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Our duties and responsibilities are related to the mission of Christ the Messiah. The Church draws her meaning and identity from His vocation which, effectively, can be distilled and expressed through the two-fold ministry that is commonly known as the Sacraments of Service. They are Holy Orders and Matrimony.
The word “mission” has an evocative ring to it if we were to think about “Mission Impossible”. However, what can make Christ’s mission impossible is because we are distracted by what we can achieve rather than how these two Sacraments are to shape the manner or the way we ought to think and live.
Apart from it being suggestive, the word “mission” can also be ambiguous. What does it entail to state that the Church has a mission? Is the mission of the Church to increase the number of Christians through baptism? Or is it her role to “make the world a better place”?
Both are not mutually exclusive. But there is a calling within the Church which is crucial for her mission ad extra—to be salt of the earth and light of the world. The Church being the Body of Christ will need to be fed with His Body. Unless the Church sees herself merely as another “philanthropic” entity, like any charitable body, then we must take a look at the dwindling vocation to Holy Orders. It is the means through which Christ feeds His Body so that His Body can carry out His mission of evangelisation, of making more Christians and also of changing the world.
The number of priests is dropping. In these two short months, 4 priests in the different dioceses of the country have passed. Each time a priest dies, water has to find its own level. It is an unenviable task for the Archbishops and Bishops to shuffle and reassign priests to cover parishes and provide services to the laity. If Holy Order is an essential component of the Church’s identity and if she is to be faithful to the mission of Christ, where should our vocations be coming from?
The aim of vocation promotion is mainly to encourage young men to embrace Holy Orders but still it does not answer the question why we do not have enough vocations. The uncomfortable answer to this lack of vocational response is because it possibly reflects the loss of faith or lack of belief in this Sacrament as instituted by Christ Himself. God is calling and it is not that we are not listening to Him. The lack of vocation just exposes the dissonance in our belief system that on the one hand, we affirm the necessity of the Eucharist for salvation but on the other hand, we actually do not appreciate what the Eucharist truly is. If we know what the Eucharist truly is, there will be a floodgate of vocations to the priestly life.
This fall in priest vocation raises serious questions for us. What is the Church? How should it be shaped, particularly in the matter of the Sacrament of Holy Orders. As priesthood is suffering a decline in number, should we follow the Anglican model? Experience has shown us that the model adopted by the Church of England and those who follow in her footsteps is not the solution. The solution must come from knowing what the mind of Christ was and is with regard to Holy Orders? Recently, the Holy Father made the timely call for us to recognise the Church as feminine. It is precisely that the Church is feminine that there exists a complementarity which translates into a masculine Holy Orders. This brings us to the challenge to be chaste as found in the 2nd Reading and it is closely linked to the Sacrament of Holy Orders.
St Paul’s Letter to the Corinthian is a vocation too. Just that it is not one which we want to hear or are comfortable listening to. St Paul spoke of fornication and linked his abhorrence to it by connecting the human body to being the Temple of the Holy Spirit. It is a call to chastity which in today’s myopic search for meaning or fulfilment we are incapable of appreciating. Why? We have arrive at a rather sad state of life where we associate the fullness of life with earthly satisfaction or pleasure. Many people can no longer live with or are patient enough to wait for a life of eternal fulfilment. Such a vision entails sacrifices which many are not willing to pay.
Let us take for example, a man who is married. He is expected to give up his roving eyes for other women. That sacrifice is essentially an articulation of fidelity in marriage. It is not easy but it is made possible through the grace of the Sacrament of Matrimony. Marriage’s faithfulness is a mirror of God’s covenant with humanity and Christ’s fidelity to the Church because of all the permutations in human relationships, that which is between a man and a woman in the sacrament of matrimony is the most appropriate sign in which faithfulness is both fruitful and life-giving.
But our sight falls short of the Resurrection and in our unwillingness to wait for eternity, what we have done is to widen the net of permissibility. There are many models of relationships that are possible. The bounds of faith that corrals us in is felt to be too stifling under the present philosophy which regards fulfilment only in this-worldly terms. We continually try to rationalise and accommodate whatever relationships possible in order to satisfy this short-sighted philosophy. Therefore the Church is at a crossroads. What is the Church? And what should her response be to God’s calling?
The most beautiful definition of the Church is expressed through both the Sacraments of service. If there is failure in the Sacrament of Matrimony one can be sure that the same will be detected in the Sacrament of Holy Orders and vice versa. Both these Sacraments are at the service of the Church and the world at large. When society becomes self-referential, it will not be able to fathom or appreciate God’s calling. Perhaps, this explains the ease of divorce in marriages and the lack of priestly vocations. Christ’s invitation to Peter and Andrew, Paul’s chastity challenge to the Corinthians should help us better appreciate the link between the vocations to Holy Orders and to Matrimony.
The lack of seminarians can be remedied only to a certain extent by a vigorous promotion of priestly vocation. The proper solution to this crisis of vocation is to recognise that the faithfulness of married couples is enlivened by the commitment of priests and the dedication of the priests is supported by the vows of marriage. Without the full strength of these two Sacraments of service, we will always struggle and stumble in our service of the Church and our witnessing to the world.
