Priest Personnel

Jim St.Germaine was preparing a cicular enclosed mound of soil enshrining a polished statue of Mary on the campus of Saint Nicholas Catholic Church in Clinton Township, MI..

The next day he aimed to plant pansies.

Between uprooting weeds, Jim, now in his 80s, conversed with me about many topics.

Our connection was Saint Rene Goupil Church in Sterling Heights, MI., where his family prayed after joining years after I had moved from there to St. Christine Church in Detroit.

My son thinks that the answer to the priest personnel problem is clergy having another job besides being a priest.

"That's the worker priest concept,"  I said.

Father Jacques Loew spawned the worker-priest movement  when he worked in the docks at Marseilles in 1941.

A re-examination of priestly life and vocation began with hundreds of other French Catholic priests.

Loew, a Dominican order priest studied the condition of the working classes with clergy engaging in jobs in car factories, among other jobs.  They intended to experience the everyday life of those they ministered among daily.

Father Karol Wojtyla, a young Polish priest and future Pope John Paul II, visited Marseilles in 1947.  Wojtyla seemed certain that this "apostolic work" was the way for the French church "to reach its
 own believers."

However, the abandonment of the traditonal preist way of life and the worker-priests' growing role in left-wing politics, raised concerns and Pope Pius XII ended this experiment in 1954.

Merit mounts, it seems to me, when pastors work in the trenches with the people, however.   Experiencing their daily struggles and joys assists clergy in pastoral care, and, fruitful ministry.

"I wish my son would get a real job,"  my dad once told an usher of my home church of the late Saint Thomas the Apostle, on Detroit's east side.

Dad was a farmer who worked hard with his hands.

Exploring anew the worker-priest movement merits such examination.

In a way, my special assignment as a counselor that was not my idea is part of the worker-priest movement.  Although my bishop asked me to do this, I suspect that the lack of enthusiasm and support for this cryptic assignment, as Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, wondered out loud about its meaning, has its roots in fears of the worker-priest movement.