✣ Highlights from the week online
Ignoring your brethren
The Church is not taking good enough care of its priests, says Fr Ray Blake on his blog. Part of the role of a bishop should be to look out for his priests, he notes. “Many bishops seem to treat their clergy as a possible source of problems, who are best avoided,” he writes. Considering the enormous expense to train a priest and their rarity nowadays, one would expect a bishop to spend most of their time ‘‘strengthening’’ their priests. In some dioceses the opposite can happen, bishops undermine their clergy.” “We clergy, too, are often very poor at supporting one another. Clergy can be sick, depressed or even dying and be ignored by their brethren; they can lose their faith or begin preaching heresy or fall into serious sin or addiction and be left to themselves. It is certainly one of my faults, we tend to imagine greater resilience in our brothers than there actually is, or simply not want to be bothered by their problems.” Little attention is given to the career development of young priests, he writes, “and often their talents, skills and enthusiasm [are] left to stagnate or wither”. He concludes: “The Church should not be a less caring employer than business or industry.”
