The Priest as Authority on the World

by John M. Gessell

from To be a priest, pp. 117-123,
edited by Robert E. Terwilliger and Urban T. Holmes, Seabury Press, New York, 1975.
Republished on our website with the necessary permissions.

John M. Gessell is professor of Christian Ethics at the School of Theology at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. Dr. Gessell has worked in the area of liberation theology and in curriculum design in theological education.

Religiousness, says Kierkegaard, is suffering. The capacity to feel and to be moved deeply is the sign of that compassion, springing from the unique vision of faith, which is the mark of true religion and points to its authority wherever it is exercised.

The unparalleled quality of compassionate anguish is perfectly revealed in Tom Wicker’s account of the Attica Prison uprising of September, 1971.*(A Time to Die (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Co., 1975). Wicker has elsewhere observed that he has no special competence or expertise in prison management or prison reform, but his compassionate involvement, driven by an unquestionable loyalty to his own sense of humanity, has made him an unarguable authority on the American penal system.

Wicker wrote that for most of his life he had lived by the reporter’s peculiar standards, the ethic of the press box rather than of the participant. It was high time, he thought, that he hold himself to a line. What was a life if it was never put to challenge, not just by foolhardy choice but as a logical and perhaps inevitable consequence of the way a person has lived and believed?

Wicker was one of a small group of men that the rebelling inmates requested be sent to the prison as observers. The exact position of this group was never made clear, and as the time passed, their power diminished to the vanishing point. As negotiators they were helpless. As advisors they were unanimously reluctant to suggest that the prisoners commit themselves one way or another. All they could hope for was to buy time in the event that some form of peaceful agreement could be reached. Even here they were unsuccessful.

And so it was inevitable that their effort would fail, for neither the community of Attica, nor, indeed, the American community outside its walls, was prepared to admit either its responsibilities or its failures with regard to the prisoners. This experience did, however force Wicker to confront a problem which he has now made the concern of us all. Wicker’s compassion testifies to a passionate religious conviction, and this compassion commands him to share the heartbreak and devastation of the brokenness of the human experience as disclosed at Attica. He has shown us what it takes to be an authority on the world.

Authority is born out of this sort of authentic religious compassion. It inheres in the ineffable quality of religious suffering, not suffering for its own sake but suffering through participation in the suffering of the world and the world’s anguish. Authority on the world is conferred upon him who is willing to suffer for the world. The authority of religiousness, then, does not lie in its superior knowledge or in its exemplary behavior, but it is inherent in its commitment, its openness to suffering, its capacity for compassion for the world. This has important implications for priestly authority on the world.

The priest has no inherent authority either in himself or in his office. Along with all baptized Christians, authority may emerge out of his experience with the world and fasten itself upon him. This authority arises from his willingness to suffer, to be stung by the world’s need, from his capacity for compassion. In addition, an authority is conferred upon him by the Church for the exercise of specialized functions on its behalf. These two sources of Christian authority are interrelated, as we shall see, but both are rooted in the one Gospel.

The priest has no authority other than that inherent in the Gospel. The authority of the priest, as the shared authority of any baptized Christian, is the authority of one who bears the Gospel in the world and who is enabled thereby to perceive the world compassionately and authoritatively in its light. The authority conferred upon him, on the other hand, by his ordination in the Church through the power of the Spirit, is carried out by the Church in obedience to the Gospel. This twofold authority is rooted in the one Gospel and is responsive to the authoritative word of God. This word goes forth as a creative and reconstitutive power. It confers in turn the power of critical discrimination, the power of imagination and perception, and the power for reconciliation and reconstruction. In what follows, I shall examine the authority of the priest on the world as the authority of baptism, the authority of the Eucharist, and the authority of reconstruction.

The Authority of Baptism

In what, then, lies the distinctive authority of the priest on the world? He has no unique authority, but shares in the common authority of all baptized members of the body of Christ. The calculation of the relationship between Gospel and world is, to paraphrase T. S. Eliot, an occupation for a saint. It is shared by all baptized Christians as command and grace. But the validity of Christian priesthood is, in part, guaranteed by the priest’s own conformity to this authenticating task. The exercise of Christian authority on the world is a part of priestly formation, and a repeatedly authenticating act.

If priestly authority on the world is, in part, constituted by the exercise of perception through the unique angle of vision of the Gospel, seeing the world constituted and reconstituted through the eyes of faith, there are three moments constitutive of this authority. These moments are compassion, alienation, and vision. They are not, however, related dialectically, but synchronously. They are experienced altogether at the same time as responses of baptismal faith.

In the compassion born of the vision of faith, the priest weeps with Jesus over Jerusalem and its rejection of the prophetic vision of the Gospel. His compassion is extended to the broken world and he shares in that pain. He knows the anguish of our troubled, crooked human nature. He experiences the shame of our errors and ignorances in judgment and in charity; he suffers the embarrassment and guilt of our negligences and of our sinful behavior. He is slow to judge, and he issues that judgment without condemnation; he is swift to forgive and assures that forgiveness, commending the sinner to the throne of grace and mercy, without commending the sin. He is swift to offer acceptance and the support of the outstretched hand of love which demands nothing in return. The priest knows his own experience of brokenness and lives with his own bent nature.

The priest shares in the alienation of Christians because the authority of the Gospel is alienating inasmuch as the Gospel appears as alien to a fallen world. Christians are not to be conformed to the world, though their consciousness needs to be formed by the need of the world. But this need is also alien because the fall has darkened the eye of understanding and perception, and the world does not know its own need. Further, the Christian is an alien in the world and shares in the world’s own alienation because the contingent structures of the created world have been elevated into the idolatrous objects of our corrupt imaginations, and have taken on the meaning of self-authenticating objects constituting a power now at enmity with the kingdom of God. The Principalities and powers of the world are in rebellion and Christians may lose their way among them, becoming estranged from themselves and from God. The reification of the world through its own imagination into the pretension of ultimate power leads it to make idolatrous claims which Christians are bound to reject. And so they become alien for Christ’s sake and the Gospel’s, even as Christ himself was outcast and an alien to the world that put him on a cross.

The authority of Christian priesthood, then, is realized in the exercise of that healing and reconstituting compassion for the world, which, at the same time, does not suffer the confusion of being conformed to the world. The authority of priesthood on the world arises in turn from the priest’s ability to remain alien from the world and to render a responsible critique of the world in the light of his vision of faith. The moments of compassion and of alienation are complemented by vision. The cross of Christ provides a unique angle of vision on the world. In the light of the cross and the resurrection faith, the world is refracted in a singular way. And the priest calls and recalls the world back to this vision, a vision which heals and transcends the brokenness of the world. For he knows that the idolatrousness of the human situation and the brokenness of the world are not the final but the penultimate words. The authority of priesthood is in the acknowledgment and the proclamation of the finality of the creative and the reconstituting word of the Gospel that is known and grasped in the unique vision of faith which sees the world reconciled and whole.

The authority of priesthood on the world is constituted by the exercise of that authority in the moments of compassion, alienation, and vision. These acts are signs of the healing power of the Gospel, and assist in bringing to the world that healing power in obedience and in loyalty to the God of faith. In sum, part of the authority of the priest on the world is that of Christian baptism, sharing the pain of abandonment and hopelessness where it is experienced in the interstices of disorder and despair; or, as Bonhoeffer put it, participating in the sufferings of God in the world.

The Authority of Eucharist

The authority of the priest on the world is amplified by ordination to a sacramental ministry of Eucharist, of showing forth the Lord’s death until his coming again. This at once dignifies and heals suffering. The Church confers this authority of the Gospel on the priest, both on its own behalf and for the sake of the world.

Christian priesthood is forged out of the unique experience of the Christian community. The priest’s authority on the world is that of the one who convenes eucharistic community for the recalling of the salvific event through which Christ redeemed and liberated the world, overcoming the enmity between God and man, and by leading that community into liturgical participation in that efficacious event.

This action, authorized by the Church through ordination, declares God’s unequivocal purpose to save and to reconstitute the world. It is also an unequivocal call to action to attack with compassion every center of power, in the Church as in the state, in the person as in the family, which constitutes itself alien to God’s purposes. The authority of the priest on the world is conferred by the Church and is centered in the Eucharist as the Gospel declaration of the purpose of God ultimately to overcome all human fallibility and to knit together the broken world.

Thus eucharistic authority, shared by the Christian community, is the authority to declare to itself and to the world both God’s judgment and his healing power. This dual eucharistic authority is in principle indivisible, for the two actions of healing and judging coinhere. At the same time, eucharistic action both divides and unites. It divides idolatrous power from God’s purposive power, and it unites sinful humanity with God’s redeeming grace.

The authority of the priest on the world, then, centers in his authority, conferred upon him by the Church, to convene eucharistic community. This action is pivotal since it is both the source and the center for compassionate suffering as well as the healing balm for the world’s need. Thus, in the Eucharist all compassion and suffering are gathered in and made one with our oblations whereby we experience the healing of our suffering and of our brokenness. We experience the wholeness of the resurrected Lord truly present to us.

The authority on the world of the priest as baptized Christian is gathered up and completed in the authoritative action of the priest as eucharistic officer. From here the priest’s authority on the world moves out again from the eucharistic action as the shared authority of all Christians called to go forth again into the broken world. The picture here is that of shared authority brought from the world to the holy table, offered by the priest in eucharistic action on behalf of the whole body, issuing forth again as the shared authority of all baptized Christians and going back into the world bearing the Gospel in the grace and power of the Eucharist.

The Authority of Reconstruction

The authority of baptism and the authority of the Eucharist are completed in reconstruction. Faith that issues in compassion and prayer inevitably leads to action. The central and unassailable fact which Christianity addresses is the tragic dimension of the world. The central and unassailable message which Christianity brings is that the way of God is the way beyond the tragedy of the human experience. Identity with the cross of Christ is at the same time solidarity with the world and with the poor and the sinful, with the broken and the oppressed people of the world.

The authority of the Gospel confers the power of criticism and judgment, of imagination and perception, and of the vision of reconstruction. All of these are born out of the struggle of compassion and alienation, supported by the vision of faith, and nurtured in the Eucharist. In this way the world is seen anew through the perspective of faith. It is seen in the light of its transcendent reference, without which it has no meaning. This vision of faith constitutes the authority of reconstruction. Here the priest’s authority on the world is that of the diagnostician. This is the authority of one who feels and sees the reconstituted world, and of the theological critic, the maker of new knowledge of and for the world.

The last and completing action of the priest as authority on the world is, therefore, the inescapable call to attack with compassion those powers existing in the world contrary to the kingdom of God wherever they are found. For the centers of worldly power are always at odds with the reign of God. The authority of the priest on the world is, with Christians everywhere, to attack the idolatrous powers of the world which are at enmity with God’s purposes and his kingdom.

The authenticating power of suffering, of Eucharist, is not completed without the authenticating power of prophetic judgment and disclosure. Without this, compassion and suffering are trivialized, and the Eucharist becomes blasphemous. Since Eucharist implies both healing and discriminate judgment, the priest as authority on the world is, together with all Christians everywhere, inescapably and consequentially involved in the compassionate confrontation, for example, of institutionalized violence, of attacks on privacy, of structural and systematic causes of poverty, and of economic and social injustice and oppression wherever they occur in the world. And the same confrontation must be had within our own household of faith, with our complicity in the violence and the injustice of the world, and with our inability to come to terms with the problems of authority, ordination, and human sexuality.

Conclusion

The priest has no inherent authority on the world. His authority is that of any baptized Christian whose authority is inherent in his own compassionate suffering. The priest’s authority on the world is either conferred upon him by this right of suffering, or by the intention of the Church that declares in him its own eucharistic priesthood in accordance with its apprehension of the Christian experience in the world. In other words, the experience of struggling with the relationship between Gospel and world and with the authenticating vision of faith is a act It is this authority, garnered out of personal Christian experience in the struggle with faith and belief, and out of the Church’s existence in the world, that is validated in ordination.

Finallv as Tom Wicker points out, the authentication of authority is the inevitable consequence of the way a person lives and believes. We are to go out into the world with gladness and singleness of heart.

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