His bishop writes, “I tried often and unsuccessfully to get Monsignor to agree to an assisted living facility in his last few years of life and he successfully withstood me. He found security, comfort and continued meaning for his priestly life…”
Religion and Ethics Newsweekly is the latest mainstream media outlet to take an interest in the clergy stress story that has already been featured in The New York Times and on National Public Radio. If we are not mistaken, this particular piece is set at a CREDO conference, although, disappointingly, CREDO isn’t mentioned.
“I am praying hard for Ted,” Armstrong said. “[I]t’s hard for any of us to understand the level of temptation or the level of attack he’s had to deal with, but if this is the case then he walked up to the edge and was victorious, and I think we ought to celebrate that.”
“Some years ago I was walking to the Mater Private Hospital to visit a good friend, Archbishop Joe Cassidy. On the way, I passed a group of teenagers who shouted, ‘Abused any children lately, Father?'”
Bonnie Anderson: Ministry is a shared enterprise in which lay people are equal partners. Clergy burnout occurs because both parties lose sight of this fact. The result is clergy who believe that they must meet everyone’s needs while playing the role of a lone superhero, and members of the laity who are either infantilized or embittered because they cannot make meaningful contributions to their church.
For the past 10 years, the estimated median age of candidates for master of divinity degrees has fallen steadily, from 34.14 in 1999 to 32.19 in 2009.
When clergy blur the lines between the touch of the shaman—God’s conduit to be physically present in the liturgy and in pastoral settings—and the touch of an individual—it is inherently dangerous. It’s why the Episcopal Church has training in sexual exploitation of both minors and adults.
… the clergy who have been the focus of extensive CREDO research reflect higher negative emotions about work (mainly due to stress), but ironically, also higher positive emotions about work when contrasted to the general population.
It seems that priests are being explicitly used as handy scapegoats for the deeper issues of our day – issues whose presenting symptoms are the economic woes of the wider church; the turning of a mostly latent anti-clericalism into its ugly, active counterpart; the desire by some to exercise more and more control over the nature of priestly identity and ministry; a cultural opposition to any form of institutional authority; and, compounding all of these, the decline of involvement in organized religion.
What’s on the business card, while entirely irrelevant to some, can certainly have the capacity to tinge ministerial life in critical ways. Though ethereal sounding, the loss of “temporalities” is real enough; and the headaches that can arise in an environment of rent-to-own authority can be more than one feels is worth bargaining for.