The following is the first in a series. We are grateful to Vigilius (the pen name of a German priest-theologian) for sending us the translation. The original appeared in German here.
The Disintegration of the Priesthood
Vigilius
Vigilius
The logic of the revolution
“It is about a new culture in the Catholic Church, which takes seriously that baptism is the most important thing ... With synodality, an element of decisive co-responsibility of all believers is added to the basic hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church as a complement, so to speak - at all levels: from the parish to the dioceses, to the national churches, continental churches and the universal church. This is something new!”[1] Thus spoke Georg Bätzing, Chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference and participant in the Roman Synod.
In this statement, the “basic hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church” is initially cited as a self-evident fact. This refers to the priestly or episcopal decision-making authority in doctrinal and canonical matters. That Bätzing is referring to the clerical hierarchy is clear from the fact that his statement also includes the category “all believers”, which only makes sense from a logical point of view if, in contrast to the first-mentioned group, “all believers” refers not only to ordained ministers, but also to those who do not belong to the basic hierarchical structure of the Church. This group, which is not part of the basic hierarchical structure of the Church, consists of people who are usually called “lay people”. In the logic of the term, the fact that lay people, unlike ordained ministers, do not belong to the basic hierarchical structure of the Church means that they have no decision-making authority in matters of doctrine and church governance.
On the other hand, according to Bätzing, by virtue of the new synodality “an element of decisive co-responsibility of all believers is added to the basic hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church as a complement, so to speak”. The crucial question here is what a “decisive co-responsibility” of all believers means, in other words: a decisive co-responsibility of the laity, which is also said to be—”so to speak”—“complementary” to the basic hierarchical structure of the Church. This is not clear. It could mean that the laity, who are not authorized to lead the church themselves, accompany the hierarchy’s decision-making process with their necessary prayer and ascetic exercises—which the lay women empowerment activists who can be found globally certainly practice eagerly. But the very fact that this inevitably sounds like irony shows that the word “decisive” is not only not about prayer accompaniment, but that prayer is no longer regarded as the decisive dimension in the Church at all. Rather, the ability to decide for oneself has become the decisive factor. In other words, we all know that Bätzing’s use of the words “decisive” and “co-responsibility” is about empowering the laity to make decisions that were previously reserved for ordained ministers.
However, if the basic hierarchical structure of the Church is now extended to all believers, there is no longer a basic hierarchical structure of the Church. Bätzing’s talk of hierarchy becomes superfluous, because the Church simply becomes a democracy. This also renders meaningless the argument that the lay people who have a say in decision-making are “complementary” to the hierarchy, because—with respect to hierarchy—there is no longer a mutually complementary duality of hierarchy and laity. In Bätzing’s construction, there can only be the model of representative hierarchies that reflect the majority will of all believers—i.e. “synodality” as a copy of political parliamentarianism.
This means, however, that Bätzing’s sentence is—unless one assumes a defective intellectuality—a trick. The intention of the retained talk of the hierarchical basic constitution of the church, to which the lay decision-making authority is to be added as a complement, is to rhetorically conceal the fact that the revolution relies on the power of logic, which, via the implemented new synodality, inevitably leads to the abolition of precisely the hierarchical basic structure of the church, which is replaced by a democratic parliamentarism.
However, the fuse of this system-destroying explosive device was lit much earlier by the—still existing—hierarchy. Many bishops have long shared the Lutheran view that the Catholic Church is the deformation of the true Church of the Gospel, and therefore must now finally be destroyed. They just do not admit this unvarnished and, like Georg Bätzing, frame the intended goal as “being differently Catholic”.[2] In line with this view, many dioceses in the Western, especially the Central European world, have long since begun to practically disregard the sacramental-ontological link between ordination and leadership authority, relying on the normative power of the factual. Increasingly, church leadership by priests is regarded as optional. At least from this point of view, the layperson has de facto been placed on an equal footing with the priest, insofar as the layperson can assume leadership offices in the same way as the priest.
We can see from current synodal practice that this cannot—in terms of theological logic—remain limited to the parish level, but must inevitably extend to the episcopal area due to the substantial sacramental unity of priest and bishop. Of course, bishops can also sit on the various decision-making bodies, but even this is no longer absolutely necessary given the disregard for the ontological link between ordination and governance that has become a principle. The fact that half of the “Synodal Council” planned by the German Synodal Way is to consist of bishops is a purely contingent provision that cannot claim any higher necessities for itself. The mere fact that clerics sit on synodal bodies as “voting” members alongside lay people who are also entitled to vote is in itself a depotentiation of ministry. The matrix that always underlies the operation, which initially begins at the parish level, is the Protestant concept of church and office, which must inevitably lead to the bishop eventually losing his previous monarchical status.
It is remarkable, however, that this process no longer explicitly names the theological motives for its justification that led Luther to reject the Catholic hierarchy as an aberration of Christianity. Although the political-structural effect is identical, the lines of argument are different. In my opinion, there are two main reasons for this.
Firstly, the synodality activists are essentially concerned with questions of power politics and autonomy theory in the classic modern sense. This does not apply to Luther, who himself was not yet a modern subject, despite the fact that the Reformation’s incisions had de facto modernity-producing effects. The current advocates of the Roman and German synodal way, on the other hand, are filled with a bursting rage at the fact that the laity, unlike the clergy, have no ecclesiastical authority, because this circumstance must represent a narcissistic insult of enormous proportions for modern subjects. For modern subjectivity is essentially characterized by freeing itself for the sake of its own self-determination from all normative-authoritarian ties that are naturally or traditionally imposed on it as limitations to its autonomy. In the modern concept, to be self-determined means to be emancipated, and that means, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “to be able to move along as many paths as possible”. This idea is opposed by the “hierarchical basic order of the church”, which not only makes it impossible for the laity to make decisions, but also excludes women and all men who are not willing to renounce marriage from participating in the hierarchy in principle by limiting it to celibate men. It is a multiply discriminatory complex in which not everyone can do everything and has access to everything in principle.
Being and work of Christ
This brings me to the second aspect in which today’s reformers differ from Luther. This aspect refers to the fact that many basic positions of Reformation theology, which Luther still had to laboriously fight for and formulate, have already become so self-evident that they no longer need to be discussed specifically. This applies in particular to those dogmatic provisions that are decisive for the priesthood. Here the traditional doctrine has dissolved so extensively and radically that it is hardly remembered by many church members. And it is this erosion of the theological foundations of the ordained ministry, which has also characterized the clergy for decades, that makes it possible today that even bishops can so easily turn themselves into propagandists of a revolution aimed at finally destroying the hierarchy. And because the façade is now simply collapsing, these bishops no longer see themselves as revolutionaries, but only as executors of the self-evident.
In order to understand the prerequisites and consequences of today’s synodalism, it is helpful to remember why with Luther the clerical ministry of governance disappears. It disappears with him because the priest disappears altogether. But Luther does not make the priest disappear in order to eliminate clerical governance; rather, the priest disappears in his theology for much more profound reasons. It is only from these considerations that certain church-structural positions then arise, which means that Luther knew exactly that the priest’s power of governance could not be shaken as long as the ordained ministry as such was not abandoned. At the same time, this means that the governing function inherent to the priest is intrinsically linked to the provisions of the priesthood that establish the power of governance in the first place.
The question must therefore be asked as to what these “much more profound reasons” were, which, in contrast to today’s synodalists, still preoccupied Luther so intensely. These reasons essentially relate to the question of the Sacrifice of the Mass. Why Luther described the Catholic doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass as “terrible idolatry”, how he justified his own understanding of the Lord’s Supper, the relationship between Word and sacrament and his concept of the priest cannot be explained here. Nor is it necessary. All that is important is the fact that Luther clearly recognized that the priest, and consequently his governance authority, stands and falls with the question of whether the Mass is a sacrifice.
Incidentally, it is worth emphasizing that Luther never doubted the atoning nature of Christ’s cross. This distinguishes him from today’s reformers, who have not only abandoned the Sacrifice of the Mass, but also the cross as a sacrificial event. The statement by Bätzing’s predecessor, Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, that the cross is not a sacrifice offered to God, but merely an expression of divine solidarity with human suffering, can be considered representative of today’s theological awareness.[3] I doubt whether Zollitsch was aware of the consequences this position must have for the concept of the priest, indeed of the Church as a whole. Nevertheless, the definition of the priest and the Church depends on the question of whether the cross of Christ was a sacrifice and how this sacrifice and the Mass relate to each other. Since this complex problem cannot be discussed in detail in an essay, I can attempt only a cursory sketch.
In its traditional concept of itself, the Catholic Church identifies itself as the sacramental space of Christ’s re-presentation of Himself as the only sacrificial Priest, who Himself is the ultimate and unsurpassable offering. It is this self-offering of Christ that becomes present in the Church and which the Church—from this very self-offering—becomes itself in a certain way as the mystical body of Christ. This self-gift of Christ on the cross is the atoning sacrifice for the “sin of the world” and at the same time a “latreutic sacrifice” (Matthias Josef Scheeben). It is both in one, because the atoning sacrifice follows from the self-gift of the incarnated Logos to the Father under the condition of sin, glorifying the Father. The Logos is essentially self-gift to the Father, and when the Logos becomes man, His self-gift glorifying the Father takes on the character of an atoning sacrifice because He wants to glorify the Father, who is the Creator of the world, through the overcoming of the sinful turning away of the creature that takes place in this sacrifice. This atoning, redeeming and God-glorifying sacrifice takes place in history as a bloody event on Golgotha
It is of great importance to realize that the incarnate Logos cannot simply be given various determinations that lie next to each other like pearls threaded on a string. Bad theologies have a tendency towards such mere stringing together. Instead, it is exactly as the Protestant theologian Karl Barth formulated it in his “Church Dogmatics”: “Jesus is absolutely the bearer of an office. He is therefore not man and then additionally also the bearer of this office ... There is no neutral humanity of Jesus ... His being as man is His work.”[4] Barth calls this ministry the “Office of Christ”, and it consists precisely in what I have just described: Jesus’ work, with which He is identical, is the direct correspondence to His eternal Logos-being of giving himself back to the Father, the atoning sacrifice for the salvation of the world glorifying the Father, in which God is again given full glory by the creature. This is the Christ
Therefore, when theological tradition speaks of the three “munera Christi”, meaning Christ’s prophethood, kingship and priesthood, these offices must be interpreted from the principle of Christ’s self-sacrifice, as in the New Testament. In the Gospel of John, the cross is the ascension of Christ to the throne, who thereby receives His eternal power and glory from the Father, and Christ’s role as shepherd means precisely that through the sacrifice of the cross He makes eternal life accessible to people, which is the focus of Jesus’ preaching from the very beginning.
Re-presentation of Himself
Now the question arises as to how it is conceivable that this temporal event can become present again at later points in time, whereby the “presentness” does not simply refer to our subjective performances of reminiscence. However, it is also evident that “becoming present” does not mean that the event becomes present in its former form. The mode of re-presentation can only be a symbolic-ritual one. Since the sacrifice of Golgotha is absolutely unique and final, the rite cannot aim at a kind of reproduction, as is the case with repeated performances of a play. The Council of Trent also formally rejects this. The mode of re-presentation of the sacrifice must therefore be an act in which, in strict numerical and factual identity, precisely what once took place in a bloody manner now takes place in the form of an unbloody symbolic act at any number of times on the altars of the Church.
Such a re-presentation only becomes conceivable if what happened once on the time axis is always present in divine eternity, which itself is not subject to any time extension and relates to all points on the time axis in the same immediate way. St. Thomas illustrates this with the geometric image of a circle, to the center of which all points on the circumference have precisely the same distance. In God, however, the temporal event of Golgotha is only conceivable as perpetually present in such a way that it has transformed its particular historical form into the resurrection reality of Christ. In this, however, its metaphysical substance, which was realized in the historical event, is preserved in a way that cannot be lost.
To illustrate this connection, according to the New Testament accounts, the Risen Christ identifies Himself before His disciples with His wounds, which are now “transfigured”, but are preserved as marks of the sacrifice in the eternity of God. They are a permanent part of Christ’s identity. “For once sacrificed, he does not die again, but lives forever as the Lamb who was slain,” is the wording of the Easter preface. As the sacrificed Lamb, Christ is the eternal life of the faithful, and the faithful relate to the Lamb and His eternal self-sacrifice in the manner of glorifying worship. This is the “heavenly liturgy” that is illustrated in the magnificent images of the 4th and 5th chapters of the Book of Revelation.
The substance of what happens in the Mass is precisely this eternal liturgy of Christ as the Lamb who was slain. The sacrifice of the cross becomes present in its eternal mode of existence in the Mass, which is why this presence has no magical traits and, with regard to Communion, nothing cannibalistic about it. It becomes present because Christ wants to extend His act of glorifying the Father, realized in the cross, by the dimension that the creature can actively integrate itself into the atoning sacrifice in order to wash itself “clean in the blood of the Lamb” (Rev 7:14) and now glorify the Father together with Christ, who continually gives Himself to the Father as the incarnate and crucified Son. The enabling condition for this becoming present in time is the Holy Spirit as the mediation of Christ’s presence, who Himself (i.e., the Spirit) needs no mediation. And the instrumental mode of the becoming present of the eternal state of existence of the sacrificial Lamb mediated through the Holy Spirit is a symbolic-ritual one, because the heavenly liturgy becomes present under the modest conditions of our temporal existence.
The rite of the Mass has its prefiguration in the historical Last Supper, in which Jesus liturgically makes present this event even before His physical sacrificial death: “This is my body, which is given for you”. This act is also only conceivable if the future sacrificial event in God’s eternity, which knows no temporal extension, always already exists in its transfigured form and is made present in the Upper Room through Christ by virtue of the mediating power of the Holy Spirit.
At this point, I would like to make a liturgical-theoretical parenthesis. One of the favorite habits of liberal liturgical practices is to give the Eucharistic celebration a form that is as close to everyday life as possible, following the simplicity of the Last Supper. Clay dishes are preferred. It is not plausible to these protagonists why the liturgical form of the Church’s celebration of Mass should differ from that of the Cenacle. However, there is a theological reason for this difference. The subject of the Lord’s Supper is not yet the Church, which is established in the first place by Christ’s earthly act of the Lord’s Supper and the subsequent sacrifice on the cross as well as the sending of the Holy Spirit made possible by it. Once the Church has emerged from these events, the same sacrifice of Christ is then offered through His sacramental self-representation in the priest. Only now does the Lord’s Supper become the celebration of the Church, the Mass, in which the risen and invisible Christ now acts in the Church’s mode of mediation. And this inclusion of the Church has a strong effect on the ritual question. It is precisely the Church’s mode of mediation that prohibits the imitation of the Lord’s Supper. Precisely because it is about the identity of the event, the rite strives for an artificial stylization that would have been completely inappropriate to the earthly act of Jesus itself.
An imitation of the Supper only gives the semblance of authenticity, whereas in fact it is the opposite of it. When we encounter groups that re-enact the Last Supper scene, we can be sure that the belief in the sacrificial character of Christ’s death and the eternal liturgy of the sacrificial lamb—and thus the identity of the historical sacrifice with the Church’s celebration of the Mass, which is mediated by the Holy Spirit—has disappeared. For this reason, the Mass is deflated into a mere celebration of the meal, in which everything depends on our own performance of reminiscence, which seeks scenically to actualize something that is past and inevitably becomes trivial. This applies to Eucharistic celebrations in swimming trunks on air mattresses as well as to the liturgies of the German Synodal Way.
On the other hand, those who believe in the formally differentiated but substantial identity of the Lord’s Supper, the death on the cross as an act of sacrifice, the heavenly liturgy, and the Holy Mass will endeavor to shape the rite in such a way that it most adequately manifests the theological content of the event and the veneration owed to the sacrificial Lamb.
The priest of the Church
The basic dimension of the ecclesiastical priest has always already been touched in the previous considerations. I would just like to make this explicit once again. Assuming that Christ lives eternally “as the Lamb who was slain” and as such is the life of the faithful, the Mass cannot be regarded as a mere moment in the Church, but must be seen as its very essence. The Church is the presence, mediated by the Holy Spirit, of the heavenly liturgy as the eternal self-fulfillment of the sacrificed Christ in space and time, in which man reaches the Father in and with Christ. The entire structure of the relationship between the Trinitarian God and human beings is mediated through the Mass. In view of this significance of the Mass, it is no exaggeration to claim that the Mass is the essence of the Church. The Catholic Church is either the Church of the Mass or it is not at all.
But if the Mass is the being of the Church, the priest is the central instance of the mediation of salvation. That is why the priest is fundamentally sacerdos. This is an ancient term that is composed of “sacer” (holy) and “dare” (to give) and refers fundamentally to the ritual act of sacrifice. The Church needs this sacerdotal function because without it there would not be the presence of Christ’s sacrifice, which completes all the sacrifices of the past, and which presence defines the being of the Church. The proposition that the Church is the Church of the Mass, or it is not at all, must be logically extended by the statement: The Church is what it is only through the priest. However, this definition does not constitute a Christological monism, because there is a permanent difference between the ecclesiastical priest and Christ Himself. This is precisely the point of the sacramental structure. But in the ecclesiastical priest, Christ Himself is, in a singularly qualified way, the acting subject who communicates Himself and His own sacrifice to the faithful in the Holy Spirit and thereby constitutes the eternal unity of life of the “mystical body”.
Precisely because the priest is sacerdos, he must also have the exclusive function of shepherd or leader and preacher in the Church. This assignment corresponds precisely to the structure of Christ’s ministries. The ecclesial sacerdos, too, can only ever be concerned with enabling the faithful to participate in the Sacrifice of the Mass through teaching, pastoral care and other sacramental acts. This focus on the Mass also applies to baptism. It is significant that Bätzing speaks of baptism being “the most important thing”. This formulation is absolutely under-complex. But it serves precisely as such to legitimize the empowerment of the laity, which logically presupposes the deconstruction of the Mass and thus of the priest. In truth, baptism and the Mass are organically interwoven in such a way that the inner telos of baptism is the integration of man into the mystical body of Christ, whose basic act is the eternal liturgy of Christ present in the Mass.
Bätzing’s statement on baptism is widely part of the rhetorical repertoire of today’s hierarchy. Because many bishops are no longer aware of the context described above, the priest can only be described as a “presider” of the Eucharistic celebration and reduced to something like the role of a Protestant pastor and a spiritual companion of congregations, whose leadership can lie with the laity, who are increasingly replacing Mass on Sundays with a so-called “celebration of the Word of God”. However, there is then no longer any reason why the priest, as such a presider, as which the layman also functions in his offices, must be ordained to his office of presider at all, or why ordination must be understood as a sacramental-ontological event.
In fact, liberal theology understands the act of ordination simply as a solemn form of institutional commissioning, which is spiritually embellished as a “sending out” and no longer differs in substance from that of a layperson to pastor, parish leader and liturgist. The ordained priest as such is only an indispensable and plausible category if he is the God-manly sacrificial Priest’s real-symbolic re-presentation of Himself, who in turn wants to make His sacrifice glorifying the Father present in the celebration of the Mass: “Until the end of time, you gather a people for yourself so that a pure sacrifice may be offered to your name from the rising of the sun to its setting”, is how the Rite of Mass formulates the purpose of the Church. If this conviction disappears, the priest disappears too.
It is therefore only logical that the Synodal Way discussed the question of whether the priesthood should not be formally abolished or, which effectively leads to the identical result, to reformulate the priestly office, which has been robbed of its supernatural dignity, in the sociological category of a “professional profile” in order to define this professional profile—as was recently done by the Bochum pastoral researcher Matthias Sellmann on behalf of the German Bishops’ Conference—as a “commitment to the common good”.[5] And just as it is then only logical to replace the “hierarchical basic order of the church” with the synodalism praised by Bätzing, because anything else would now merely be an arbitrary power structure, it is also the custom everywhere in Germany that the priest is addressed as “dear colleague” by the full-time laity.
The “dear colleague” sounds so harmonious, but it is a poisoned harmony. After all, egalitarian synodalism loudly demands a church free of discrimination, which should not open up “any room for hostility”. As in the French Revolution, however, the sacerdos, in which the kingship of Christ manifests itself, must be sacrificed on the altar of “universal love of mankind” (Max Scheler) and universal equality of all. It is a perverse sacrifice. In the modernized world, the ordained ministry, which needs no democratic legitimation because it derives its authority directly from Christ, was the last splendor of true sacrality and monarchy. It was only a matter of time before the insatiable mass man of modernity would also try to incorporate this ministry into his vulgarity, and for at least 60 years it was just as likely that this would eventually happen through the nihilistic hierarchy of the church itself. This hierarchy has now become so stubbornly committed to applause-inducing synodalism that it now knows only one goal: to erase all images that might provoke a memory of the greatness of the priesthood and the Sacrifice of the Mass and a love that has long since withered. In their vain opportunism, they have become pitiable bureaucrats of banality.
The advanced decline of the priesthood in today’s church is reflected not least in the radical questioning of celibacy and the letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis by John Paul II, in which the Pope states that access to the ordained ministry is reserved for men. Analogous to the question of governance, both aspects also lose their plausibility due to the erosion of the doctrine of the Sacrifice of the Mass and the definition of the priest as sacerdos. However, because they are closely linked to the sacramental priesthood—albeit in different ways—I will deal with celibacy in the next step and then with the question of why the priesthood is reserved for men alone. In the final and fourth part, I would like to raise the question of whether there are possibly unresolved tensions in the tradition of theology of hierarchy and ordained ministry of the Latin Church itself, which unintentionally play into the hands of the anti-priestly synodalism of our day.
NOTES
[1] https://www.vaticannews.va/de/vatikan/news/2024-10/deutschland-synode-bischoefe-baetzing-oster-frauen-kirche-genn.html
[2] https://de.catholicnewsagency.com/news/12083/bischof-batzing-wir-bleiben-katholisch-aber-wir-wollen-anders-katholisch-sein
[3] www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjLn3zHq2es; http://www.kath-info.de/suehnopfer.html
[4] Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik III,2, Zurich 1948, 66-69.
[5] https://einsprueche.substack.com/p/matthias-sellmann-und-die-priester
