Problem of payments to priests

ACharterhouse, Chronide
FROM time to time most Catholics are faced with the problem of giving their priest an offering or a fee for some religious service that only he can render.
It may be for a sorrowful duty like a Mass for a dead parent or a joyful one for a wedding or a baptism. The whole subject in our
present climate of deinstitutionalisation and general liberal mucking about has become enclouded in embarrassment.
To some the whole idea is slightly scandalous. Why should you pay anything for a service which is the right of the People of God? There lies incipient anticlericalism. There are two answers.
Priests must live, and the ravens that used to bring buns to prophets and saints are all on strike because the recipients get immortality and they do not.
And also it is genuinely an offering, admittedly in the form of money, by which the client shares in a practical way in the sacrifice.
It is like a classical Jew bringing a pair of doves to the Temple, though not even the most traditionalist of priests would want to wring their necks before the altar or allow them to escape into his gothic tracery.
So money, not evil in itself, is the substitute. I think you should remember that being paid, almost tipped is rather an embarrassment a bit of a humiliation for the mere sensitive or radical priests. (Not the same thing!) This, of course, may confer an opportunity for spiritual benefit on the priest.
You may ask for a Mass or prayers and you are not obliged to hand over a twopenny piece. Similarly, except in general terms, the priest is not obliged to accept your request or your money.
So put the money in the envelope. If it is a Mass for the dead, write out the name on a card — not "Uncle Fred", which might sound odd in the Canon — but "Fred", or "Frederick", or "Fred Charterhouse."" How much should you offer? Well, in 1838 the Vicars Apostolic met and decided that five shillings was the proper stipend for a Mass. (These were the territorial bishops who ruled districts or segments of England until the hierarchy was restored Five shillings at that time was at least a week's wages to a slumdweller. I have no idea why those sturdy and masterful men who were the plain, no-nonsense bishops of that time chose such a vast sum.
True, a considerable and wealthy Catholic middle class existed — as was shown by the rich losses of London Catholics in the mad Gordon Riots of the previous century.
But there is no set tarrif. The priest does not have to accept offerings or say the Masses you ask for if he does not choose. Nor are the offerings obligatory, but they are a legitimate part of a priest's income. And it is your way of sharing in the sacrifice.
Nowadays about Ll for a Mass is usual. It should be more if you can afford it. It should be princely if you are rich. And it should be given tactfully since the whole process,. though necessary, is distasteful to your average, run-of-the-mill Man of God.
There are also occasions like baptisms, weddings and funerals when it is customary to give something. Of course you can have all these services for nothing. And a great number of people do, especially after they have been made distraught by a death. Priests, unlike dentists, do in 1850). not send in bills for services rendered.
But you will have to pay for the extras — say at a wedding. The organist, the choir, will expect small fees. The sacristan should be tipped and so should the altar boys. In a wedding, this is the business of the best man.
If you throw confetti in the churchyard, a curate will almost certainly shoot at you with an air gun from an upper room — and quite right too.
At a funeral in Ireland you used to have to give the priest a length of linen which he came home in, with it rolled up and worn like a bandolier over one shoulder and tied at the ends.
They've rather stopped that — it was a hang over from penal times when their priest wore secular clothes and was as poor as an apostle. Goodness knows what they did with all the bits of linen afterwards — too small for a sheet, wrong shape for an altar, too much trouble to turn into heaps of hankies.
These offerings look like sales to our more musty enemies. They are not. They are useful, reasonable, charitable and selfcomforting. Nor are they now exhorbitant. The sheer expense of it all has never turned a soul away from the Catholic Church.
Death of a Polish clerico-fascist
EVERY time I went to Poland, I used to ask in the nicest possible way for an interview with him. And every time, it was refused.
I met him once as a guest at his banquet. He was a tough, broad, rather brutish-looking man with cropped ginger hair. Or so I remember him, and now I see that he is dead. He was 63.
This was Boleslaw Piasecki. His story is both extraordinary and obscure. The central question — that of how or why he sur
vived — is answered. likely to remain un He was the leader of the tiny and privileged Catholic faction in Poland which believed that the triumph of Marxism was inevitable and that the Church should make its obeisance to the Communist State. They did. They were called "Pax".
Piasecki led them. He was the richest private individual in Poland. It is most unlikely that the present Pope saw even as much of him as I did and that by the Pope's own choice.
He came of a good family, and before the war he was a dashing young patriot. He was also 'a clerico-fascist, a thing which almost needs explaining nowadays. It was an alliance between the local Church and extreme Right-wing militarists. But Clerico-fascists once flourished all over the Christian world — as a powerful minority.
He was a political leader at the age of 20. He was so far to the Right behind his cloud of illicit incense that he was practically out of sight. Yet when the Nazis invaded Poland he refused to collaborate. The Gestapo arrested him, but Mussolini persuaded the Germans to release this promising young man.
That was right at the start, in 1939. When free, he organised an underground resistance against the Germans and later against the Russians. The Russians arrested him in 1944.
Somewhere in Russia he made some sort of deal with the since assassinated police chief Beria or the dead dictator Stalin. They Sent him back to Poland as a Catholic time-bomb. He would preach and practice collaboration with the Communists — and according to Russian planning corrupt from within the powerful Polish Church.
In return he got a virtual monopoly of the manufacture of objects of piety. His Catholic newspaper got the newsprint of which the real Catholic papers were starved.
He survived all the changes of regime in Moscow and he made hardly a dint in the Catholicism of Poland. His son was found murdered in a ditch, and, by implication, the death was blamed upon infuriated Catholics. No one was ever accused of the savage death.
Cardinal Wyszinski, the Primate of Poland and the supreme upholder of its independence and identity at that time, would have nothing to do with him. His daily paper was the official Catholic paper, read perforce because the real one from Krakow had to be so short and so seldom printed. Piasecki was never excommunicated, never commanded more than a few interested Catholics. Now he is dead and, I supposed, God rest him. .
I once went to Poland as a part of a "British Catholic delegation" that the Warsaw Press described as Dickensian to a "Pax" international conference. I seem to remember it was about peace.
Our lot included the late Christopher Hollis, Norman St John-Stevas, Peter Hebblethwaite, and me.
I think now we were wrong to go, but except for an invitation from our Foreign Office to attend the installation of a President of Peru who was subsequently murdered or something, and which I had to refuse for personal reasons, it was the only delegation I have ever been on. No wonder MPs and trades un
ionists scramble for those free and lavish trips. But ...
The local Catholics ignored us — indeed rejected us. The other delegates from various parts of the world seemed only interested in denouncing the Federal Republic of West Germany.
Peter Hebblethwaite and I nearly brought down a wooden, baroque side-altar to St Theresa of Avila when we leant on it. And an elderly Polish sacristan kissed my hand when I gave him a vast and pre-revolutionary tip after Masses in the morning.
I did not like what I saw of Piasecki, who presided over our banquet like a little ginger cloud of well-meant treachery. At least I hope it was so. He was a disappointed man.
Goldenness of silence
THERE ARE several sorts of silence. There is the silence of sulks. There is the silence of utter dismay. There are the silences of loneliness and boredom and despair.
There is the national silence which falls when the Press is on strike. But there has always been a connection between silence and holiness. Silence has been golden. Though that was only said to shut the children up — the same as: "No dear, I can't, I've got a bone in my leg."
At about 9.30 in the evening, monasteries start a magnum silent/urn — it varies from house to house. Then it is as if the Prior had called "Time, brothers, please" and there is no more roystering in the cloister.
True, like the landlord's private parlour behind the saloon bar, the guest room tends, at least on special occasions, to stay open for business.
But silence, a sort of listening rather than a switching off, is part of the religious ideal. Silent prayer — the "I look at Him and He looks at me" sort — is the most difficult of all. It explains the marvellous practicality of the Rosary.
But one of the things that many of those who look back to the old rite of the Mass regret was its long periods of silence. Belloc, in "The Path to Rome" — alas a nearly unreadable book now — praises this daily haU-hour of silence for its therapeutic apart from its religious value.
And I think that a lot of people miss it in the much more demanding and participatory new form of the Mass.
It is true that there is a period set aside for silent comtemplation at the end of the Mass. And there are at least two other occasions when moments of silence are enjoined.
But it's not the same thing, and that stillness, with nothing
going on, is as demanding as the knife-edge attention which is now demanded by the liturgy. I should explain that in this context I do not mean demanding" to indicate anything but a proper functioning of the liturgy._
However, I read some time ago in the Irish periodical Furrow (I think) that the beginning of the Liturgy of the Eucharist can be said in silence by the priest.
Admittedly the words as he offers the bread and wine and moistens his finger tips under a torrent of water poured by an altar boy whose big moment it is, are exceptionally eloquent. This is a part of the Mass when one sinks gratefully back onto the rock-hard lap of the Catholic pew. I've seen this silence done, and it works.
There might be other parts of the Mass. Why not silence except at the more solemn Masses — for the second part of the Canon, from the shout of the Acclamation after the Consecration to that clap of quietthunder which begins — "Through Him, with Him, in Him, etc ..."
A lot of older people would love it. It would make sense whether you used your missal or worked away at being prayerfui in our amateur sort of way.
Alas, Charterhouse is not an expert on the liturgy and the Catholic Herald is rich in these. But "Great joys, like griefs, are silent."