Which priests do we need? To form missionary pastors"All for you", the testimony of a young seminarianJoan Enric Vives, archbishop and president of the Episcopal Commission for the Clergy and Seminaries of the Spanish Episcopal Conference, and Dr. Carlos Chiclana, psychiatrist and author of "Retos, risks and opportunities in the affective life of the priest", were the speakers at the last Omnes Forum focused on Affective Life and Priestly Personality. Keys to formation, organized in conjunction with the CARF Foundation and with the collaboration of the bank Sabadell.
Dozens of people gathered at the headquarters of the Carlos de Amberes Foundation (Madrid, Spain), on Wednesday, March 15 for this Forum, which highlighted the need for clear and adequate formation during seminary time and during priestly life, as well as the main conclusions that Dr. Chiclana's team has drawn from its study "....Challenges, risks and opportunities of the priest's affective life", in which more than a hundred priests and seminarians participated.
The director of Omnes, Alfonso Riobó, welcomed speakers and attendees, stressing that "affectivity and happiness are closely related", since through good training, "affectivity can be integrated into the personality as a whole", a necessary aspect for the fulfillment of any person.
"Priestly formation is a single great way."
Joan Enric Vives, Archbishop and President of the Episcopal Commission for the Clergy and Seminaries of the Spanish Episcopal Conference and Bishop of Urgell, was the first to speak. In his intervention he referred to "Forming missionary pastorsThe "Plan for Priestly Formation of the Church in Spain, a document that obtained total unanimity on the part of all the Spanish bishops", essential for understanding the formation process of priests and seminarians. In this text, it can be seen that "priestly formation is a single great path".
Vives wanted to start from the idea that the sacrament of Holy Orders consists in "making the grace of the fatherhood of God reach everyone". The priest, the bishop explained, is "a bearer 24 hours a day, all his life, until he dies, of the grace of priestly ordination for the Church and for the world". Precisely for this reason, it is important that "the formation process lasts a lifetime, not only during the seminary period.
In this regard, the Bishop of Urgell stressed that "psychiatry and priestly formation have to go together, they have to seek together the welfare of our priests and seminarians". Especially important is "the collaboration with psychiatry and psychology in the period of vocational discernment".
All this without forgetting that "one also forms oneself, welcoming the gift of God, allowing the Holy Spirit to form you in the Church and in the paths that life opens up for us".
The importance of taking care of the heart
Vives pointed out that "priests, as men that they are, do not cease to have some needs and shortcomings. Therefore, it is good that "they have as a motto for life the importance of letting themselves be helped.
The help they can get is aimed at taking care of the heart, something that Pope Francis has echoed many times. Writing the role of the heart is constantly emphasized.
But why is it important to take care of the heart? As Vives affirmed, because this attention allows "to form the heart of man so that he can love as Christ loves his Church".
Keys to formation in pastoral charity
Joan Enric Vives ended his talk by specifying five keys to formation in pastoral charity, in order to help both seminarians and priests. The points mentioned by the bishop were:
- Acquire the feelings of the Son of God
- Feeling with the People of God, feeling it as one's own
- To give consistency to the personality
- Living fraternity
- Welcoming simplicity of life, poverty and spiritual infancy
- Fostering an evangelizing or missionary spirit
Spiritual life as the center of everything
The second speaker was psychiatrist Carlos Chiclana, who focused his presentation on the results of the aforementioned study. A total of 128 priests and seminarians participated in this study, with an average age of approximately 50 and 20 years of priestly life.
Dr. Chiclana explained that the study was based on "five open-ended questions about what challenges seemed most significant for the affective life of a priest, what risks they appreciated, what opportunities they saw, what helped them in particular in their formation on affectivity and what they missed in the formation".
The results showed that "the areas of greatest interest are spiritual life, loneliness, interpersonal relationships and training", however, Chiclana clarified that among the participants "it is not shown that they lacked training in relation to loneliness, both physical and emotional".
The conclusions of the study
Carlos Chiclana affirmed that, taking into account the data provided by the study, it is important "to strengthen in priests all that is relational, friendship", so that "they can live human relationships with normality, intimacy, affective freedom and commitment".
In addition, the psychiatrist proposed "that all seminarians be psychologically evaluated to help them". In order to know them better and help them "to put all the necessary means to mature in their personal vocation". And, along with all this, to reinforce the idea that "priests have to take care of themselves in order to be able to take care of others".
Antidotes against loneliness
Dr. Chiclana, like Vives, wanted to specify some points and, in his case, they referred to the fight against the loneliness that can afflict priests and seminarians:
- Orderly attachment that provides safety and security
- Social integration
- Nurturing relationships with others
- Reaffirmation of the value
- Reliable partnership with others
- Guidance through someone trustworthy and experienced
Responsibility and integration
After the presentations, there was a question and answer session in which issues such as the accompaniment of the priests of the families in the Christian communities were raised. To which Dr. Chiclana responded that "the first and simplest thing is material". If priests are helped in day-to-day matters, pastors can devote more time to the administration of the sacraments and to their spiritual life.
For his part, Vives explained that "there is a mutual responsibility" that should lead us to "foster different forms of fraternity", in order to take care of each other.
They also discussed the idea of excluding a pathway, whether spiritual or psychological, when the priest or seminarian has some kind of discomfort, causing the problem to try to be solved from a very limited point of view. In this aspect, Dr. Chiclana stressed the importance of promoting integrity in all aspects of the person, so that each issue is worked on in the most appropriate way, thus managing to "integrate both spiritual and human aspects".
