They [priests] gradually lost their faith as they went through life and woke up one day to find that they were agnostics who had a decent living in the Church and no prospect in middle age of getting a job of equal worth and satisfaction. It’s an easy thing to do in a post-Christian society.Much as Obama era FBI and DOJ executives, who began careers caring about justice, ended up “conceal(ing) the vice to protect the institution.” This primrose path is well-trodden by minions and leaders alike, in all sorts of large organizations.
No doubt their loss of faith was a problem for them, but in a very human way they managed to keep postponing a decision on what to do about it. Maybe they even enjoyed their job, which they defined as a special kind of social worker helping others or, at a more senior level, a special kind of bureaucrat who could use the Church to advance good causes of a secular kind.
Of course, agnostics in clerical garb would find it hard to keep the rules on chastity as age and loneliness wore them down. And if they no longer took the priesthood’s disciplines (or the authority sustaining them) seriously, even if they remained personally chaste, they would find it hard to impose those rules on others. Their loyalty would gradually shift from the Christian faith to the Church as an institution, and their first response to scandal would be to conceal the vice to protect the institution.
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A personal insight - as a young PhD I spent 22 months consulting in a government agency where two professionals were former Roman Catholic priests. One had married a former nun, the other wed an airline flight attendant.
The second enjoyed the clerical role so much he retrained as an Episcopal padre and did the gig “nights and weekends” while the agency was his bill-paying “day job.” Each, I learned, viewed their priestly role as “a special kind of social worker helping others.”
