“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to London. We hope you have an enjoyable time.”
Cox squeezed Lennon’s hand. “We intend to.”
The two friends were seated at a small table just inside the entrance to Beoty’s, a Greek restaurant on St. Martin’s Lane adjacent to the theater district. They were about half an hour early for their 8:00 p.m. dinner date with Inspector Koznicki.
After landing at Heathrow earlier that day, Father Koesler had gone directly to the Hotel Carburton, grateful that the British, unlike the Italians, did not conduct prolonged sightseeing tours of the countryside while the hotel rooms were being prepared. After a most welcome shower—he had been without running water for something more than twenty-four hours—he had napped and now felt refreshed.
Ramon Toussaint, on the other hand, after arriving at the hotel had left immediately to establish his mysterious contacts.
By prearrangement, they had met in the hotel lobby a little after seven and taken a taxi to Beoty’s, Inspector Koznicki’s suggested meeting ground.
“The Catholic Church of the future will be interesting. But I don’t have the slightest clue what it will be like.” Koesler rattled the ice in his bourbon manhattan.
“You mean the priesthood, whatever it will be, will have changed?” Toussaint sipped from his Myers’s dark rum and soda.
“Yes, exactly. There are so very, very few seminarians! Somewhere down the line, it’s got to show. The median age of active priests keeps going up. I just don’t know where it’s going to end!”
“The exodus from the priesthood seems to have decreased. Is that not a hopeful sign?”
“In a way, I suppose. But that decreasing number will be more than made up for by a recent phenomenon that hasn’t drawn sufficient interest so far.”
“Let me guess, Bob. You must be referring to the retired priests.”
“Exactly. When I was ordained in 1954, a retired priest was most rare. And if and when retirement did take place, it was almost always caused by some sort of terminal or at least debilitating illness. Why, the pastor of my first parish had such poor blood circulation that one of his legs had been amputated. Of course, he used to claim that he had one foot in the grave. But what he most feared was that the bishop might put him on the shelf.
“No, the image then, and, as far as I know, for centuries, perhaps right back to the beginning of Christianity, was that the priest went on doing his sacerdotal work as best he could until death. Every older priest I knew, from the time I was ordained, feared most being forced to retire. The ideal was that you were to die in harness—with stole around your neck in midabsolution.
“Nowadays, retirement is taken for granted as much for priests as it is for those in secular jobs. In Detroit, they become ‘senior priest’ and move out to a rest home, or a private home—or, as pastor emeritus, they continue to live in a parish rectory and do what little they wish.
“The contrast is provocative: If, after twenty years of active priesthood, a priest opts for laicization—and possibly marriage— a certain stratum of the fraternity looks down on him; but if, after twenty years of active priesthood, he retires to Florida—with or without his housekeeper—that same stratum considers him a good ole boy.”
“To what do you attribute this phenomenon?”
“I don’t really know. I suppose one of these days the sociologists will get hold of it, spread out the statistics and enlighten us. In the meantime, I don’t blame it on Vatican II, but I think it must be attributable to the Council.
“The after-effects of the Council appeared to change much of what many of us considered to be the heart of the religion we had been preaching and teaching. Some of us grew to understand that these reforms—and many more—were needed, indeed overdue. But others never made the adjustment. Their whole attitude changed and congealed. The green pups, as they saw the younger clergy, had managed to mutate the genuine Church and create an organization without rules and regulations, without all the convenient blacks and whites of the past. Very well, then; let them have it! Some of the older guys decided to mark time until they could fully bequeath this bastard Church to what they considered its progenitors.
“So now, even before clerical retirement, some priests resign the position of pastor—an office many of them spent fifteen or twenty years longingly preparing for. They voluntarily demote themselves to assistant pastors. Why should they take the heat of being in charge? The monetary income remains the same, while the responsibility diminishes.”
“All of the bonus and none of the onus,” Toussaint commented.
“Beg pardon,” the waitress appeared beside the table, “would you like to order another drink?”
Toussaint glanced at Koesler and noted their accord. “No, thank you, miss. We will just wait for our companion, if you please.”
“It’s a good thing she stepped in,” said Koesler, “I was getting carried away on a topic that not enough people are concerned about.”
“Not at all, Bob; please go on.”
“Well, priestly retirement is just a manifestation of our times.
“I know that may be too broad a statement, but consider how assignments—at least in Detroit—are made. In the good old days, whenever the chancery bureaucrats wanted to move a priest from one parish to another, you simply got a letter—not unlike the one the government used to send to military inductees—saying, ‘For the care of souls, I have it in mind to send you to . . .’ and then you’d be told at which parish you would spend the next several years of your life.
“No wonder that back then the Church was considered second in efficiency only to General Motors.
“By contrast, now, parish openings are listed in the priests’ newsletter, and, in effect, parishes advertise for a pastor, an associate, a chaplain, or whatever. There’s no doubt about it: it used to be a buyers’ market and now it’s a sellers’ market.
“But, you see, that is pretty much the way it always was in the secular business world. Employees would apply for the jobs they wanted. And they went where they wanted to. Of course, their employers might transfer them elsewhere, in which case the employees had no choice—other than to quit and try to find another job.
“Actually,” he paused for a moment, “it’s ironic. With the current recession in the U.S., the priestly employee has met and passed the secular employee on the bridge. Now it is a buyers’ market in the business world and their employees are hard put to find an alternate job—while the priest, whose services are very much in demand, can have his pick of clerical jobs.
“But back in the good old days, for us there was no practical recourse, no alternative. Quitting the priesthood was unthinkable.
“It is no longer unthinkable. And, in addition, there is a drastic shortage of priests. So, today’s priest is free to apply or not for the parish or position of his choice. There is precious little pressure. There can’t be; it is, as I said, a sellers’ market.
“And, just as priests now apply for jobs as our secular counterparts do, so priests retire just as our secular counterparts do.
“Whatever, there is no doubt that retirement is a drain on the priesthood that hardly anyone considers. It’s just, ‘Father deserves his well-earned retirement.’ Everyone takes it as a matter of course. But it remains a contemporary phenomenon that very definitely and substantially cuts down the number of active priests that are available.
“So, where do we go from here?”
Toussaint’s fingers drummed the table top. “It would seem that an alert organization in a situation like this would take some drastic steps at recruiting. Otherwise it would be forced to face the very real possibility of self- destruction.”
“Ah, yes, Ramon. But you see, the bishops fall back on Biblical passages such as, ‘You have not called me but I have called you.’ And, ‘Behold, I will be with you unto the consummation of the world.’ So, they tend to look at this as
