (1992), a landmark text which has shaped priestly formation since. Various national episcopal conferences were given the responsibility of devising programs for the effective implementation of Pastores Dabo Vobis’ teaching within their specific national contexts. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops produced the Program for Priestly Formation (PPF) in response, a document which has provided the framework for priestly formation in the United States since its drafting and which is currently in its fifth edition.

Recalling the teaching of Pastores Dabo Vobis, the PPF utilizes the image of “pillars of formation” to organize conceptually the principal focal points of priestly formation. It draws attention to four major pillars. They are (1) human formation, (2) spiritual formation, (3) intellectual formation and (4) pastoral formation. It is on the basis of growth and personal depth in these areas that a candidate is evaluated for his suitability for ministry in the Catholic Church today.

There is a certain danger in dividing these areas of formation, as it could give the impression that they are somehow separable. Of course, this is not true and is not how the PPF conceives of the relationship between the pillars. Rather, they are all interconnected and necessarily impact one another. If one is to grow into a holy and effective minister, there must be continual growth humanly, spiritually, intellectually and pastorally. They are all integrated and form one whole, just as the man being formed for priesthood remains always one person.

Human Formation

In a certain sense, the entire priestly formation process first has to attend to human formation, since everything builds on this. Applicable here is the wisdom of the Scholastic adage: “Grace builds upon nature.” It is not that grace cannot or does not have its effect regardless of a person’s qualities. Nevertheless, the presence of good personal habits and a well-formed character dispose the person to be more receptive to the growth in holiness offered by God’s graced call.

In the words of the PPF, the qualities that are to be sought and fostered within human formation are “freedom, openness, honesty and flexibility, joy and inner peace, generosity and justice, personal maturity and interpersonal skills, commonsense, aptitude for ministry, and ‘growth in moral sensibility and character’” (PPF, 5th ed., No. 85). Moreover, as those committing to a life of celibacy, affective and sexual maturity also is deemed essential.

Spiritual Formation

The importance of spiritual formation for the seminarian and future priest cannot be overstated. As those with the unique vocation to lead the assembled Church in prayer, they must be first men of prayer themselves. As men who dispense the sacraments, they frequently must receive them. And as those called on to provide spiritual counsel to those entrusted to their care, first they must have a deeply personal relationship with the Lord.

The development of the future priest’s intimate relationship with the Lord is at the heart of seminary formation, since the existence of that relationship is crucial for the priest’s holiness and effectiveness in his ministry. To that end, much of a seminary’s resources are dedicated to the cultivation of that type of intimate prayer among seminarians. In addition to the regular celebration of Mass, and the communal praying of the Liturgy of the Hours, seminaries will also offer retreats, spiritual conferences and various workshops. There is often the communal recitation of the Rosary and the encouragement of other devotions. The Holy Hour highly is encouraged. Moreover, there is frequent Eucharistic Adoration and the Sacrament of Reconciliation is made regularly available. Significantly, every seminarian is assigned a spiritual director with whom they meet regularly.

Intellectual Formation

Much of a seminarian’s day-to-day activity falls under the pillar of intellectual formation. In addition to maintaining and growing in the life of prayer, and alongside any other personal, pastoral or seminary responsibilities, the seminarian is a full-time student. This is in large part why the process of priestly formation is so lengthy (typically for a diocesan priest, time in seminary formation will last six to eight years). The priest is a teacher of the Faith, and in order to pass on the Faith and instruct others in it first he must know it himself.

Certainly he does not master the entirety of the tradition. Such mastery of the Catholic theological tradition is not achieved even by the greatest of theological minds — for example, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, etc. — not only because of its scope, but more significantly because of the subject of theology — the Triune God. God is mystery, and while the human mind may know things about God (otherwise the study of theology would be pointless) — especially those things which we know of Him by the gift of reason and through His revelation — no human mind ultimately can have a comprehensive knowledge of Him.

Since indeed we can know about God — and His saving and redeeming action in the person of Christ continued on in the work of His Church guided by His Holy Spirit — it is essential for the Church’s ministers to have an adequate knowledge of the Faith. This may be needed now more than ever, given the widespread confusion that exists among both Catholics and non-Catholics with regard to what the Church actually teaches. To this end, a priest’s intellectual formation in seminary involves studies with a focus in both sacred theology and philosophy (theology for obvious reasons, philosophy perhaps less so, at least at first glance).

The study of philosophy by seminarians has many purposes. First, by engaging with philosophical argument, the seminarian learns the skills of good reasoning and, just as importantly, the ability to detect shoddy arguments and bad reasoning. Basically put, philosophical education is supposed to inculcate good intellectual habits.

Second, there is an inherent connection between philosophy and theology. Positively, philosophy and its terminology have proven advantageous in articulating various theological doctrines — for example, person and substance in Trinitarian theology, transubstantiation in sacramental theology, etc. Negatively, so many theological errors have their origins in basic philosophical errors, and so it often is an important theological task to sort out the underlying philosophical mistakes which have produced these negative consequences.

Third, philosophy has a culturally formative power. Many of the particular errors which plague modern culture, and which result in numerous obstacles to the reception of the Gospel in our world today, have their origins in bad philosophy. In order to respond adequately to these challenges, it is important to engage with, take seriously and understand the intellectual roots of a culture which has grown inhospitable to evangelization. This is why a seminarian will study in philosophy not only Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas and the like, but also Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche. Studying such figures is not a luxury, but a necessity. No serious confrontation with modern culture, for the purposes of evangelizing it, can take place without this manner of engagement, done with great seriousness, and not by evasion or the dismantling of straw-man arguments.

In a different but not unrelated context, Blessed John Henry Newman observed in “The Idea of a University” that “it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them.” Believers find themselves today in troubled waters born of confusion and error. They look to priests to guide them through these waters. They look to priests to show them how to swim. If the priest is to be successful here, first he must know how to do this himself.

Pastoral Formation

Which leads us to the last pillar of formation, the one which functions basically as the capstone, and the one toward which all the other areas of formation are directed — the pastoral. Seminaries exist to provide priests who will be effective pastors to those whom they will encounter in whatever ministerial context they find themselves in. That is why, throughout priestly formation, seminaries are given numerous pastoral opportunities. Examples include visiting the sick and imprisoned, service to the poor (which can take a variety of forms), religious education and catechesis, service in parishes (both during the summertime and the academic year) and, for upper-level seminarians, administering sacraments (baptisms, marriages or funerals outside of Mass may be celebrated by seminarians already ordained to the diaconate).

All this formation — human, spiritual, intellectual and pastoral — is crucial so that the hope of the people who look upon their priest at the altar Sunday after Sunday may be well-founded: that they have been blessed with a shepherd after God’s own heart (see Jer 3:15).

Father Andrew Clyne is a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C.

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Lent

Holy Thursday Amid COVID-19

Father Andrew Clyne

March 31, 2021 7:02 pm March 31, 2021

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With Holy Thursday, we arrive at the Triduum, the most sacred time in our liturgical calendar. These days sometimes have been referred to as the “still days,” but for most…

With Holy Thursday, we arrive at the Triduum, the most sacred time in our liturgical calendar. These days sometimes have been referred to as the “still days,” but for most of us, our prior experience of them has involved very little stillness. While the Church sets aside extra time for special liturgies recalling the mystery of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection, the world generally takes very little notice. It continues on, with its hustle and bustle, with commerce and the cacophonous noise of lives simply moving without pause. And while we might be members of the Church, we are also creatures of this world. It is difficult for us to resist the inertia of that hustle and bustle that too often moves us along unthinkingly, and that makes these days just like those on the rest of the calendar: markers of time come and gone.

This continuous flow of activity impedes us from entering into the requisite stillness to which we are invited. But this year things are markedly different. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has ushered in an unanticipated and enforced interruption of activity. The hustle and bustle we simply assumed as a given, that we took to be as natural as the passing of days, is revealed now as what is truly artificial: it is, it turns out when all is stripped away, the stillness that is the constant, not the busyness.

We can resist that disclosure or we can accept it. We can choose to embrace the privileged time and silence to which God has constantly been inviting us. Or we can once more rebuff that offer by desperately searching for distraction instead, as so many will be tempted to do. This moment affords us, though, the possibility of allowing ourselves now to take the plunge into the mystery of God in ways previously unimaginable.

And it is a special challenge leveled at the Church and her members. The world does not know what to do with itself now. But we do. We have this knowledge not through our own merit, but only as those who have already received the gift of God’s largesse. We have been given God’s life and made stewards of it in order to extend it to others. That is the nature of God’s very life — a Triune exchange of giving. Our privilege as the Church is to be invited into this; but that privilege comes with a mandate to draw others — through our service — into this same life. And that summons to service is especially what Holy Thursday and the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper brings to the forefront.

The collect, or opening prayer, of Holy Thursday’s Mass reminds us that the God who has “called us to participate in this most sacred Supper,” is the same God who has entrusted to us “a sacrifice new for all eternity, the banquet of his love,” so that we might draw from so great a mystery “the fullness of charity and life.” In case the meaning of what we have been so entrusted with remains unclear, we have the most dramatic gesture of this annual celebration, which is the washing of the feet. The significance of that action for all of us is stipulated by Christ’s words in the Gospel proclaimed: “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do” (Jn 13:15).

On Holy Thursday we recall Christ’s institution of the Eucharist, the “sacrifice new for all eternity” alluded to in the Collect Prayer. What will undoubtedly make this particular Holy Thursday memorable, and regrettable for so many, is the inability to receive that very sacrament. But it is worth recalling that reception itself is not its own end. We can take Christ on our tongue repeatedly, all the while being closed to him interiorly. The meaning of our reception of Communion as a believer is to — in St. Augustine’s formulation — become the mystery we have received. Or alternatively expressed: to become like Christ, who is himself “the fullness of charity and life.”

How does one do that? The foot-washing has already shown the way. As he says, “I have given you a model to follow.” We the beneficiaries of Christ’s humble service are likewise called to the same service. Those who have received Christ’s life poured out in them are to pour out themselves for others. The pouring out of Christ for us is most fully expressed in the Eucharist. It is true that COVID-19 may deny us this Holy Thursday the privilege of receiving that Eucharist, but it does not prevent us from being the mystery we receive; that is, it does not preclude us from becoming now Eucharist for the world.

Father Andrew Clyne writes from Maryland.

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Lent

Good Friday Amid COVID-19

Father Andrew Clyne

February 19, 2021 9:36 pm February 19, 2021

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4 min read

Good Friday’s is the starkest of the Church’s liturgies: the sanctuary is divested of every encumbrance, the altar left bare, the tabernacle emptied of the Lord’s Eucharistic presence. Such starkness takes on new meaning, though, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it is not just the gathering place of the church, which is so stripped, but the social spaces of the world as well.

And not just these gathering spaces; increasingly, as time marches forward toward an indefinite future, each one of us is being stripped as well. The layers of performance we have developed for the world’s benefit are rendered pointless, as the stages for those performances are made one by one to disappear. We are left only with ourselves, as we truly are, hovering over the abyss of the nothingness from which we emerged and to which we can always return.

When confronted with this — having been unburdened of our delusions of control and power — we become acutely more aware of our need for salvation, for a savior. But the real one: not the innumerable impostors that are the stuff of advertising and politicking. We need the one who actually has the power to lift us from the abyss, because he is the same one who entered fully into our powerlessness, and unlike us, did not reject it, knowing that “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9).

The power of God’s incarnate weakness is most visibly manifest on his cross, the object of Good Friday’s veneration. We, who have not yet learned to embrace that weakness, are made to confront this instrument of torture, which is the consummate symbol of those who seek to wield power and impose control, when in truth they lack both. The enemies of Christ (which we are through sin) think they can keep him at bay. Wood, nails, hatred or even indifference should do the trick. Only they will not, and for that, thank God. Thank God that our powerlessness before him has not excluded us from being the recipients of his power made perfect in weakness. For as St. Paul reminds us, Christ “while we were still helpless…died at the appointed time for the ungodly,” and in doing so, he “proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners [he] died for us (Rom 5: 6-8).”

Beyond venerating the cross, Good Friday is defined by its silence. The silence with which the service begins, the silence in which it ends: the cry of the crucified Christ enveloped in the silence.

Increasingly our world is enveloped in silence. Not on our screens, surely, from which much noise and silliness continues to spill. But in the places of flesh and blood, in the face to face encounter, the stuff which goes to make up a human life fully realized. There, only a haunting silence.

Silence though, is an interesting phenomenon, for not all silences are in fact the same. Especially with respect to the relationship between silence and love, the type of silence involved speaks volumes.

There is the silence that manifests love’s absence: the silence which refuses to speak the necessary and life-giving truth, the silence of fear which true love casts out, the silence of conspiracy, the silence of indifference, the silence of brooding hatred, the silence that refuses to impart forgiveness. These are a type of silence, the silence which is love’s enemy.

But there is another kind of silence. Adoring and restful silence before the beloved, the contented silence that follows the mutual declaration of love, the silence that follows the exhausting sacrifices of love made visible in action.

Perhaps the last of these is most beneficial to dwell on in this moment. There are all kinds of malicious silences plaguing our world. The trajectory of our hyper-individualistic technologically oriented culture is toward the silence of indifference and neglect. The coronavirus pandemic presents the strong possibility of pushing us further in that direction.

But there is another possibility. We consciously embrace our enforced distance from the flesh and blood encounter and its silence, not out of indifference, but out of concern for others, making it a silence of love. We do whatever we can for those on the front-lines of this struggle, who have been rendered silent by their exhaustion, reduced as they are to speechlessness by their self-giving love. And we take some time to silently and delightfully bask in the wonder of other persons, most especially the person of God.

We embrace these silences of love, knowing they are made possible by God’s own loving silence. For we belong to a God left silent on the cross after saying “it is finished” (Jn 19:30), because with such love expressed, what more needed to be said?

Father Andrew Clyne writes from Maryland.

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Church Seasons and Feasts

Pentecost Amid COVID-19

Father Andrew Clyne

May 31, 2020 2:26 pm May 31, 2020

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In our theological language we speak of the Son as begotten of the Father and the Holy Spirit as “spirated,” which means to be breathed out. The Holy Spirit is…

In our theological language we speak of the Son as begotten of the Father and the Holy Spirit as “spirated,” which means to be breathed out. The Holy Spirit is breathed out by the Father and the Son, the union of their love so intimate and substantial, that he is a third fully equal and one with them.

Pentecost is our annual celebration of this same Holy Spirit breathed out on the world through the Church. The breath of God is given to the Church headed by Christ to guide her members into the fullness of life. That is why we receive this life giving breath: we receive the Spirit in order to be drawn in, and to draw others into, the union of Christ’s Body on pilgrimage to the Father.

The celebration of Pentecost this year will be unlike any other in recent memory, and it will be so because of the tragic irony that we find ourselves contending with a virulent disease whose most notable symptom is its denial of breath. This Pentecost we find ourselves longing to be filled with God’s breath in a world struggling for air.

Of course, compounding the suffering still for many is our inability to physically gather in fellowship as the Church to mark this great solemnity. However necessary this is, it should nevertheless be a source of great lament, for this separation is not the norm. We are inherently social creatures: creatures, who, though spirit, are also flesh. We are tactile, and the manifestation of our communion in spirit is most readily apparent in our intimate gestures of fleshly embrace. Our highest form of union is precisely when we huddle together in joy and thanksgiving to feast on the body of Christ and thereby to become ourselves one body in and through him.

That is the norm, and any derivation from it must necessarily constitute a diminishment, an undeniable deprivation in our lives. But the intimacy of bodies, the intimacy of the Eucharistic fellowship of Christ’s body the Church, is conducive toward one shared and singular end — namely, the perfection of intimacy in God’s life, which is simply love. Where love is absent, no matter how many persons are crammed together, regardless of how many hosts are distributed, there is no unity; there is no life.

The world before the outbreak of the coronavirus was already significantly marked by fracture. Unfortunately, in many ways the virus has only intensified that reality, deepening the fissures. Perhaps most disappointingly, the Church herself has not been immune to this developing fragmentation.

Those of us left wondering how to mark Pentecost this year amid social distancing might simply recall that in spite of our absence from public worship, the Spirit’s invitation to the Church to offer fitting worship (the capacity for this being itself pure gift) persists. This is so because “Church” is not simply showing up for an hour in a building on Sunday (or maybe a few more times a week).

Rather, the Church is realized in the graced response of her members to God’s summons for loving unity. Not the all too prevalent pseudo-unity of an imposed uniformity that ignores, denies or suppresses conflict. Rather, genuine unity, the reconciliation that takes place in truth and charity, necessarily making it a work of God. The Church is most fully herself when she cooperates with the Holy Spirit to foster that unity. In this alone does she convey genuine gratitude for the gift of God’s life, and in turn offers fitting worship expressive of that gratitude.

These weeks of quarantine have eliminated much from our lives (both temporarily and permanently), but it has not eliminated the possibilities for such worship. In fact, in a world, in a nation, even in a Church wracked by disunity, the need for the fitting worship of unity sought is needed now more than ever. Of course, that type of unity — real unity — is not something we achieve on our own. That unity so described is a reflection of, and a participation in, the unsurpassable union of God: Father, Son, and Spirit. It, therefore, requires us always to turn to God in supplication, imploring his favor. And that is why once more at Pentecost we must cry out, “Come, Holy Spirit.”

As is the case in all worship, this worship of lives seeking the communion of our brothers and sisters — which is but the most telling sign of our desired communion with God — is the meeting of the human and the divine. God initiates, but with the expectation of response. There is simply no such thing as passive worship. We are most fully active through the complete offering of ourselves, which is only our replication of the self-offering of God that has made our very lives possible. In this willingness to cooperate, in our openness to be filled with God’s breath, we, as the Church’s members, are able to in turn breathe out God’s breath to a suffocating world. Despite what we must now endure this Pentecost, the possibility for this — and the challenge to do this — still remains.

Father Andrew Clyne writes from Maryland.

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Easter

Easter Amid COVID-19

Father Andrew Clyne

April 12, 2020 3:13 pm April 12, 2020

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Holy Week culminates on Easter, the celebration of Christ’s triumph: darkness gives way to the light, silence to exultant praise, and death to eternal life. The world marked by sin…

Holy Week culminates on Easter, the celebration of Christ’s triumph: darkness gives way to the light, silence to exultant praise, and death to eternal life.

The world marked by sin and death, constriction and diminishment, the defeat of which Easter represents. Sin’s nature turns sinners in on themselves, makes their vision myopic, their desire truncated, and their relationships with God and others increasingly disabled. The world of death, which is sin’s consequence, is marked above all by decay. Sin is the spiritual material withering toward nothingness.

Easter is the very opposite of all this. Easter is characterized by expansiveness and growth. The spark of one candle giving way to an ocean of flame, the birthing of baptismal waters, the marvelous uplift of the Spirit outpoured, the nourishment of bread come down from heaven is all made possible by the inability of a rock-hewn tomb to encase the author of salvation.

But what does it mean to celebrate this expansiveness of Easter in a world shrunken by quarantine? How to celebrate life surrounded by images of death? How to proclaim the growth of God’s Kingdom within the suffocating global empire of pestilence?

These are the unavoidable questions of Easter 2020. And, if we are honest, they are questions that do not come with stock answers, but we must now navigate these uncharted waters.

May I be so bold to propose a path forward? If I can, it’s only because of the pathway that Christ has already cleared for us. It is the road that runs from fear to freedom, impatient despair to hope.

The COVID-19 pandemic already has become an event of global disruption unlike anything we have seen, since, perhaps, World War II. It’s still far too early to tell the ultimate consequences of that disruption. That uncertainty quite understandably is the source of great anxiety, even dread. To not be so affected would be, in truth, inhuman.

That constricting fear at the level of the spirit is compounded by the increasing constriction of our bodies, as the requirements of social distancing become ever more restrictive. The world remade by virus is a claustrophobia inducing vice-grip of persons.

It is true that we cannot (nor should we) stage a “break-out” from the legitimate strictures put in place on our physical movement. But we can and should break free from the chains of fear and despair, because Christ has set us free, and that is the one and only source of our hope. Not only must we do so for our own sakes, and for the sake of the Church, but for the world as well. That is how we live Easter expansiveness. We share with the world the freedom and hope given to us. We share the light of Christ until it illuminates a world plunged in darkness. We breathe out the God’s Spirit on multitudes literally suffocating for lack of air. This is what it truly looks like to be an Easter people.

But we can only give to others what we have. We cannot share the freedom and the hope that Christ makes possible if we are still consumed by fear and despair — even if these are cleverly veiled under the guise of devotion.

Part of growing in Christ’s freedom is accepting that things will inevitably change. We do not know what the world will look like — or even the practice of Church life — on the far side of the pandemic. Certainly much that once was will be lost, never to be regained. Of course, contained in the moment, is the alternate possibility that things once lost may be recovered. Regardless, there is no going back to exactly how things were; there is only the possibility of going forward.

There will be those who find this difficult to accept, and that is to be expected. There are the impatient demands for the world and the Church to get back to “normal” as quickly as possible. But that is merely the voice of fear denying the truth that we have no control over what is uncontrollable. Real freedom involves a surrender: to God, and God’s future, yet to be revealed.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich — a woman who in her own life witnessed medical and ecclesial calamities far greater than any of us have experienced — recalling the words of Christ, once wrote: “he did not say, ‘you shall not be tormented, you shall not be troubled, you shall not be grieved,’ but he said, ‘you shall not be overcome.’” God want us to pay attention to these words, she added, “for he loves and is pleased with us, and so he wishes us to love and be pleased with him and put great trust in him,” and in the end, “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well (Revelations of Divine Love, Penguin, 1998).”

Father Andrew Clyne writes from Maryland.

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Lent

Holy Saturday Amid COVID-19

Father Andrew Clyne

April 11, 2020 6:30 am April 11, 2020

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Each Holy Week, I have made it a practice to watch Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light (1963). In black-and-white, and with the starkness characteristic of most of his films, it…

Each Holy Week, I have made it a practice to watch Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light (1963). In black-and-white, and with the starkness characteristic of most of his films, it depicts one day in the life of a Lutheran pastor named Tomas Ericsson. To say that his congregation has diminished, that it has fallen on hard times, is an understatement. While a smattering of worshippers still show up for services, his church is nearly as barren as our own have become, after having been cleared out by the COVID-19 pandemic.

And more, he has lost the touch. He no longer knows how to reach his people. He struggles to speak to their fears, their anxieties and their crises of faith. He lacks the words to help them confront the globalized fear of his own day — the Cold War prospect of imminent nuclear annihilation. And so he is left with this overwhelming sense of his own helplessness and the futility of his efforts.

Perhaps amid the crisis of our day we experience that helplessness, too, and are confronted with that same sense of futility. It is certainly futile to think we can resolve the challenge that confronts us. For as comforting as it might be to believe, we do not in fact control the pandemic, we are subject to it.

The questions that Tomas is met with, like our own, are simple. What do we do in the face of the helplessness and inability to make things come around, as we would want them to? In whom do we place our faith? Or do we give up faith all together?

These questions, I think, are at the heart of Holy Saturday. It follows the death of Christ on Good Friday but comes before his triumph at Easter. In this interlude, which is really a spiritual chasm, we are confronted with apparent failure. The tomb door is still closed. The forces of sin and death still seemingly have their sway. It is the time of supreme Godforsaken-ness.

On Good Friday is the cry, “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” And as of Holy Saturday, there is no answer. Likewise, we await the answer to our own cry: “God, where are you in the midst of all this?” “God, do not abandon me, do not abandon us, to it.”

The invitation of Holy Saturday is not to retreat into simplistic piety that ignores the enormity of what we face. Empty theology and shallow culture are now exposed for what they are — smokescreens to hide from us what we would rather not confront. But if we take Holy Saturday and this time of pandemic seriously, that smokescreen and the evasion it enables will simply not do.

The entire purpose of this Holy Week — as is the case with the life of discipleship more generally — is to become ever more intimately united to the mystery of Christ’s life. The prospect of uniting ourselves with Christ’s triumph is for us no problem. Uniting ourselves, however, with his suffering is a different story. And to unite ourselves with his apparent failure, that might simply be a bridge too far.

In one of Winter Light’s more notable scenes, the church sexton Algot discusses Christ’s passion with Tomas. For years he has been plagued by enormous pain, to the point — as he cheekily observes — that he has almost certainly endured more physical suffering than that of Christ. But he brings this up only to make clear that the emphasis on Christ’s physical afflictions is misplaced. That is not his greatest trial. Instead, it is Christ’s experience of total alienation. His efforts are now seemingly pointless. His actions are met without comprehension or even the slightest understanding. He is abandoned by almost all who had previously professed their love for him. Most of all, there is that still unanswered cry of his: “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me.”

To unite ourselves with Christ on Holy Saturday is to unite ourselves with him in his helplessness and apparent futility, awaiting that answer — to really go to the end with him.

And there, what will we say? Will we still have faith?

Staring out at an empty church, having failed in almost every conceivable way, the words roll off Tomas’ lips: “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.”

What words will come forth from our lips, if we decide to truly be with Christ this Holy Saturday, amid the pandemic that surrounds us?

Father Andrew Clyne writes from Maryland.

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