More on clergy burnout
I’ll suggest with all respect that this points to the Catholic/Protestant divide. The great Thomas Day described this: the Protestant minister looks out at his congregation; he knows them and they know him. After all they hired him. Rome can be coldly institutional (the Orthodox not but they have their own problems) but at St Gargantua’s, the priest and that huge, frightening entity, ‘the people’, all have to answer to something bigger than themselves: defined doctrine, a constitution with no repeals. Not like a cult controlling everybody’s lives — everybody who really lives trad, pre-conciliar Catholicism knows it’s not like that at all. But the people’s expectations of the clergy are different that way: they tend less to treat the priest like one of the help. An Orthodox convert priest once described mainstream Americans (by definition culturally Protestant) expecting clergy to be like funeral directors: you hire them to say nice platitudes because that’s what’s done; you don’t take orders from them!

Not that burnout’s not a big problem with priests as the rash of resignations 20-40 years ago showed. Celibate diocesan priests have a compounded problem of loneliness, neither family men nor with the support of community that monks and nuns have. But things are bad all over: the Orthodox, who ordain the married, seem be living off the ‘stimulus package’ of convert clergy; where are the Greek and Slavic boys?

When it’s congregationalist, even functionally, and/or when everything is subject to change by majority vote (essentially how mainline Protestantism works), how can the minister be effective? Don’t like him/her? Get another one!

Via the Revds Tripp, Jane and Robb, all of whom do intensely demanding work with people at which I wouldn’t last a week. I vest and chant part of the office and the epistle: a lot of the fun (this week’s fun: I forgot to take my epistle book to church but somebody saved the day) but none of the crushing responsibility.

Labels: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Catholic faith