While many questioned the accuracy of data in the expose and the assumptions derived from them, any educated Catholic would not question the probability of the story. We realize that just because a man wears his collar backwards doesn’t mean he has his head on straight.

While I read those stories with mild embarrassment as a Catholic, I do not judge those who have been unable to keep their vow of celibacy or for their moral delinquency. I believe someone we all know has something to say about not judging. Nor do I place the backsliders, heterosexual or homosexual, in the same repugnant vein as I might place child molesters.

One article on AIDS in the priesthood in The Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission (December 2000) by Paul J . Shaughnessy, S. J., condensed from Catholic World Report (November 2000), however, gave me quite a start as to its faulty premise:

Clerics make the priest celibate. Right. And going into a garage makes us automobiles. Shaughnessy, S.J., suggests that “When a priest leaves the rectory not wearing clerical garb, one needn’t automatically assume that he does so to engage in unnatural vice. It may be natural vice. But there is almost never a good reason for a priest to wear mufti away from home. Confront him. Don’t be taken in by the excuse that it’s his day off.”

Shaughnessy’s logic may have been stilted from wearing his military uniform rather than clerics. He is reportedly a military chaplain.

Perhaps the reason his article gave me a start is that when I am “off”, I don’t wear clerics. It is not that I take a vacation from priesthood or involved in natural or unnatural vices. As Jesus did, there are just some times when I need to get away from people and have time for myself. The collar attracts the good and bad—the good can be embarrassing and humbling as people show their respect for the collar. The bad speaks for itself: While shopping and wearing clerics, I was accosted by a man in a department store who queried, “Are you with an enlightened Christian religion, or are you with the whore of Babylon?”

“Yes, I’m with the enlightened and oldest Christian religion—Roman Catholicism. No, I’ don’t even know your mother.”

Another time, while hurrying from the parking lot into a hospital to anoint a critically ill parishioner, an able-bodied man stopped me with, “Are you a Catholic Priest?”

“Yes.”

“Will you hear my confession.”

“Not now. But if you’ll wait here, I’ll be back shortly.” He didn't wait.

However, my fondest memory of being accosted in clerical garb was from a woman who stopped me in the Post Office to bend my ear with a whiny, boring scenario of why she left the Catholic Church—her pastor had been very rude to her—and “the people at church were snobbish.”

“Lady, if that’s the reason you left the Church, prepare yourself to spend eternity in hell—and don’t be surprised that some of the same people will be there, too.”

“Don’t be shy about confronting priests who put off the outward signs of their priesthood,” Shaughnessy, S.J., writes. Obviously, he has not had annoying interruptions, confrontations or solicitations while wearing his clerics or he would not have reached an inane assumption that wearing them makes one priestly.  Does it stand to reason that wearing civilian clothes is an occasion for sin, or that the uniform makes the soldier a fighter,  an officer a gentleman?

Clothes do not make the man. They only make what we expect the man to be, which may or not be what he actually is. When we see baggy pants, a skull cap and shirts down to the knees on a teen we can shrug and think, “A kid is trying to fit in.” The same attire on a twenty-something and we see a man who hasn’t grown up or going to rob the Seven-11.  Remember, that Jack the Ripper was a snappy dresser and George Washington observed, “Do not conceive that fine clothes make fine men, anymore than fine feathers make fine birds.”

No, it is not what we have outside that makes us a priestly people.  Trying to live The Way as celibates is generated from inside.  We are priestly when we live out our commitment to God and the Church in accordance with the Gospel.  That resolution is what makes us disciples of Christ—who by the way, didn’t wear clerics either.

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