This is part of a read-along hosted by myself and MrsDarwin of DarwinCatholic.
The main page is here.
MrsDarwin's biographical sketch of the author, Robert Hugh Benson, is here.
My introductory post is here.
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Cat wrote about the last chapter, "Christ in the Church:"
Our judgment is not infallible; we see that every day in a million minor ways. Our desires, though sincere, though educated, though acute, must be tested. Our love needs a foundation if it is not to be blown away in the first storm.
This foundation is friendship with the Church, with the Church as Christ himself.... It is the Church we must be friends with, learning her teachings, tracing her through history, loving humanity through her as Christ does.
Benson's last point is addressed to the person who rebels against this submission as an obliteration of his judgment and gifts, his individuality....[T]oday I wonder if a more common objection might be to befriending the Church when it seems a place to shelter evil, an institutional cover for child abuse and sexual control. The glamor and mystique of the institution seem designed to blind the faithful and take advantage of them.
Yet, if the Church is Christ himself, the glamor is like the purple mantle the soldiers draped over Jesus, covering his torn body.
I like the concept very much of the purple garment being like all the "glamor and mystique" that people sometimes see when they view the institutional Church. Some people are attracted by the pretty things, and other people are repelled by them or suspicious of them; but it isn't, after all, the prettiness that we are meant to be contemplating but the Christ beneath.
Benson takes a lightly mocking tone towards the Priest, I think deliberately, anticipating some of the criticism that non-Catholics often level at us:
She exalts, it is said, fallible humanity, in the person of the priest whom not even she believes to be infallible... If it were merely the Ideal Society that was exalted, some excuse could be found; but it is the individual human priest who, as a matter of fact, in the eyes of Catholics parades in the garments of Christ...
"Parades in the garments of Christ!" It is the sneer of our critics. And Benson says: Yes. Yes, exactly.
Yes, that is what our priests do. Parade in the garments of Christ: which, as Cat pointed out, means (among other things) that purple mantle by which He was mocked, and also the seamless tunic for which lots were thrown, and the underthings that protected His dignity, all those bits that adhered to the flesh as they were in the end stripped off. It must also mean the ordinary clothing of the worker and the itinerant preacher, the swaddling clothes; and the wrappings of the tomb.
[P]arades in the garments of Christ, and is thought to be clothed with His prerogatives. This is largely true.
I see the two chapters, "Christ in the Church" and "Christ in the Priest," as two aspects of a very similar concept. The Church is made up of human beings, and the priest is a human being; and we relate to Christ through our relationships with these human beings. (Even when one thinks: well, I relate to the Church through physical objects, the buildings and the incense and the art; humans designed, made, and selected them, poorly or well). We may even literally be friends with some of these human beings, or they might possibly be our very real enemies; or perhaps we find them agreeable or distasteful according to personality.
And yet friendship with Christ-in-the-Church is not quite the same thing as having warm feelings about the parish secretary or the Archbishop or the other dudes in the men's prayer group or appreciating the sweep of a ceiling or a sparkle of colored glass. And friendship with Christ-in-the-Priest is definitely not the same thing as having a particular priest as your buddy, someone you might buy a beer for, or appreciating your pastor for his good homilies and diplomatic leadership.
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It's a good thing, too, because (as Cat alluded) these human connections fail us so often, sometimes in spectacularly horrible ways.
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A good part of this chapter is a defense of the priesthood. I'm concerned mainly with what it means to find friendship with Christ in the priest---and it seems to me that by this Benson means friendship with Christ in the priesthood and its attributes, friendship with Christ-as-the-High-Priest. Because of course friendship with Christ can be found in the human personality of any particular priest you happen to meet or know; I suspect, though, that we are going to meet this particular image of Christ in later chapters, such as "Christ in the Saint," "Christ in the Sinner," "Christ in the Average Man." Because of course a given priest could be any of those things, and God help him, he may eventually be all three.
The priest is a man whose job is to willingly do the will of God. All of us have the job to do that! But the particular version of this, for the priest, is---at very particular and crucial moments---to submit his own personality totally to the personality of Christ; to accept with John the Baptist, "I must decrease, and he must increase;" and to give God permission to use his hands, his voice. Christ "energizes," Christ "exercis[es] the prerogative of mercy," Christ "mak[es] himself present in...the Sacrament." The priest consents.
So where is the friendship?
[Christ] exhibits, in that atmosphere that has grown up about the priesthood, through the instincts of the faithful rather than through the precise instructions of the Church, attributes of His own Divine character, in sympathy with which constitutes the friendship of those who love Him.
I think when people talk about having that "personal relationship with Christ," it is very easy for them to be picturing a relationship with the human nature and character of Christ only: the same sort of imagination that gives us the parlor-game of "Which historical character would you like to have dinner with?" We close our eyes and there is Jesus, copied from a picture we saw once, in sandals and tunic, sitting in our living room. We try to make friends with this Jesus. Even if we imagine a Jesus speaking in our interior hearts, it's a human-sounding voice. We try to make that connection feel as like a human friendship as possible. When it really does feel like that, we understand it to be a grace and a consolation.
And it's not wrong!
But we must also make friends with the Divine character of Christ. And for that we have not much in the way of models from practical experience.
Benson is telling us that friendship with Christ is also "sympathy with attributes of His own Divine character," and that we are able to develop some of this by having a devotion to the priesthood.
Not the priest, but to the priesthood:
Devotion to the priesthood... respect for the office, jealousy for its honor, insistence upon the high standard of those who fulful it---these are nothing else but manifestations of that Friendship of Christ of which we are treating... Not to lean upon the priest...---but to lean indeed upon the priesthood---this is reliance upon Christ.
Can I just point out here the bit about high standards? When we (ahem) cover over serious failings of individual priests, make excuses for them, excessively defer to them, or make them into celebrities, we're in direct opposition to all that helps us develop sympathy with attributes of the Divine character. So let's shut down any idea that this is an apologia for clericalism.
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On a personal note, I found these two chapters incredibly reassuring as a reader. When I first picked up the book, I thought that I would be learning how to begin a Friendship that I had never, ever, been able to really form. But in Benson's explication of the Church and the Priest I recognized a Friend I already had. For I have long had an attachment to the Mystical Body and a love for the Order of Melchizidek, so to speak. When I sit in Mass surrounded by the atmosphere, however inauspicious it may seem (sometimes entirely because of the inauspiciousness), I feel the weight of centuries: I feel myself among a crows of countless Christians, listening to so many homilies, including some very bad ones, from some very bad priests, and yet receiving grace all the same from those very hands. It is a miracle that Christ has made himself so poor, I tell you, so as to reach into all the parishes and missions and cells of the world by such hands and voices.
I am a person who finds it hard to rely on people. And somehow God's friendship has found me through my mistrust, by letting me know that no matter what those people are like, His word that He comes to me through them is good.
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