No Priests for England ?
By MICHAEL GEDGE THOSE who have to do with young Christians between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four in England at present would probably agree that enthusiasm, devotion, and eagerness to spread the Faith are as great or greater than at any time in the last thirty years; yet there is a considerable lack of candidates for Holy Orders. Why is this the case ?
Spectator correspondents have given various suggestions, of which the alleged dominance of Oxford University in the Church is the most amusing and the least serious. Although the experience of rejection by a selection board must be terribly discouraging and even heartbreaking to those who suffer from it. few people who know the careful and conscientious methods of the boards can Object to their existence, even supposing that their system of work could be improved. But there may be other and deeper reasons for this lack of potential priests. First of all there is still some confusion as to the fundamental nature of the work of a priest, which is partly due to the double Catholic-Protestant nature of the Church of England itself. I think it would be fair to say that most candidates for Holy. Orders are consciously moved by a ' missionary ' vocation—that is a desire to ' convert' people to membership of the ' Body of Christ.' if they have not already reached it; and in the past it was assumed that this vocation could best be fulfilled in the priesthood. This was due to the fact that for some hundreds of years up to the time when the legal Prayer Book was compiled it could be assumed that everyone in this country was more than a nominal churchman, and therefore the functions of teaching the Christian religion and administering the Christian sacraments were identical with the work of converting the people : it amounted to trying to make churchpeople better Christians. .
Everyone knows that the situation is quite different now; the potential priest has to consider two sections of the com- munity: churchpeople, who to some extent at least accept and try to practise the Christian religion, and the greater part of the population for whom. it is chiefly a conventional formula which has no direct conscious bearing on their lives. The Prayer Book is perfectly right in laying down the main functions of the priest as it does; but these. are now very different from the work of a missionary to the whole population. It is this latter work which is felt by many to be the most important or the most pressing; many young people feel that th0 can best serve the Christian cause by being active missionaries in their secular life; and not all the clergy would disagree with them. , cannot help feeling that there is something wrong in all this; that young men are not moved by the call to security; that the bishops who, however severe the calls on their own income, are usually in a somewhat more secure financial position than the rest of us, may suffer from an unconscious feeling of guilt which leads them to ease their consciences by supporting the clergy; that, in short, the Gospel should not really be re- written: " If any man will come after me, let him assert himself and insist on a house and follow me; for whosoever receiveth not £550 a year cannot be my disciple."
Perhaps a more serious obstacle to vocations is the quite fantastic system by which jobs are found or exchanged in the Church of England. The system in fact does not exist at all. Between one diocese and another there is only an occasional and apparently accidental liaison; a bishop some- times gets men from his own previous diocese (if any) to fill jobs in his present diocese; or a friend tells a friend of a vacancy. But it is contrary to etiquette for a man to apply for a job; and outside his own diocese there is no reason why anyone should know anything about him. This does not mean that within a diocese men are moved about or properly provided for by their own bishop; not at all. Case after case could be quoted of men who have asked for a move and waited five or six years in vain; of others who have been offered one job which they are free to accept or reject, and having rejected it are told that they cannot expect to be offered anything more It is futile to pretend that bishops know their own men and their parishes so well that they can judge better than men themselves when they ought to move or where they ought to go. All this amounts to two facts: first that the system of employment in the Church of England would be a disgrace to any labour exchange, and secondly that it is high time some sort of central register of jobs and men who wish to apply for them was formed.
Finally there, is an impression, rightly or wrongly, among young people that there is something less than a man's job in the work of a priest. This is not the place to discuss the accuracy of such an impression; but I think it is there. Certainly this is the impression of a vast number of the working people of England, who form the greater part of our population. A working man today is not much impressed by someone who lives in a completely different world mentally, economically, spiritually, and culturally, from himself : the fact that the working man is full of silly press-fostered delusions about the life and work of the clergy makes this more and not less difficult to cope with.
Looking ahead to the next fifty or a hundred years one is forced to the conclusion that this problem could at least bo attacked by the formation ei a large body of priest-workmen, who would be unpaid by the church; earn their living at ordinary occupations; and act as assistants to a smaller number of whole-time priests who would concentrate more on the inner circle of churchpeople while the priest-workmen acted as missionaries to those outside the Church. Unfortunately at the present tinie there is a remarkable agreement between Roman and Anglican bishops to strangle this movement in, infancy: unable to prevent individuals from carrying out this ' experiment' in the first place, they are' determined that " though eminently pleasing to Almighty God it is- on no account to occur again." Yet it is possible that if young men of the present generation felt that the bishops would whole- heartedly back this vocation they might volunteer for it in larger numbers. Certainly at present many of them are enthusiastically going to work in factories before ordination, which is a step in the right direction, though far from a solution of the problem. They know that if they want to go further they will be frustrated by those who might encourage them.
The usual episcopal policy about any new movement in the Church of England is to attack it at first; to look on it with suspicion second; to permit it with reservations and hesitations third; and finally, years after the original movers are dead; to give them a pat on the back. This last is likely to happen to the priest-workmen, but only when the supply of ordination candidates is so small that the bishops wake up to reality.
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