The Parish Priest as Spiritual Father

There have been a number of times throughout my ministry that I have been asked by inquirers or parishioners if I would be their spiritual father.  My answer is always the same: “No, but I am happy to be your pastor and your friend”.  Sometimes I explain more fully:  “People in parishes don’t need a spiritual father; they need a pastor.” My guess is that my attitude is a common one among parish clergy.  And yet despite this our 1998 OCA clergy guidelines (repeated in the 2023 update) affirms that “the priest is the spiritual father of his parish and every parishioner ought to respect him as such”.  What is going on?

       Briefly, what is going on is the use of two different understandings of what it means to be a spiritual father.  There is no contradiction; different people are just using the same words to indicate two very different things.

       When someone asks another to be his or her “spiritual father” they are thinking of a relationship characterized by intense one-on-one spiritual direction:  the spiritual father gives counsel, advice, and orders and the spiritual child obeys the spiritual father.  The origin and natural home for such a relationship is the monastery, not the parish; for it is in a monastery that such an intense one-on-one relationship is possible, built on a deep knowledge of the spiritual child on the part of the spiritual father. 

Bluntly put, elderly Fr. Barsanuphius knows the younger monk Br. George very well indeed since they share a close and intimate life together with the rest of the brotherhood in the same monastery.  That knowledge allows Fr. Barsanuphius to function as a director, guide, and spiritual father to Br. George.  The monastic culture of humility and unquestioning obedience— i.e. asking a blessing before doing pretty much anything— undergirds and supports such a relationship.  The fact that it all takes place in a monastic community under the guidance of the Abbot limits the risk of the abuse of authority on the part of the spiritual father.  If the spiritual father’s counsel becomes unbalanced, tyrannical, or otherwise weird, the checks and balances inherent in a close monastic community can still step in and correct any abuse (and possibly assign another spiritual father).

We note again:  in this monastic context, spiritual fatherhood consists of the individual and detailed direction of another’s life.

None of this is really possible or desirable in a parish.  If one attempts to replicate monastic conditions in a parish, things are almost guaranteed to turn abusive and strange, since the parish priest cannot possibly be privy to all the personal details of his parishioner’s life in the way that a monk can know about another monk in his monastery. 

The priest in such a case then turns into a guru and his ministry is transformed into one of control rather than love so that one is left with a cult of personality wherein no one can criticize or question the priest.  This is always bad, both for the priest and for the parishioner since the parish consists of a community of families, each of which has its own internal hierarchy and a parish guru threatens the internal hierarchy of those families.

Regarding church leadership, our Lord He said, “You are not to be called Rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers.  And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called guides [Greek καθηγητής/ kathegetes], for you have one Guide, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant” (Matthew 23:8-10).

There is indeed a hierarchy within the Church but it is a hierarchy of function, not ontology, for it is built upon a foundation of radical ontological egalitarianism: before anything else, we “are all brothers”.  No gurus allowed.

We note too the often unfortunate phenomenon of laymen seeking spiritual fathers or monastic gurus outside their parishes, sometimes from monasteries far away or perhaps finding such guides online. The problems here are obvious and manifold.  How can a monk many miles away know the details of a distant parishioner’s life?  Or the parish situation in which he must function?  And how will the parishioner co-ordinate and combine his relationship with his pastor with that of his long-distance monastic spiritual father?

This, of course, does not mean that a parishioner must have his parish priest as his confessor, especially if he or she has been confessing to someone else for many years.  One is certainly allowed such relationships outside the parish, since each parish should function in a symbiotic relationship with neighbouring parishes.  One’s parish is not an island from which one cannot leave or travel. But having a long-distance spiritual director with no real connection with the parish is rarely wise.

What then are we to make of the episcopal declaration that “the priest is the spiritual father of his parish”?  The episcopal guidelines are there to supply wisdom for the priests since the bishop has a God-given responsibility for all the parishes in his diocese and all the clergy.  What, then, can the bishops mean?

Simply this: the bishops are not counselling that the priest become a spiritual father giving intimate direction to the lives of every parishioner as if the parish were a monastery.  They are counselling something else entirely— namely that the priest be a father to the parish as a whole.

That is, the main task of a priest is to create family, to take all the people of the parish with all their varied and sometimes conflicting differences and mold them into a single family, a community based on mutual love, mutual trust, and mutual service where each has his own role and his own value.  He does this in a variety of ways such as proclaiming the truth in sermons, offering advice when requested in personal counselling, visiting his people in their homes, sharing occasions of significance with them such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals, hearing their confessions, and (of course) by faithfully being their voice and liturgical leader in the regular church services.  In other words, what a father is to his family, the priest must be to his parish.  This involves working cooperatively with the Parish Council, the Church School, the Choir and all the various workers in the parish.  (See here for more.)

Be it well noted: in the parish, this kind of spiritual fatherhood is not one of control, but of service.  And in a healthy parish, the result will be a community in which the people love one another— and also love the priest.  When a priest truly loves his people, they will come to love him in return and to trust him and to follow him. 

For this reason I always tell my young men whom I send off to seminary that a priest runs his parish not by canonical authority alone (because the bishop has made him the Rector) but by moral authority (because the people have come to trust him).  By his love for them and his service to them, he has gained credibility.  But such a thing takes time, even years.  To be a priest, a man must be outwardly ordained by a bishop.  To be a successful priest he must then also be inwardly ordained by his people as they add their silent axios repeated time and again as he continues to serve them.  The sacramental ordination and the cassock give him the opportunity to serve his people and gain their love and trust.  Only then in time will he be able to function as a true father to his parish as the bishops have counselled.

The parish church needs true fathers, men who will humble themselves, lay aside the garment of pride, gird themselves with the towel of servanthood and wash the feet of the people (see John 13:4f). 

And the parish must do this because of what the World outside needs.  For the World, broken, bleeding, sinful, dazed and confused, needs Christ— not just a Christ far away, enthroned in the heavens, but also Christ within its midst, a saved and saving Body, a community of truth holding aloft the Word of life to the dying race of men.  Our bishops are tasked with guarding and transmitting the Faith.  To that end, they ordain parish priests throughout their dioceses, to form God’s family in their local community.  Parish priests are ordained by them to form the Church and so help save the World.  This is why a priest must prove himself a true father to his family.