The priest

There was a time long ago when the Maker thought he wanted to become a priest. So his mother brought him over to the parish priest to learn how to be a Mass server or kulitos, as Mass servers were called in Dumanjug town, where he grew up. He was only a young boy barely 5 years old. His first assignment was to memorize text from the Latin Mass starting with “Pater Noster.” He didn’t do too well with that. The Maker always had a problem memorizing things by rote.

It would be many years before he would serve his first Mass. By then he would be in grade school in the big city and Masses were said in English if not Bisayan. He did better with the prayers. But there was always a bit of the klutz inside him. He thought he did his work well for that first Mass. But after everything, the priest scolded him in as gentle a way, he supposes, as any Canadian Jesuit can gently scold his young Mass server.

It seems that ants had infested the wine or perhaps the chalice before the Mass. The young boy was not told it would be part of his job to make sure this did not happen. He was not told to clean up everything. And the priest, too, did not see the ants until after the offertory. Of course, by then the wine had been transformed literally by rite into the blood of Christ and must have to be consumed in its entirety ants and all. This the Jesuit did with some amount of pique, to be sure. But it is the role of the priest to emulate the martyrdom of the Saviour no matter how early in the morning as it was his role to shepherd even the most unschooled of Mass servers. And this, he did well. Even so, this was the last time the young boy would ever serve Mass and he walked away that morning doubting his own mettle for the priesthood. If he had ever been called by God, that day he realized he had been mercifully “un-called.” He would have to find other ways to serve.

But he always admired priests and they would be a constant presence in his life, his formation into what he is now and whatever he would be in the future. And he had been with priests of all sorts—Belgian, Canadian, Spanish, Mexican, Filipino, good and bad priests.

There was a time when he thought of priests always in the context of the altar as a conduit to God, indeed, Christ’s very presence. This grew into the context of the classroom. The priest was also a teacher opening his eyes to the possibilities of thought and science. He liked the priests in his school. He liked especially the late Father Joseph Kauffmann, S.J., who insisted he was not German but Belgian and would without fail correct anyone who made this error. He would be the only teacher in his life who ever quoted Camus and Kirkegaard and say that magical word—existentialism. Not that he explained them well for these were things that could not be explained well to a young teenager. But he explained them well enough so that he would be curious and they would be signposts he looked for and looked forward to in his sojourn through life.

Along the way, the Maker would come to realize the inevitable humanity of priests. They were  in a sense prophets on the pulpit of the Mass as well as teachers in a classroom, but they were as fallible and as imperfect as everyone else. He had played basketball with priests, had wined and dined with them, had conversed, had argued with them and in the end come to realize he was wrong to put them as benchmarks for his own salvation. It is true that they help, but in the end, he would have to find his own redemption by himself and by the direct grace of God.

The recent controversies with some bishops and their SUVs would seem a direct assault on the priesthood itself and it is admittedly hurtful not just for priests but also for everyone else who is Catholic in this country. But in a sense, it is only inevitable. We are a modernizing country retrieving itself from a feudal and corrupt past and the process will cut everywhere. The old expectations we held for priests, such as that they are immune and removed from the corruption that is all about us, is proven to be simply an illusion as it should be. And it is high time we lost our illusions about the Church and the priesthood. There will always be priests of all sorts as there always has been. Priests are human. The best we can do is simply to hold them up as examples to emulate when they do good and to forgive them when they do badly, as should be said with those damned SUVs.

As he is wont to do, the Maker puts himself in the shoes of his Canadian Jesuit finally looking down into the cup of wine now become Christ’s blood, finally to see the island of red ants floating there. How his eyes must have searched for the young Filipino boy who did not clean his cup well that day. Did he think, “Once again, a bitter cup?” Or did he instead think in final resignation, “Ah, by my Father’s will, a bitter cup.” And so he drank, as we all must who have faith in God and the Church inside, which we grew to become who we are now. Nobody said it would be easy. And it will get worse before it becomes any easier.