A Paper to the Federation of Catholic Priests

Let me begin by talking about what sacrificial priesthood is NOT. I spent some time last weekend with a priest from the north of England – let’s call him Fr Edward. He works on his own ministering to a large, sprawling parish comprising mainly social housing. He told me he couldn’t remember the last time he had a day off and he took only 10 days holiday with no Sunday at all last year. Whenever he plans some time off invariably a funeral director rings up and, well, someone’s got to bury the dead haven’t they?  Fr Edward is not just parish priest. He’s also parish caretaker, parish secretary, parish pilgrimage organiser, chair of the PCC, chair of the school governors and endless other things. He says the parish just doesn’t have people with the skills or confidence to support him. He visits ceaselessly, he does all the home communions himself, he takes immense care of his small congregation who love him dearly, he sits on the committees of endless community organisations, he ensures the Office is said publicly three times a day, he rises early, he goes to bed late, he can’t remember the last time he did any proper reading because there just isn’t time. He is worn out.

I suspect a lot of you here will see yourselves in that portrait. It is the archetypal model of the heroic hard-working Anglo-catholic priest, the model of sacrificial priesthood. Or is it? What are the actual results of that kind of ministry? The immediate one is that Fr Edward is profoundly run down and I would say close to collapse. His parish is very happy, but how effective is his ministry in the longer term? The style of priesthood I have just described is often associated with the Company of Mission Priests – we like to see ourselves as non-stop, hardworking priests, constantly tramping the streets of our parishes, working every hour God sends. In the short run it’s very effective. But Fr Buik and I could run through lists of parishes run like that which, when they have passed out of the care of the Company, have collapsed. Many are closed. Because that style of ministry is entirely priest-centred. It doesn’t encourage the skills of the laity at all, and so by definition it is not sustainable. As soon as a priest arrives who can’t or won’t work in that kind of way, it collapses.

That’s one defective model of sacrificial priesthood. And here’s another. We are looking to a very differently structured church in the future. It is becoming increasingly clear to everyone that if the Church of England pushes ahead with moves to consecrate women, as inevitably it will, the only workable provision for those of us who cannot in conscience accept that move is an alternative structure or a free province. One objection often raised is a practical one – in a separate structure how can we sustain a stipendiary priesthood given that so many of our parishes are inner-urban and deprived? And whenever that objection is raised, some priest or Bishop will raise themselves to their full height and say, ‘These young priests need to rediscover what sacrificial priesthood is all about!’ Now you can be absolutely sure that the priest or Bishop who says that is either retired or has their pension arrangements all nicely sorted out. And they’ll be saying it to clergy for whom the new structures threaten their livelihood, their homes and the future of their families. It is an abuse to use the language of sacrificial priesthood to justify the financial hardship of priests and their families.

Two things then that sacrificial priesthood is not. The mistake that they have both made is to use the word ‘sacrifice’ in a simplistic and non-theological way. In this sense sacrifice is simply about going without something, choosing voluntarily to manage without some luxury or comfort or putting up with hardship of one’s own choice. ‘I’m going to sacrifice my holiday this year and paint the flat.’ Or, ‘I’m going to sacrifice my daily chocolate bar to lose some weight.’ But in theological terms the idea of sacrifice is much more complex. It is also a feature of almost every religion throughout history.

Properly understood sacrifice isn’t about doing without something at all. It comes from two Latin words – sacrum and facere – and so it means to make holy. The French theologian Eugene Masure defines it neatly and for all religions in his book, ‘Le Sacrifice du Chef.’ ‘When man offers sacrifice his purpose is to make a profane object divine, so as to unite himself with the Divinity itself by subsequent communion with the victim.’ He goes on to outline four actions that are common to all sacrifice. First there is the act of immolation in which the worshipper renounces some personal possession – an animal or some crops or in the case of the dreaded Moloch cult, a child. Then second there is the act of oblation. The object is offered to the divinity. Then third the object must in some way be made acceptable to the Divinity. For example in Roman religion this entailed immensely complex ritual presided over by a priest who didn’t actually make the sacrifice but was there to ensure that the rules were kept. Only if accepted by the divinity can the object be said to be sacred, and if it is not sacred then the sacrifice will obviously be useless. And the fourth and final stage is communion in which the worshipper reclaims the object which is now charged with divine acceptance. The victim of the sacrifice thus becomes a sign of the alliance between the human being and the god. Masure makes great play of the importance of that word ‘sign’. The victim of the sacrifice is what he calls a true symbol in which a whole series of spiritual realities is bodied forth.

A marvellous example of this, and one which as we shall later see is surprisingly relevant to our discussion, is the Jewish feast if Yom Kippur. During the recent series of Walsingham lectures on the theme of Sacred Space we were lucky enough to hear a wonderful tour-de-force by the Old Testament theologian Margaret Barker, an expert on the Temple and especially on the worship of the Temple prior to the Josian reforms – reforms which she says make the European Reformation look like a tea party. Yom Kippur is the most important feast of the Jewish year, the Feast of Atonement. The worshippers would gather in the Temple in Jerusalem. The heart of the Temple was the Holy of Holies, a small walled chamber containing a thick curtain behind which was the Altar of Sacrifice. Surrounding the Holy of Holies was a huge walled courtyard. The Holy of Holies is the place where Yahweh dwells. The courtyard, filled for the feast with people, represents the whole of creation. At Yom Kippur an animal was taken into the Holy of Holies and ritually killed as an offering to Yahweh. In the act of killing the unblemished animal was made holy as Yahweh accepted the offering. Once the animal had been killed the blood was collected up and carried by the priest out of the Holy of Holies into the outer courtyard of the Temple. He would then sprinkle the blood of the Sacrifice over the people and also smear it over the walls of the temple. In this way not only the chosen people but also the whole of creation would be made holy through the sign of God’s presence which is the sacrificed animal. What a do that must have been. Makes even SOM look a bit tame!

One of the big distinctive features of the early church is that the Christians did not offer sacrifices to their God. We hear in Acts that the church in Jerusalem continued to attend the worship of the Temple in the years after the Ascension, so its probable that they attended sacrifices there. But there is no evidence of them offering sacrifices in their own worship, and before very long at all, perhaps even before the destruction of the Temple, the Christians have divorced themselves from Jewish worship and indeed from sacrificial worship. That makes the Christians really distinctive. The Jews offered sacrifice, the Greeks, the Romans, everyone was at it. Why not the Christians? As we know from the Letter to the Hebrews, the answer lies on the Hill of Calvary. From very early indeed the Christians were arguing with tremendous eloquence that this sacrifice fulfilled all others. It made other sacrifices pointless. The worship of the Temple is superseded in the person of Christ. In that sacrifice there was immolation – Christ renounced a personal possession which was his own life. There was oblation – the Son offered his life upon the cross. He went there of his own free will, accepting in Gethsemane that this was what he had to do, this was the Father’s will. The Father accepted the offering as worthy, something which is proven at the resurrection and Ascension when the Son is accorded that glory which he was entitled to from the first but did not in his earthly life enjoy. It is a classic sacrifice following Masure’s model perfectly. But since it is the Sacrifice of God for God, it puts an end to all other sacrifice. It is the perfect sacrifice which makes all others insignificant.

But I have left out the last of Masure’s four features of Sacrifice. How do we reclaim the object that has been sacrificed? How does it become ours so effecting a union between us and the Divine? The answer is of course the Eucharist. We have the gift of a sacramental communion. That’s why the early Christians didn’t offer animal sacrifice. They had the Eucharist instead. In the Eucharist we offer up our gifts of bread and wine. Now those things have no value, no power of their own right to please God. So God transforms them, he changes them into the body and blood of his Son. The bread and wine is sacrificed – it is made holy, it becomes the only thing that can please God which is his Son. To quote Masure again, ‘The signs instituted by Christ contain and make real what they represent. The Eucharist was instituted by Christ as the Sign of the Sacrifice of the Cross. Thus the Eucharist contains and makes real the Sacrifice of the Cross.’ And it is not just Christ who is sacrificed in the Eucharist. We, the church, are his body. We are sacrificed also. God makes bread and wine an acceptable offering. And that bread and wine is a sign of our lives also, a symbol of all we have to offer. In the Eucharist we unite our love with that of Christ, so in him we are made an acceptable offering to the Father. We are sanctified and made his people through the power of his cross.

So if we have a proper understanding of Sacrifice, then it can be seen that to talk of sacrificial priesthood is unnecessary. It is tautologous. The priest is by definition the person who offers the Eucharist. That’s all we are. No Eucharist, no priest. Priesthood is therefore by definition sacrificial because as we offer the Eucharist so we make real the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross and bring its power breaking in to the present for the sanctification of the faithful. We shouldn’t really even need to bother to talk about it, and in fact we only have to because we are part of a church which has almost completely forgotten what priesthood is. I think we’ve done enough etymology for a bit. It’s time for a rant!

We hear lots about the damage that women’s ordination has done to a Catholic understanding of Anglicanism. But in my view the report, ‘Mission Shaped Church,’ does almost as much. Catholics, eager to show that they aren’t negative about every development in the church, have sometimes jumped on the Fresh Expressions bandwagon. I nearly did myself. But it is an extremely dangerous bandwagon to be on. Mission Shaped Church actually crystallises a new Anglican ecclesiology which is entirely un-sacramental. The writers get about two thirds of the way through the report when they suddenly realise that they have forgotten to define what ‘Church’ is. Never mind the creeds or Acts 2,42 or 2,000 years of Christian history and reflection, it then goes on to define the characteristics of church – Incarnational, transformational, relational, Trinitarian, making new disciples. But surely the real Fresh Expression of church is what takes place between the Resurrection and the Ascension. Jesus breaks bread with the disciples. That is the one consistent feature of ecclesial communities throughout history. It is the Eucharist that makes the church because it is the Eucharist that makes present and effective the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. But the Church of England seems to have forgotten that. The Eucharist is seen as believers’ worship. Okay for those who enjoy it, but evangelistically ineffective and therefore not necessary.  At one point, presumably under pressure from its catholic members, the report grudgingly accepts that the church is a Eucharistic community. But in one of the most staggering pieces of double think in Anglican history it tells us that, ‘To be a Eucharistic community you do not necessarily need to celebrate the Eucharist.’

If we have become so disconnected from our Sacramental identity is it any wonder that we have forgotten what priesthood is about? The priest has become in the Church of England the manager, the functionary, the pastor, the evangelist, but not the man of the Sacraments. And if we don’t know what priesthood is, then of course we don’t know what it is in Christian terms to live sacrificially because sacrificial living is Eucharistic living. Hence we have Ordinands seeking titles who ask far more about the house, the day off, the study day, the sabbatical opportunities and the childcare arrangements than the ministry. They literally don’t know what it is they are going to be ordained to be. They’re confused.

The Catholic movement in Anglicanism was borne out of a desire to renew the Church of England by recalling it to its catholic roots and identity. If we want to do that today, we need to help the Church of England to rediscover the sacramental identity of priesthood. And we do that above all by living it. The sacrificial priest is not the one who works himself to death. It is the priest who understands his life in Eucharistic terms, the priest for whom the Eucharist is not something he does but something he lives in the innermost core of his being. The Eucharist is a lifestyle. What do I mean by that? The Eucharist is the effective sign that the Son has offered his life to the Father for the salvation of the world. To be a Eucharistic priest (another tautology of course) is to emulate that self-giving and offer one’s own life as a gift for others. To sacrifice means to make holy. To be a sacrificial priest means to seek holiness of life in the offering of one’s own life for the salvation of the world.

Let me pick out three characteristic of what that means in practical terms. You may disagree with these and have your own ideas in which case we can talk about it later. But let me tell you what I think. It means first of all a coherence in the priestly lifestyle. We hear an awful lot today about the work-life balance. Happiness is claimed to spring from the correct prioritisation of the different areas of our lives – work, leisure, family. Many clergy try to apply the same principles to their own lives. Hence many colleges teach their students to divide their day into three – morning, afternoon and evening – and be sure only to work for two of those three sessions. But I would suggest that the language of work/life balance is simply anathema to what it is to be a priest. We’re on dangerous territory here. This is the kind of talk that gets the likes of Fr Edward into such trouble. They think that abolishing the concept of the work/life balance means having to labour away non-stop. But that’s not what it means at all. To be a sacrificial priest means that one’s whole life is priestly, not just the bits you choose to label in that way. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have days off. It means that your day off is just as priestly as Sunday morning at the Altar because time off refreshes and relaxes and feeds, so enabling a more fulfilled and richer ministry. Fr Michael Whitehead used to tell his colleagues off for doing their ironing on their day off, arguing that ironing was just as priestly as saying Mass. I think that’s a good way of looking at it. Celebrating the sacraments, visiting the sick, studying, taking school assemblies, preaching, relaxing, having friends round for dinner, going to bed at night, chairing a meeting, taking a funeral – all these activities are equally part of our priestly self-offering. We never stop being priests. Our whole lives are a gift for the world that emulates the self-giving of Christ on the cross.

The liturgical action of washing feet demonstrates this perfectly. That is such a vivid image of priesthood and one that we can now rediscover as never before. The church has virtually lost all respect in a secular culture. Clergy, once pillars of the status quo, are now little more than figures of fun in the eyes of most. No one in their right mind is any longer going to seek Ordination in order to better themselves. We have become unrespectable. And that’s wonderful news. That leave us free to wash feet, to give ourselves in radical service to the world, to demonstrate vividly the values of the cross. People often wonder why in John’s Gospel there is no account of the Last Supper. It’s because instead of that we have the Washing of Feet. He may not record the institution of the Eucharist. Instead he shows us perfectly what it means to live a Eucharistic life.

Then next, to be a Eucharistic priest says a great deal about the way we minister with others. Very often an unhealthy understanding of the role the priest plays in the Eucharist is at the heart of unhealthy models of priesthood. If we see ourselves as priests as those who alone do the sacrificing in the Mass, those who put on the worship for the benefit of those attending, then we end up with the one-sided ministry that was so upsetting Fr Edward. If the priest does everything in the Mass, the corollary is that he must also do everything in the mission. But that’s based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the sacrifice. The bread and wine are the immolation and oblation not of the priest himself but of the whole community. The priest is there to oversee, but it is the whole church that offers the sacrifice and receives from it. In the same way it is the whole church that must offer itself as a gift for the world. The priests role is to oversee that and ensure that it is happening.

It is our complete refusal or inability or unwillingness to set the laity free to minister that most holds back effective evangelisation in Catholic Anglican parishes. You can see it grotesquely illustrated at the big dos here at the National or in the Royal Albert Hall. The lay people, we’re told, love nothing more than watching these great long queues of priests coming in to reverence the altar before the Mass. It’s priest worship. It’s a profoundly unhealthy model of the church that we are encouraging here. The role of the laity is to watch on and be impressed while the priests do their stuff, that’s what the message is. And so the people of God are left stunted and unused, their gifts unacknowledged. The single most important priestly gift in the 21st century is to discern gift in others. It is to call the baptised to ministry in the Church. To be sacrificial in this respect means to sacrifice the old expectations and certainties about what priests are for. It means to sacrifice our mistrust of lay ministry, that feeling that ‘Father knows best,’ or that, ‘Father can do it better.’ Every Diocese has some scheme or other to encourage lay ministry in order to fill the gaps left by a shrinking priesthood. But that’s not why we want to encourage these patterns of ministry as Catholics. It has nothing to do with a shrinking church but everything to do with sacrificial, Eucharistic priestly ministry.

But to what end? What are we trying to achieve in this ministry of sacrifice? For the big vision let’s return to Yom Kippur. The sprinkled blood of the sacrifice sanctifies the courtyard of the Temple which symbolises creation. That rite is perfectly fulfilled in the Eucharist. We offer Christ, the perfect sacrifice and we sprinkle his blood not on the walls of the church but on the lips of the faithful who are the Living Temples of the Holy Spirit. We send them out to sanctify all creation. Sacrificial Priesthood drives us with our people to a passionate concern for the whole created world. To live sacrificially means to have a vision for a renewed creation, one where the excluded are included, where the poor shall know justice, where this beautiful world will be restored in Christ. A renewed world, an atoned creation in harmony with its creator, the Kingdom. That’s the vision. 

Philip North
October 10th 2006