Two hours by car from the centre of the diocese, dark roads, a half-empty presbytery, no peers to talk to. The new parish priest is not even thirty, he was ordained only recently; until yesterday he was following hundreds of young people in the oratory and on social media, now he finds himself in a village with very few souls, with no real exchange, no fraternity, no real possibility of continuing that ministry which had made him so close to the younger generations.
Officially, it is a pastoral appointment: “the periphery has a right to a young parish priest full of energy.” In reality, however, the other priests know that this is a parish where “you get dumped if you risk outshining the bishop.” With the pontificate of Pope Francis the number of young bishops has exploded and, with a few naive exceptions, by now everyone has realised that many of these appointments are proving to be disastrous. Why? Because maturity is missing, experience is missing and often the very people concerned end up suffering in a role which, on the one hand, they have pursued obsessively, but on the other hand imprisons them: always under the gaze of people and confrères, crushed by the weight of a diocese and all the problems that come with it.
Discontent among priests and abuse
Among priests, especially the younger ones, stories are emerging that describe disturbing situations: bishops who govern the diocese as if they were suspended in a kind of prolonged adolescence. Men of the Church who, instead of representing a mature fatherhood, end up taking part in dynamics of jealousy, gossip, factions, which certainly exist among priests but which a mature bishop should know how to defuse, not fuel. Dom Dysmas de Lassus, Carthusian prior and author of Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, describes in the Russian tradition the figure of the mladostartchestvo, the “young elders”: spiritual guides who behave like great masters without having the experience, holiness or charism. They are men who “play at being staretz” and end up producing only fruits of confusion and dependence.
Transposed to diocesan governance, the risk is evident: bishops who demand total obedience without having reached true affective and spiritual maturity, and who react like wounded adolescents when a young priest is more sought after by the people than they are, or dares to question their visions and their demands. Here the distance between the “bishops of the past” and many bishops today becomes fully visible. The bishop who is a father is the one who engages in dialogue with his priests, understands, listens and then decides; he did not need to proclaim synodality because he lived it in the concrete form of fatherhood. Today, instead, they fill their mouths with synodality but act like despots, and their decisions often bear the mark of resentment, retaliation, the desire to punish. And if you rebel? They send you to a psychologist – not someone truly free and competent, but the trusted professional of their inner circle, functional more to “brainwashing” the priest than to taking care of his person.
Obedience or control? When the bishop’s will takes the place of God
In ecclesial language, obedience is a noble word. Dom Dysmas recalls that obedience, in the tradition of the Church, concerns the will and actions, not thoughts: a superior can ask someone to do something, but cannot claim the right to command what a person must think or feel. In many testimonies of seminarians, priests or religious, however, a distortion emerges: obedience is used as a key to control even the conscience, to cancel personal judgement, to replace discernment with a “do as I say” that claims to apply “in the name of God.” You are about to leave for summer camp with the young people of the parish when, just before getting on the coach, the bishop calls: “We need to talk.” These bishops expect you to drop everything and go immediately, because they come first. They do not respect the priest’s time, they do not know how to wait, they do not consider that the priest too has his own life, responsibilities and activities already underway. And the imbalance is obvious: when you are the one asking for an appointment at a difficult time, you have to wait weeks before you manage to see them; when they are the ones looking for you, you must show up at once.
This is what de Lassus calls “spiritual abuse”, an evil that is not just a mistake in governance, but a real violence against the person. Quoting the theologian Jacques Poujol, he describes spiritual abuse as a “spiritual and psychological ill-treatment inflicted on a person,” which has the effect of weakening them to the point of destroying them and making them dependent, both psychologically and spiritually. If this applies to a religious community, it applies even more to the relationship between bishop and priests. When we are ordained, we promise obedience and fidelity to the bishop, successor of the apostles. But when that ordinary uses this promise to secure silence, unconditional submission, the absence of criticism and total alignment, we are no longer in the realm of pastoral guidance: we are already on the threshold of control.
Peripheries as exile, not mission
One of the most insidious forms of abuse is the use of appointments as an instrument of undeclared punishment. There are no decrees that speak of sanctions, no written disciplinary measures, but it is enough to look at the map of the diocese to understand: “problematic” priests end up in the most remote parishes, priests very much followed by young people are moved to places where there are practically no young people, those who dare to propose a more vibrant pastoral life find themselves in locations that do not even appear on direct transport links to the city. The point is not that a mountain or rural parish is in itself a “punishment.” The point is the criterion by which it is decided who should be sent there.
There are certainly parishes for which priests of greater maturity are more suitable, with years of ministry behind them and a consolidated inner structure; and there are contexts – schools, universities, oratories, city centres – where it is almost natural that young priests should be close to young people, speaking their language, sharing their schedules and struggles. When, instead, a newly ordained priest is sent alone, hours away from the presbyterate, without a network of relationships capable of supporting him, without the possibility of continuing his commitment to youth ministry, simply because he is “too sought after” or “too highly regarded by the people,” that periphery ceases to be a place of mission and becomes a place of exile. The consequences are not only pastoral. A young priest in isolation risks depression, withdrawal into himself, loss of vocational enthusiasm. Unchosen solitude, imposed “in the name of obedience,” can become fertile ground for all kinds of fragilities: addictions, cynicism, loss of trust in the Church. What, from the outside, appears to be a normal transfer, from the inside is experienced as a disguised disciplinary measure.
When the bishop claims the right to manage the priest’s soul
At the heart of de Lassus’ book there is a sentence that encapsulates the drama of spiritual abuse: the abuser takes “into his hands my brain, my heart, my soul, my spirit.” This is what the author calls “slavery without visible chains”: the person is not physically bound, but psychologically and spiritually. Applied to the relationship between bishop and priest, this dynamic appears every time a bishop interprets every dissent as a lack of fidelity, uses the appeal to unity to extinguish legitimate questions, and confuses the rejection of an unjust decision with the rejection of himself. In this logic, the bishop is no longer the father who discerns together with the priest, but the chief who claims the right to decide in the priest’s place what God’s will is for him. “Obedience” thus becomes a device that allows the superior to occupy the place of conscience. De Lassus insists that spiritual abuse is an abuse of authority aggravated by the use of divine authority: God is invoked to obtain what one wants, one’s own will is sacralised to make it unquestionable. “I am your bishop”, “I am the one who tells you what God’s will is”, “If you disobey me, you disobey the Church”, etc.
For a young priest, who has promised obedience “to the bishop and his successors”, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between obedience that is truly owed and manipulation. The risk is to think that, if one does not accept a punitive transfer, one is rejecting God himself. And this is precisely where spiritual abuse reaches its greatest gravity: it not only wounds the person, but distorts the image of God.
Broken vocations and a wounded image of God
In the most dramatic pages of the book, many victims of abuse in religious communities confess that they can no longer pray: “I no longer know how to pray, I cannot pray anymore.” The desire for God remains, but his image has been so deformed by the abusive authority that the relationship becomes impossible. And this is what happens when the priest is humiliated, isolated, constantly suspected: the wound does not only concern his psychological balance, but also his faith.
If the figure of the superior – who in Catholic theology is a sign of the fatherhood of God – is superimposed onto that of a narcissistic, jealous, unpredictable father, the temptation to walk away is not only from the ecclesial structure, but from God himself. Part of the current vocational crises does not simply arise from personal fragilities or from a “lack of faith” on the part of priests. It stems from immature systems of governance, from entrenched practices of control, from a diocesan culture that tolerates the use of appointments as a form of reprisal. It is the same diagnosis that de Lassus applies to religious life: when the problem ceases to be the individual superior and becomes a “community culture”, the internal immune system no longer functions and only an external intervention can be effective. If this is true for a congregation, it is also true for a diocese.
An adult Church: putting wounded priests at the centre
In the introductory text to Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing it is stated that no one can “remain indifferent if young people who had placed their trust in the Church see that trust betrayed and their lives plundered.” It is added that this book serves to strengthen the Church’s “immune defences”, so that communities may be vigilant in preventing such deviations. Strengthening the immune defences of the Church, so that our communities are vigilant in preventing these dynamics, also means listening to the words of wounded priests, without dismissing them as “clerical whining”; seriously assessing the governing choices of bishops, especially when they produce isolation and systematic humiliation; and, above all, forming new bishops not only in administrative management, but in a non-possessive fatherhood, capable of bringing charisms to the surface rather than suffocating them.
Because if in recent years we have heard extensive reflections on abuse of minors, even in courses organised by the Dicastery for Bishops or for Evangelisation, very little has been said about the abuse of power over priests and subordinates. This is not about demolishing episcopal authority, but about restoring it to its evangelical form: a service to the freedom of persons, not an anxious management of one’s own prestige. Even from this angle a worrying dichotomy emerges: on the one hand there are those who are ready to give up rings, sashes, crosses and lace, but on the other, their episcopal privileges must remain untouchable – social prestige, respect from institutions, the housekeeper who washes and irons, the reserved parking space, the presidency of meetings and celebrations, and the obedience of priests. The problem also lies in the immaturity of many of these men who are ordained bishops after a seminary path that is poor from the affective and human point of view. A bishop who is truly a father, instead, rejoices when one of his priests is esteemed, followed, sought out by young people: he does not experience it as a threat to his image, but as a sign that the Gospel is being transmitted through the ministry of his priests. The abuse of bishops against their priests – especially when it takes on the elegant form of pastoral isolation, punitive transfers, subtle delegitimisation – is not a secondary chapter. It is one of the most serious frontiers of ecclesial conversion.
As long as adolescent bishops exist who govern like gang leaders and not like fathers, there will be priests sacrificed as the price to be paid to someone’s ego. Telling these stories, in the light of analyses such as that of Dom Dysmas de Lassus, does not mean attacking the Church, but guarding its heart: so that no priest will ever again see his soul crushed by those who should have protected it.
fr.C.P. and fr.L.E.
Silere non possum