This article is an adaptation of the first part of Fr. Antonio López’s article, “Friends of the Bridegroom: Reflections on Priestly Fatherhood in Light of Contemporary Challenges,” which was published in Communio: International Catholic Review (no. 45 [Summer 2018]: 250–92). It is published here with permission.
The current anthropological and theological crisis at the root of the clerical abuse of power and the sexual abuse of minors by ordained ministers bears on at least these three fronts: the nature of power; the meaning of love as gift of self to others; and the bodily extension of God’s redemptive love in history. Given that Christ is both man’s archetype (Rom 5:14) and the eternal high priest (Heb 7:23–27), these three dimensions of priestly existence find their meaning only in Christ. In him, we discover that they express the filial, nuptial, and paternal dimensions of love. The power a priest enjoys is a participation in the filial dimension of Christ’s love. His gift of self for the Church is nuptial because the priest is the friend of the Bridegroom and is called to be “the living image of Jesus Christ, the Spouse of the Church.”[1] His love is paternal and merciful insofar as, through the sacrament of ordination, the priest participates in God’s merciful, fruitful, and ever-patient fatherhood.
The Call and Authority of the Ordained Priesthood
Christ called the apostles to be with him (Συγκαλεσάμενος, Lk 9:1) and to participate in his own authority (ἐξουσίαν, Mt 10:1). Between the vocation to the priesthood and the power (δύναμιν, Lk 9:1) it confers, there exists an intrinsic relation that surpasses a legal entrustment of the capacity to perform certain rhetorical, administrative, and charitable tasks. This crucial bond between power and vocation will pass unnoticed if, as is common today, “vocation”—from the Latin vocare, to call—is taken simply to mean either “the strong feeling of suitability for a particular occupation” or the “specific trade or profession” for which one has an aptitude or training. Such a subjectivistic perception of vocation yields the belief that one’s authority in a certain field depends either on the fact that one’s skills surpass those of others or that one’s position grants the contractual or political capacity to have others at one’s disposal. Power, on this reading, would be nothing but a neutral capacity to order peoples and things, and its goodness would depend on the integrity of its wielder and the nobility of his purpose. This, of course, presupposes that power is the exercise of a human freedom that is not intrinsically attracted to the good, and that this power designs man’s countenance and forges his destiny by enacting available possibilities.[2] Within such a subjective anthropology, both vocation and power begin and end with oneself and concern mostly what one can do.[3] Were we to assume this account, we would understand the priest as someone who felt called to and relatively gifted for the tasks to which holy orders gave him access after he passed muster with those in charge of his priestly formation. The nature of his actions and his gender would have little to do with the calling and authority with which ordination invests him. Christ’s calling of the apostles, instead, is a radically different event. It begins not with man and his self-perception but with God’s gracious call, which always takes into account the priest’s humanity. Rather than a mere starting point, vocation is the permanent source of the form of priestly life and authority. Let us then look at the mystery of this calling and, in its light, discover the true meaning of power.
Christ calls the men he wants (Mk 3:13), and this vocation remains for those chosen a life-long, dramatic relation of love with Christ that encompasses all of their existence. As every priest knows, the reason for Christ’s selection is not the capacities the chosen ones may have; nor is it an utterly random divine will. Instead, the calling to the priesthood—as with every other divine vocation—is a participation in the eternal vocation and election of Jesus Christ himself: “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Eph 1:4). Christ’s own calling is not only to be the one in whom, through whom, and for whom everything is created (Col 1:16). He is also the sent one (Jn 5:36–38) for whom a body was prepared (Hb 10:5) so that through his life and sacrificial love he could witness to the Father’s love for mankind: “The Father himself loves (φιλεῖ) you, because you have loved (πεφιλήκατε) me and have believed that I came from the Father” (Jn 16:27).[4] For the human being whose original sin was a profound rejection of God’s fatherhood and goodness, nothing is more important or delightful than to learn that the Father, whose countenance no one except Christ has seen, loves him.[5] Through Christ’s transfiguring revelation of the Father’s love, men’s destiny “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Eph 1:4–5) is accomplished.
It is not that [Christ] simply obeys because he is powerful. More radically, Christ reveals power to be obedience.
If we grasp that the priestly vocation is a participation in Christ’s eternal calling and specific mission in history, then it becomes possible also to see Christ’s election as the revelation of God’s omnipotence. Rather than the exercise of a random and absolute will, divine power is the communication of God’s own being to another person.[6] In fact, because “person is what is most perfect in nature,” to fully communicate one’s being—inside and outside God—is to posit another person and to share with him all that one is.[7] The Father is God as always having given himself to the Son and the Spirit without either remainder or loss of self. Albeit with infinite difference, there exists a similarity between the Father’s eternal begetting of the Son with whom he breathes the Spirit and the creation and redemption of man. God calls man out of nothing; he lets him be and affirms his goodness. He communicates his simple and perfect being to what he is not so that the human person, apex of creation, can participate in his tri-personal life, that is, live in it and respond to God with filial love.[8]
Along with the dimension of divine power just mentioned—the communication of being that posits another person and thus affirms his goodness—there is another important characteristic revealed by Christ’s incarnation and obedience to the Father unto death.[9] Divine power is gratuitous. Gratuity here does not mean that God contemplated the possibility of being simply for himself but decided against it. To affirm this would be to project into God the creaturely distinctions between being and nothing, nature and freedom, as well as fallen man’s experience of genuine love that teaches him to convert from self-enclosure to fruitful union with the beloved. Gratuity, instead, is the power in which, by nature, one person wants the other two to be, wants to be himself in the other two, and wants the other two to be themselves in him.[10] Gratuity regards utter joy in the divine other’s being both other and equal to oneself, in one’s own being in and with the other, and in sharing with another one’s eternally being loved by the beloved.[11] This gratuity, which makes creation and redemption possible, exists eternally only as paternal, filial, and spirit-ual love. In brief, gratuity is divine love as tri-personal unity that lets the other be and does not grasp. In light of the Trinity, we can understand power as the self-communication that posits another person with whom one shares life and from whom one desires, awaits, and welcomes a gratuitous response.[12]
Precisely because divine power is the affirmation of another to whom one has given all of oneself and who responds with equal love, the Son’s revelation of the Father’s love within man’s sinful history cannot but take the form of obedience unto death (Phil 2:8). It is not that he simply obeys because he is powerful. More radically, Christ reveals power to be obedience.[13] Rather than to violently bend oneself to an extrinsic will or positive law, to obey is to depend lovingly on the Father. This dependence confronts man’s rejection of both himself and God with the affirmation of the Father’s goodness, which alone fulfills man’s existence and is capable of redeeming him. Thus, Christ’s power, in the form of obedience and service, is simultaneously the gratuitous, life-giving, and wonder-filled affirmation of the good of the Father, of mankind, and of creation. Every genuine form of human power is a participation in and expression of this filial affirmation.
In order to redeem fallen mankind, Christ had to receive and respond to the Father’s love as a human being. In doing so, he rejected every false form of power: At the beginning of his public life, he contested Satan’s claim to be the ultimate possessor of the kingdoms and glory and rejected his offer to share them with Christ if he just adored him (Mt 4:8–10). He rejected Peter’s all-too-human proposal that he fulfill the Father’s plan not through the folly of the Cross but by another more efficacious and less embarrassing strategy (Mt 16:21–22). He tirelessly contested the lie in man so that he may embrace the truth (Jn 6:67; Jn 8:21-59). He offered himself as the sacrificial lamb that meekly endured man’s punishment, his disciples’ betrayals (Lk 22:48), and, more deeply, the Father’s silence (Mt 27:46; Lk 23:46). Having shown himself to be the true servant (Phil 2:7; Is 52:13–53:12), after the Resurrection he receives “all authority (πᾶσα ἐξουσία) in heaven and on earth” (Mt 28:18) and makes his disciples participants in his mission to redeem mankind.[14] In so doing, he draws them into the power of his very being (ἐξ-ουσία): power to judge and thus to bind or set free (Mt 18:18); to consecrate the eucharistic species (Lk 22:19); to preach the word (Mt 28:19); and to govern people, that is, to guide them to the Father.
Lest we think the calling to the priesthood is a mechanical passing on of power, we should recall that Christ entrusted Peter with the responsibility of governing the Church (Mt 16:18; Jn 1:42) only after Peter confessed three times his love for Christ (Jn 21:15–19). By requesting this confession of love and entrusting to Peter the great task of tending his sheep, Christ taught him that to exercise his power is to communicate to them the grace he received, that is, the grace of believing in Christ’s love for him. Power is not about what one can do or give but is, as we saw, the communication of God’s life-giving love (Acts 3:6). Only the one who truly believes in the love that Christ is—that is, only the one who entrusts himself to Christ and recognizes him as the very heart of the Father—can be the “good and faithful servant” (Mt 25:23) dwelling in this love and thus living for Christ. Having being confirmed, Peter followed Christ to a death similar to his and thus witnessed to Christ’s love to the end.[15]
In light of his dialogue with Peter, we see that Christ’s bestowal of his own authority—the power to communicate divine life—requires the priest to enter into Christ’s unconditional obedience to the Father and into his love for the Church. The priest is therefore the sacramental representation of Christ—he acts in persona Christi capitis—and is called to live this mission within a twofold relation: to Christ, to whom he is ontologically configured and in whom, for whom, and with whom he is; and to the Marian Church, who ordained him and whom he serves. This double referentiality is a permanent reminder to him and to the Church that he is not Christ. His unconditional service to Christ in this twofold relation is what makes priestly existence so beautiful and utterly demanding.
Human sinfulness makes the challenge to live the sacramental representation of Christ very difficult because it obfuscates the fundamental truth that God is a genuine giver and, with the gift of his own being, he invites man to participate in the gift he is by allowing him to give further. God lets man participate in his own power precisely because he wants a free, gratuitous, and creative response from him. This is why man’s power is not for him to go about his own little things but to express God’s greatness by informing the world in his light and reciprocating his love. Original sin can make one think that being a finite but real origin means also being the ultimate origin of what one gives. From this point of view, power is the most alluring human temptation: its possession and exercise make one believe that one is God, the beginning without beginning, and hence immortal. The greater one’s power, the greater the temptation to think oneself its ultimate source and the uglier its corruption. Power to give God and its consequent power over souls, which belong to the ordained ministry, are by far the greatest powers man knows. The priest’s sinful forgetfulness that his power is being given to him, that it is filial, makes him believe that he is the ultimate origin and destiny of people’s lives. Clericalism is in this light the most radical distortion of power, because it is the use of God and his people to affirm oneself. Concerning the way a priest relates to everything, the instantiations of this corruption of priestly power are manifold: restless activism; verbosity in the confessional; the aestheticism of pompous liturgies; self-referential spiritual direction; soulless and mechanical prayers; self-centered preaching; uncertain guidance of people; self-aggrandizing administration; the avoidance and management of human relations through bureaucratic procedures; the use of human weakness and suffering to impose oneself and one’s ideas on the faithful; and, most hideously, the abuse of the innocent and the young to exercise through them a denial of God. Men called to the priesthood are called to retrieve the beauty of a life of dependence on and obedience to Christ, finding solace in the fact that Christ, who learned obedience through suffering (Heb 5:8), will enable them to enter into the real nature of his own power. They will then communicate in an ever-truer way the goodness of the Father and of all that he has created, thus helping to lead everything back to him.
One is to be mindful that when dealing with the priesthood the very nature of the Church is also at stake since she is apostolic in nature and it is the mystery of the Eucharist that makes the Church. Following the Protestant Reformation, however, a very different view of the relation between the faithful and apostolic office became current. As Balthasar remarks, for the Christian Churches “the relation between the priest and the faithful is no longer based on apostolic succession and thus on the structure of the apostolic Church, but rather the common priesthood of all believers.”[16] In this view, both the Church’s sacramentality and the priest’s capacity to sacramentally represent Christ vanish.; the common priesthood of the faithful absorbs the sacramental priesthood.[17] Just as the Church is no longer seen as the Bride of Christ but as a congregation of worshipers who freely determine how they wish to live their faith, so the priest becomes a male or female member elected by the congregation with the twofold task of skillfully administering the congregation’s affairs and of preaching so as to occasion God’s eventful occurrence. Not surprisingly, this ecclesiology is of a piece with the subjective reduction of vocation and power discussed earlier. As such, it places the emphasis on one’s own competencies and activity and thus cannot but foster the clericalism one rightly seeks to correct. This is why, regardless of how poorly it may be lived, it is imperative not to lose sight of the sacramental nature of priesthood. Rather than accept an ecclesiology and sacramentality that subjectivize the priestly office—by, for example, disseminating priestly responsibilities through the empowerment of some lay faithful—one must retrieve the nature of the ordained priesthood and educate to genuine priestly fatherhood the men God calls to it.
Priestly fatherhood, if approached christologically, appears then as the permanence in history of God’s merciful and nuptial love for his people. God wishes to transfigure creation by affirming its goodness, and he extends this affirmation—his omnipotent power—through those men he calls to be friends of Christ, the Bridegroom. Ordination is a call to live one’s loving dependence on Christ and the service of the Church with the awareness of one’s own sinfulness and of the ever-greater divine mercy that Christ constantly bestows on his friends, who receive with this mercy also his being and filial authority. Priests’ awareness of their own sinfulness and of Christ’s mercy for everyone should yield a life lived as entreaty that the vocation they received and accepted may be fulfilled. This vocation, understood as God’s love given ever anew, is the light with which God illumines the darkness of man’s sin. If genuine, priests’ permanent entreaty will deepen a threefold wound in their souls that will spur them to live their mission until the very end, as Peter did (Jn 21:18). They will know and suffer ever more deeply the wound of faith, because people live and die without knowing Christ (Lk 18:8); the wound of hope, because they do not realize the Father’s faithful and patient presence; and the wound of charity, because they do not live for him “who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:15). Certain of Christ’s love for them and of the Father’s goodness, they will experience no anxiety to resolve this dramatic condition. They will ask to be able to offer their very existence so that, through them, God may continue to bring more men and women to the fulfillment of the eternal promise for which he has predestined us: to be his sons through Jesus Christ to the praise of his glorious grace.
[1] John Paul II, Pastores dabo vobis, no. 22.
[2] See Romano Guardini, “Power and Responsibility: A Course of Action for the New Age,” in End of the Modern World, trans. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen (Wilmington, DE: ISI, 1998), 117–20; Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 45–69; George Grant, “The Triumph of the Will,” in Collected Works of George Grant, vol. 4, 1970–1988, ed. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 726–35. David C. Schindler, Freedom From Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 264–69.
[3] Vocation is thus identified with a choice that has to be made at a certain point and that, once embraced, needs only to be carried out—unless, of course, a change of circumstances or feelings suggest moving in a different direction. For an alternative view, see, Benedict XVI, Called to Holiness: On Love, Vocation, and Formation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017).
[4] This, of course, does not mean that creation and redemption are part of God’s eternal being—as if God needed to create and be involved in history to make or to perfect himself. The creation and redemption of the world is an expression of God’s gratuitous, free and kenotic love that is completely harmonious with his own triune being. See Michael Sharkey (ed.), International Theological Commission: Texts and Documents 1969–1985 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 211–12.
[5] For an account of original sin as a rejection of God’s fatherhood, see my Gift and the Unity of Being (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 135–47.
[6] Aquinas rightly defines God’s power as “the communication of his own likeness to other things” (De potentia Dei, q. 1, a. 1, co.). Further down he writes, “We speak of power (potentia) in relation to act. . . . Now God is act both pure and primary, wherefore it is most befitting to him to act and communicate (diffundere) his likeness (similitudinem) to other things: and consequently, active power is most becoming to him: since power is called active forasmuch as it is a principle of action” (De potentia Dei, q. 2, a. 1, co.). God’s power is to extend his being, what is most proper to him, both in himself and to what he is not. This communication of his being regards therefore both his generative power and his creative power.
[7]Aquinas, ST I, q. 29, a. 3, co. As Richard of St. Victor put it, in God’s supreme simplicity “being is identical to loving,” and therefore “their persons will be identical to their love” (De Trinitate 5.20).
[8] Thus, the definition of omnipotence is not the simple application of the classic axiom bonum est diffusivum sui to God. The self-diffusiveness of the good (bonum) does not suffice to account for the goodness of otherness because, as Greek thought has shown, the self-diffusiveness of the first principle not onlyrequires that what comes from the source be less than it in order to preserve the source’s perfection; it also understands union with the origin as the absorption of the many in the one. See, for example, Plotinus, Enneads 5.3.14–15 and 5.4.1–2. If the communication of being were just self-diffusiveness, then it would only be good for the divine being to be. Nevertheless, the perception of divine power as the communication of self in another—the Father in the Son and both in the Spirit; and God in what he is not, the created human being—is also the wonderful fulfillment and sublation of the goodness of God perceived by the Greek philosophers, since it confirms the goodness of otherness by securing the incommunicability of the source through its total sharing.
[9] St. Paul hinted at this mystery when he described the spirit of Christ to be such that he “did not count equality with God (ἴσα θεῷ) a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν), taking the form of a servant (μορφὴν δούλου λαβών)” (Phil 2:6–7).
[10] As Augustine wrote about the trinitarian persons: “Both are in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one” (De Trinitate 6.10.12). See, Aquinas, ST I, q. 37, a. 1, ad. 3.
[11] For a more detailed account of gratuity, see my Gift and the Unity of Being, 241–58.
[12] To affirm this is not to presume that God’s unity is moral. Ratzinger clarifies, “The Father and the Son do not become one in such a way that they dissolve into each other. They remain distinct from each other, since love has its basis in a ‘vis-à-vis’ that is not abolished. If each remains his own self, and they do not abrogate each other’s existence, then . . . their unity must be in the fruitfulness in which each one gives himself and in which each one is himself. They are one in virtue of the fact that their love is fruitful, that it goes beyond them. In the third Person in whom they give themselves to each other, in the Gift, they are themselves, and they are one.” Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 35. Unity in God is the eternal and perichoretic communion of persons. Thus, it is not the case that the Father first possesses the divine being and then begets the Son—as Arius thought. God is his eternal begetting. Nor is it that the eternal existence of the other two persons makes the two processions spurious—as Sabellius contended. The Father is always already with the other two persons.
[13] Undoubtedly, this does not suggest that the trinitarian relations are to be thought in terms of obedience, since this would require that there be several wills in God. Rather, we mean that the relation of love among the divine persons is one in which a dialogue takes place: the Father speaks the Word and breathes it in the Spirit; the Word says God, himself, and all of creation in it; and the Spirit witnesses to its depth and searches it. See Michael Waldstein, “The Analogy of Mission and Obedience: A Central Point in the Relation Between Theologia and Oikonomia in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on John,” in Reading John with St. Thomas Aquinas: Theological Exegesis and Speculative Theology, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 92–112.
[14] It is after the Resurrection and the reception of the Holy Spirit that it becomes clear that Christ “is the splendor of (the Father’s) glory and the expression of his being” and that he “bears everything (τὰ πάντα) by the power of his word” (Heb 1:3). Christ’s power is divine: he commands and what he says exists (Ps 33:9; Gn 1:3, 6, 9ff). Albert Vanhoye, A Different Priest: The Epistle to the Hebrews, trans. Leo Arnold (Miami, FL: Convivium Press, 2011), 59–69.
[15] For the martyriological dimension of the Petrine ministry, see Joseph Ratzinger, “The Primacy of the Pope and the Unity of the People of God,” Communio: International Catholic Review 41 (Spring 2014): 112–28.
[16] Hans Urs von Balthasar, “How Weighty Is the Argument From ‘Uninterrupted Tradition’ to Justify the Male Priesthood?,” Communio: International Catholic Review 23 (Spring 1996): 185–98, at 188.
[17] Cf. Lumen gentium, 1; Henri de Lubac, The Splendor of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 84–160.
