good name trampled upon and destroyed.10 Up there as well are the chasms of distrust that have opened up between priests and their bishops in the last decade. This has been an unintended but very real side effect of the bishops’ efforts to implement new policies for handling allegations of sexual abuse against priests over the past decade and a half.
Closely related we would have to acknowledge the low priestly morale in some dioceses that is seldom effectively addressed; the dysfunctionality inherent in too many chancery offices; the attitude of some bishops who treat their priests as something less than collaborators in ministry, who are distant, calculating, and utilitarian, who treat their priests with an air of suspicion. I think, for example, of an archbishop (and later cardinal) who once, in rendering a legal deposition over abuse cases in his archdiocese, explained to the lawyers that the relationship of the priests to the archdiocese was not unlike that of “private contractors” to a corporation. The archbishop was obviously reaching for an analogy that the lawyers might understand, but the choice of analogies was revealing.
It has often struck me as well that referring to priests as “personnel”—although commonplace in most dioceses, as in “office of priest personnel” or “priest personnel board”—suggests that a bureaucratized, corporate mentality has come to characterize and dominate the internal cultures of our chanceries. It’s a far cry from a very different model suggested to us in the New Testament, that of the presbyters gathered with their bishop and the local community of disciples in prayer (see Acts 20:17-38).
Beyond these forms of hurt, there are the ubiquitous faults, deficiencies, and quirks that sadly pervade the internal culture of communities of priests themselves: the intrigue, backbiting, politics, oneupmanship, envy, and turf wars; the loneliness and lack of genuine fraternal interest in one another; the feeding off one another’s cynicism.
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