A priest's obligation is to be holy, so prayer is a necessity!

With recommendations for spiritual reading!

I remember hearing from a priest that he was told in seminary never to allow any parish matter to interfere with his “day off” — and therefore he would not be accepting our invitation to dinner.

I remember thinking that all the hard-working family men I know don’t have a “day off.” They work hard all week to support their families, and on Saturdays they are up a ladder cleaning gutters or up to their elbows fixing plumbing. Sundays they are helping their wives get the kids out the door and desperately hoping to “watch a football game” as my husband calls it — AKA snatching a nap — before the dinner madness with little kids starts up and somehow Monday morning is held at bay while the bedtime routine is wrangled.

It’s fine if he didn’t want to come to dinner… I just thought the warning about his special day was an interesting approach to his vocation.

A friend recently passed along to me a note from a priest that included this passage: “Our diocese is currently undergoing a reorganization, and it is filled with undefined slogans. One, pertaining to priest, is that they should be "happy, healthy, and holy." I think they have it backward. Holy should come first (I actually don't think they know what those words mean).”

He goes on to quote Dom Eugene Boylan to the effect that a priest "...is ordained to exercise perfection. He must be holy before ordination. His obligation as a priest is to be holy..."

The letter begins thus:

I've been reading Dom Eugene Boylan's The Priest's Way to God [affiliate link], and I've concluded that priests today are not taught to pray properly in seminary. I had a bit of an advantage. For years, I used to haunt bookstores of almost any kind. One Saturday morning, I got to one of my favorite stores and headed to the back (where the used books were. I found a treasure trove from the old Image Books line, and from TAN. I was able to acquire all of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and some others. One book I found, with which I was not familiar at the time, was Dom Vital Lehodey's The Ways of Mental Prayer [affiliate link]. When I read it, I finally began to learn to pray properly. This type of thing does not seem to be taught in seminaries any longer (it wasn't when I was in seminary). We also didn't get much in the way of spirituality. Fortunately, I had read Tanquerey's The Spiritual Life [affiliate link]. These are books to which I continue to return.

This priest is close to retirement age: note that he didn’t receive the formation he now considers paramount, back in his day.

In Louis Bouyer’s Memoirs (affiliate link), that theologian remembers his novitiate for the Oratory in the mid-20th century as a hodgepodge affair, where the men didn’t even say the Divine Office and were bustled about in an undisciplined way. “But I had there a first view of the inconceivable negligence with which the Catholic Church even at that period could prepare (?) for their religious life or their ministry those who had or seemed to have some vocation to it.” (p. 160)

Perhaps in some eras seminarians are taught to pray; it’s possible that it’s the exception. Yet everything hinges on their prayer! Without it, how can they be holy, much less hope to teach their people to pray? What is the Christian life without prayer?

In our day, however negligent things were before, we are experiencing a truly deteriorating situation regarding the interior life. Catholicism in normal parish life has been taken over by motivational, therapeutic material, whether in homilies, conferences, retreats, or spiritual aids, that harms everyone and is constantly degrading in quality. We are living in a Matthew Kelly-ized, Dynamic Catholic™️ world.

The old books, such as the ones the letter-writer mentions, either explicitly or implicitly work on the premise hitherto known and shared as a common patrimony, that everything created follows the path of purgation, illumination, and union -- that there is no other way to experience life. Time is the mode that takes us through this constant and universal pattern, built into the hierarchy of being.

Some old books take the premise so implicitly that, now that it's forgotten, it's hard to understand their themes or to grasp what they are pointing to; I think Boylan's Difficulties in Mental Prayer is this way; he only briefly touches on purgation from sin and sinful habits needed to progress, somewhere in the middle of the otherwise very helpful book.

Some of the spiritual classics make the three-fold Way so explicit or emphasize it so much that we forget that we can never, in this life, leave it behind; I think The Interior Castle is this way. Yes, the person experiencing inner conversion does have a definitive purgation, after which he begins the ascent. Nevertheless, the pattern continues to some degree for as long as the person lives. My own experience is that St. Teresa gives the impression that one moves from one state to the other more or less permanently, which is confusing and creates the tendency in the beginner to spend all his time wondering where on the path he is, rather than just praying and accepting that even the greatest, most grace-filled mystic experiences the pattern every day and even every hour -- that the need for purgation never stops.

And then there is the problem that general education is in such a sorry state, brought about, sadly, by the Church's abandonment of her duties and her embrace of the disposable, "latest bright idea" model of formation. Other than initiatives arising from the laity in the classical, great books tradition, Catholic education follows the progressive, secular model, which of course spirals ever downwards, leaving the student less and less able to tackle difficult and sophisticated works, or even works with slightly demanding vocabulary and syntax.

I wonder if the reading comprehension of the average seminarian would be up to the classic spiritual works. I think they would seem boring and impenetrable. (Ironically, if the seminarian prayed his Office attentively, he'd get a lot of the necessary formation. Instead, the current fashion is to pile up materials provided by professional motivators, leaving little time for absorbing such resources, divinely designed for every mind and spiritual state.)

I pity priests today because they are the entry point for all the burdensome and content-free programs and processes our religion industry can invent, leaving no room for just living the faith. You can't monetize those old books, so they have been long discarded. 

I was struck by the Office reading on the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from St. Ignatius of Antioch: "Our task is not one of producing persuasive propaganda"! How I wish our bishops would take this to heart! Every Christian has to accept that the encounter with God is interior, very private, very little affirmation of any sort...

I haven’t read the books mentioned in the priest’s letter, the ones he found so helpful.

But here I will give a short list of my own — indispensable books on prayer that take into account the universal three-fold pattern or Way, through which every pilgrim here on earth must travel, and that don’t contain an iota of emotionalism:

Every priest needs to read The Soul of the Apostolate by Jean-Baptiste Chautard (affiliate link). The author shows that a priest will lose his faith and his soul if he abandons his conversation with God and encourages him to nourish his interior life. I heartily recommend it.

The most helpful one I have found to describe the nature of prayer, the one that offers the wisdom of the spiritual masters combined with a sense of the intellectual variety of readers, is The Spiritual Life and Prayer: According to Scripture and Monastic Tradition by Mother Cécile Bruyerè OSB (affiliate link). The edition available is just a facsimile; it's not very nicely done and I would love to see a proper re-publishing of this work.

Mother Bruyerè, addressing her nuns yet fruitfully for the lay person as well, makes the three-fold pattern explicit. She explains how the moral life is the good life. We just can't begin to pray when we are weighted down in our conscience. The old masters take it for granted that the reader understands the concept of conscience and the means of alleviating mortal sin, of course, and also venial sin. I don't think we can take that for granted any more. Even Confession is presented as a therapeutic means rather than a sacrament with its own power to heal the soul.

I recommend Eugene Boylan’s Difficulties in Mental Prayer (affiliate link). He has a very understanding way of helping the reader over the obstacles to prayer.

I wrote more about spiritual reading here, on my other blog.