Bones of Contention

Extract

A brief report of a congress on the pastoral relationships of priests, held at Louvain, and published in France in 1968, shows encouraging signs of a serious wish on the part of a team of both reputable clergy and of qualified psychiatrists to assess the psychological implications of the priestly role in the contemporary world. That its conclusions should be tentative is only to be expected, for there is so much new ground to cover, and an English translation is probably not to be looked for. It is, in any case, doubtful if, as it stands, it is an eminently exportable product outside a French-speaking milieu. But in raising, as it does, some of the more profound sexual implications for the figure of the priest and being bold enough to make articulate the latent ramifications of his relationship to money, it blazes a trail along which others are bound eventually to follow. The truth of the most universal of its observations can scarcely be disputed, namely that to the conscious reaction to the very notion of the priest there is ‘not sometimes, but invariably’ a normally, unconscious affect which is exactly its contrary. ‘On the image which arouses a conscious aggressiveness, another image imposes itself in the unconscious which arouses a feeling for its antithesis. Indeed this phenomenon is translated into noteworthy sociological terms in our contemporary society. Consciously anti-clerical, it nevertheless throws up a mass of books, films, etc., dealing with the person of the priest. A fact which shows well enough that it is not indifferent to him.’