By the time of his ordination, Paul was well on the road to becoming the Jesuits’ fiercest internal critic. Sometimes, writing under his own name and sometimes using a pseudonym, he excoriated priests and bishops who’d only wear a clerical collar to a protest meeting or who thought that celibacy could be selective. His satire was devastating; his judgments uncompromising; his logic impeccable. For all their commitment to Christian charity, religious superiors have never coped well with criticism, especially when it’s justified, so Paul endured years of ostracism within the order. Literally for decades, he was on the verge of expulsion and denied the opportunity to take final vows.

Meanwhile, he was a professor of ancient Semitic languages to students in the Vatican; no doubt inspiring many of them to become better priests. For about a decade until 2012, he was an annual visitor to Australia, teaching a much-in-demand two-week course in practical apologetics at the John Paul II Institute in Melbourne. I recall an intellectually rigorous and personally challenging sermon to the sleepy church of St. Martin de Porres in Sydney. It was hard to grasp all he said and impossible to live up to what he asked but the parishioners mobbed him afterward all the same.

Why did he have to be so unappreciated by his own colleagues; why not join the less militantly progressive Australian province; or be incardinated into the Sydney Archdiocese where George Pell was a friend and fan, I sometimes asked. But this, of course, would have been taking too worldly or too self-centered an approach. Paul’s self-appointed mission was to prod the Jesuits into once more being the special forces of faith and if that meant that he was often a lonely outcast, so be it.

The hardest battles are with the people who are supposed to be on the same side. There are no medals for internal fights, however necessary. The strength of character and the moral courage required is all the more heroic because it’s invariably only recognized posthumously. I hope the Jesuits grasp what they’ve lost and start to give him the respect he always deserved. Especially because prayer is not my forte, this tribute is my way to honor a man I loved.
    -TRIBUTE: Remembering Fr. Paul Mankowski (Tony Abbott, 9 . 4 . 20, First Things)

Sin against the Eighth Commandment
Now it is my conviction that in our own time the sins most characteristic of clergy are sins against, not the Sixth, but the Eighth Commandment. Any sin, obviously, is a serious matter for the sinner, but since the faith of Christians is connected in a particularly intimate way to the trustworthiness of the Church’s ministers, offenses against truth committed by the clergy are especially troublesome. In fact, I believe that most of the woes that beset the clerical life today can be traced to this sin. Attempt at reform, accordingly, should aim to restore integrity, in the fullest sense, to the life of the priest.[...]

A man whom I know

... Let me give another concrete case, one of which I have more direct knowledge. I know a man who the week before he was ordained a deacon, was assembled by his superior in the parlour beneath his office and presented, for the first time, with the formula of the Act of Faith. You know the formula to which I refer: it consists of recitation of the Nicene Creed plus the undertaking to “firmly embrace and accept all and everything concerning the doctrine of faith and morals which has either been defined by the Church’s solemn deliberation or affirmed and declared by its ordinary magisterium”, and so forth. Having given the theologate time to read through the text, the superior then said. “I know this moment may be very difficult for you. I invite you, however, to allow the Holy Spirit, who has brought you this far in the journey, to carry you through to next Saturday.” There was no doubt whatever what his words meant. My informant believes that each man in the room knew that he was being invited (and, given the timing and circumstances of the occasion, urged) to perjure himself. The invocation of the Holy Spirit was an added blasphemy which, though shocking, did not alter the facts in any material way whatever.

Every ordinand in the room made the Act of Faith. My informant has excellent reason to believe that several did so in good faith; he is just as convinced that several men did not embrace and accept the Church’s doctrine on faith and morals, and accordingly, that they solemnly perjured themselves that evening.

Such a man would hope that he is wrong. He would hope that the heresy voiced by some was not really ex animo dissent but unrefl ective conformity to the atmosphere of theological Whiggery then in fashion; he would hope that others followed the superior’s suggestion simply because it came from him, blindly, mechanically, without attending to his words or to the issues at stake.

Moral eunuchs.

But my informant’s relations with some of these men were changed forever, for either they are incapable of swearing an oath, and thus moral eunuchs, or else capable of swearing, and thus perjurers. Neither alternative is gratifying, a third possibility is not evident. In some important way their manhood, as well as their priesthood, was permanently mutilated. After all, the occasions on which human beings solemnly profess who we are and what we believe are rare. We don’t have that many opportunities. For the most part, our daily lives are spent in a welter of courtesies, compromises, acts of diplomatic evasion, not to mention tactical silences; all of these may be innocent and all are certainly necessary to civilised community, but they say little or nothing about the ultimate meaning and purpose of our lives. It is by our most important commitments, vows and oaths and promises, that we plant a fl ag in the sand, so to speak, that we tell the world the truth about ourselves, about the deepest allegiances of our souls.

Motions of civility

We might well pity men who are moral eunuchs, and, though it requires a greater effort, we might pity men who are perjurers. But I submit that it is impossible to respect respect them. This is not so much a observation about them. This is not so much a observation about human psychology as an entailment of the logic of giving one’s word; perjurers and moral eunuchs have denied us a view of the true self to respect. In a philosophically important way, there is “nothing there” to respect. As a consequence, all one’s dealings with these men become necessarily superficial. Mutual wariness and suspicion become inevitable. Trust is non-existent, not because it is a good deliberately withheld, but because it is a good not in one’s gift. We share dwellings and tables amicably enough, we go through the motions of civility, but only as actors feeding each other lines in a script written for a religious life that belongs to someone else.

If all this sounds like moral swaggering on my part, let me add that I make no claim to the courage of St Thomas More; except by occasional trifling vexations, I have never paid a price for my beliefs. I don’t know if I could face what St Thomas More faced without folding at the knees. But there’s a difference between the man who embarks on an undertaking and finds the difficulties greater than anticipated, and the man who never engages the difficulties in the first place. We can feel compassion for those men who, being weaker than Thomas More and trapped in a dilemma not of their own making, succumbed under force to the threat of imprisonment and destitution and swore an oath they didn’t believe: an ugly failure, but an understandable one. But what do we make of men who – under no external compulsion whatsoever – forswear themselves and whose castration is a self-inflicted wound?

Isolation of faithful priests

The moral landscape in which faithful priests operate today makes inevitable some level of emotional isolation. True communion, union of minds and hearts, is only possible among men who are in agreement on first principles, who recognise the same goods as governing their lives. In the absence of such communion — indicated, as I have argued, by the alacrity with which one’s peers and superiors forswear themselves on matters of prime importance — a priest frequently finds himself inclined to cynicism. By cynicism I mean not a habit of sardonic comment on the seeming triumph of hypocrisy, but rather the kind of despair that tempts one to measure triumph and failure in purely this-worldly terms, to make one’s own, that is, the values of those who have prospered by cunning and deceit. Difficult though it is to resist, to succumb to this kind of cynicism is to start down a road from which few men return. The alternative is to take our vows, oaths and promises seriously, trusting that God will vindicate his word, the word he sent among us, the Word made flesh. In the interim, a certain amount of heartbreak is the inescapable price to be paid for integrity; nobody ever said it would be easy.