Too Secular A World For Priests

By Fr Henry F Mulindwa

A SECULAR priest is a man of the people, or supposedly so. He lives close to, if not within, the community and participates in the community life of the people he serves. He is a community mobilizer, a social worker a counselor for the youth, married couples, the elderly and the children. He
is accessible by pure upright saints and hard-bent sinners from all walks of life. Politicians love him if he supports their party but call him names if he challenges their vision (if they have any).

However, when he agrees with them and praises what they do, work with them for what he sees as useful for the whole community, he is not paid for his service and support and the same politicians do not threaten to quit their jobs and go to the seminary! What double standards crooked souls may have!

Some of his parishioners urge him to guide the people during election time but when he does, they barely follow his advice. At times he decides to keep away from making political statements in order to keep his community together. However, those who think they are far more enlightened accuse him of sitting behind and watch the country going to the dogs; they insist he has failed his people hence a failure in his leadership and needs urgent replacement!

 He lives in an egalitarian society – where all are equal and know what they want and go for it any way they choose. It is a society where no one wants to be told what to do or how to do it. In this egalitarian society children cannot be told what’s wrong, since that would injure their self esteem. Everything and everyone is great! Human actions are only different.

The greatest sacrosanct dogma in the relativist world is ‘I am the measure for everything’. The greatest commandment is, “Thou shall go for property, pleasure and power.” My actions are informed not by religious faith or the teaching of the gospel, but by my own experiences, my own knowledge, my aspirations and desires and my own selected influences from particular persons, or from the media.

The congregation wants the priest to say only what people want to hear. If he uses the gospel to challenge them and himself too of course, chances are that some members of the congregation will leave the Church. I remember that funeral when a woman demanded from the priest to look at the prayers he was going to say at her mother’s funeral. She did not want a ‘full Mass’, but particular prayers and songs chosen by her.

While the original sin of communism was the glorification of the party and the identification with the state, the original sin of capitalism is the idolization of money, animated by the spirit of relativism. One sees everything only according to one’s own judgment. It is in this kind of society that the secular priest works. For the secular society God is dead and buried in empty churches, as Nietzsche once  intimated.

The new shrines are football stadia, hotels, banks, theatres, malls, universities and big schools, Parliament and State House. Social services like medical care, education that the churches are known to offer, can be provided by the state and private individual, with a big price tag.

 Society seems so independent parallel to the Commandments of God. Laws of the land, enforced by police are apparently enough to transform society into a cohesive entity; one of liberty, fraternity and equality. You do not do the good thing because it is good, but because you want to keep your freedom from others. Something is good as long as one gains money, pleasure and/or power. ‘I am my own idol’, I am the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End.

The priest has little if any job in such environment, where people want to interpret scriptures their own way. Communists dethroned God and replaced Him with the state; removed religion and put the communist party; threw away ecclesial canons for communist manifestos; their leadership was hierarchical and infallible [Hans Kung]. It was a mere change of guards, not a fundamental revolution. All reality could be explained by economics, while capitalists thought communists were fools and they tirelessly tasseled against them until communism fell. But, they have not faired any better either.

Capitalists are a god answerable to none but themselves. Might is right, for them. The freedom from God that we are falsely winning does not seem to answer all our fundamental questions, unfortunately. The spread of “democracy” means more power for the rich as they get more access to more resources.

The voice of the secular priest can hardly be heard in the secular society where there are so many voices amplified by science and technology through the mass media. Minds of young people are sickened as they get bombarded by irresistible advertisements that are done by professional seducers. Even most sworn Christians do not live their lives according to their Christian teaching.

 One wonders whether a secular priest can carry out the mission of Christ in such hostile environment where atheists are free not to say prayers in public! Where a Nativity movie cannot be screened because it is offensive to atheists, who for whatever reasons come for the Nativity Festival, after all, because it will be offensive to non-Christians!

Where slogans say, ‘freedom for all’ and ‘free exchange of ideas’, but while Darwinism is rightly taught in schools, the Creation story is taboo! Non-religious people get what they want and those who believe in God come out empty handed! Such is the capitalist, secular and relativistic society in which a priest serves!

The author is a priest of the Diocese of Masaka in Uganda. He is currently on advanced studies in Washington, USA. hfmul@yahoo.com