Review for Ministers-at-Work by Phil Aspinall July 2004
Fifty years after the suppression of the Worker Priests....
It was from the end of the war, and the profound changes that it set in motion, that priests and seminarians felt the pressing need to leave the habitual places of the sacerdotal minister. Suddenly confronted by the radical divide between the world of workers and the world of the clergy, their conscience made it necessary for them to become priests in a different way. Without a preconceived plan, they progressively realised their “intuition” and renounced traditional forms of priestly ministry to go into the factories and workshops – not to be among the workers, but to make their lives as workers.
To say of the Worker Priests (Prętres Ouvriers) that they wanted to be priests and workers locates the principal objective of this book: to understand from the basis of some thirty interviews the conditions in which these candidates for the priesthood, already changed despite themselves by the seminary, were converted for a second time by learning what it meant to be workers. How did these priests want to break the barriers between a priest separated - as they had first learnt – to be exposed to the physical risks and tiredness and the long hours of work? How did they express a double fidelity: to the Gospel and to the Working Class? How do they explain the suppression by Rome since 1949, which struck down the PO on 1st March 1954? Why did they live with the interdiction to work in factory and with Unions - an irreparable condemnation, which dramatically put before them an impossible choice?
This book concludes with the important question of the transmission of the model of Worker Priest, which finds itself made more fragile by a series of institutional obstacles and social and religious changes. A type of prophetic ministry was nevertheless sufficiently present to raise up new vocations, at the cost of an inevitable repositioning of the PO in the Church, post Vatican 2, which was more open to the mass of people, but also desiring to control the internal forces for change.
“Priests and Workers” addresses itself to those who are still the players and the witnesses to this pastoral innovation. More widely, it speaks to those who wish to know better this moment in the history of Catholicism, by means of appropriate tools (notices, documents, glossary, index) set in their necessary context. One can also read of the extension of a sociology of conversion and of the incorporation of a religious culture.
Publisher’s website is www.karthala.com.