"Perhaps it would be a good thing if every Christian, certainly if every priest, could dream once in his life that he were Pope, and wake from that nightmare in a sweat of agony." Ronald Knox
INTRODUCTION
"For [Msgr.Knox] the platitudes of the textbooks were living realities, because they referred to living men and women, genuine human situations. So, too, is it with his sense of the priesthood. Because he was aware of the tremendous wealth at the disposal of Christ's priests, he was not less conscious, partly out of his own self-examination, partly out of his personal friendships with so many priests of every kind, that we do indeed keep this wealth in frail vessels. Aware of all this, he used the countless oportunities that came his way in the many retreats to priests he was invited to give, not to exaggerate a burden but to help to a response to a challenge, not to depress but to console, not to criticize but to inspire...No wonder they found in him stimulus and consolation; no wonder they loved him...They were proud of him; they were glad that he was enabled by his special circumstances to shed lustre on their common priesthood and on their common religion."
Ronald Knox, the Priest Thomas Corbishley, S.J., 1965 Sheed & Ward
THE MASS IN SLOW MOTION: INTRODUCTION
Somebody, I forget who, wrote his reminiscences of the years 1914-18 under the title, One Man’s War. I thought I should like to plagiarize that title and make up a kind of meditation under the heading, One Priest’s Mass. I suppose it is the experience of all of us that the Mass, with its terrific uniformity – unvarying throughout Latin Christendom, varying so little from one feast or season to another – does not impose uniformity on our thoughts. Merely because the words and gestures are so familiar, we don’t rest content with their immediate significance; we read fresh meanings of our own into them, treat them as a kind of cipher language in which we communicate our aspirations to Almighty God. It’s an odd reflection, then, that when I say Mass or you hear it, though the words and the gestures are the same, and you would think there was no difference at all except the sins we thought about at the Confiteor and the intentions we remembered for the living and the dead, in fact there is a difference; the devotional overtones, the mystical nuances which the words and the ceremonies of the Mass suggest to us are not, probably, the same for you and for me. So I thought I would come clean, and try to analyze, thus publicly, the inwardness of my own Mass; talk about the odd bells that ring in my own mind, the odd vistas that open up to my own view, to close again at once, in the hope that they may have some value for other people. Let me say at once that I know nothing about liturgy, so you won’t get any of the orthodox side-lights on the Mass which they give you in the books. Also that I am thinking about Low Mass; it is a long time since I had to sing a High Mass, and when I did, the only thought I can remember entertaining was a vivid hope that I might die before we got to the Preface.
The Psalm Judica. What a disconcerting thing it is about the idiom of Hebrew devotion, that the psalms are always saying, “I am upright, I am innocent, I never did anything to deserve this punishment”, whereas we are always wanting to say we are miserable sinners! Here, we prepare for the Confiteor by assuring God that we have walked innocently, and asking him to distinguish very carefully between us and the wicked. When I say this psalm, then, what should I think about? Perhaps, about myself as the representative of the Christian Church, so isolated, so shut away, in idea at least, from all the busy wickedness of the world. The Mass starts with the Church pushing the world away from her; the lodge is tiled, there are no profane onlookers, it is a cozy family party, just ourselves.
Then the Confiteor; that is more personal. Not that, I fancy, we are meant to be thinking precisely about our sins, rather about our sinfulness; not so much the sinners we are as the sinful sort of people we are; with no right to claim the sort of intimacy we are going to claim in coming before God. Well, we shall have to remember that God is Almighty and merciful, and go ahead as best we can. And then that splendid ceremony of kissing the altar as you say Quorum reliquiae hic sunt. A keyhole through which you look right back to the catacombs; Mass over the tombs of the martyrs; the Church unageing, her days bound each to each by natural piety.
The Introit gives you a nice sense of squaring your shoulders and opening out a bit; you have forgotten the fears and scruples that assailed you at the foot of the altar; you crash into the liturgy of the day in a good hearty voice. And then suddenly the old trouble comes back again, only I think in a different form. Sins or no sins, what are you, a man, a creature, that you should be standing up and talking to God like this, as if conversation with him were the most natural thing in the world? Back you go to the middle of the altar, feeling an utter worm; Kyrie eleison, again and again, begging his pardon for your ridiculous self-sufficiency in imagining, even for a moment, that you had a right to stand up straight, instead of burying your head in your hands. You remind yourself, with the Gloria, of what God is, in a stammering, apologetic sort of way, so that you find yourself thanking him for being so glorious – not a thing you do as a rule. And from that you turn to a paean of praise in honour of our Blessed Lord, hiding behind him, covering yourself in him, to get the technique of your approach to Almighty God right after all. And so you go back to your post at the side, a little reassured, and start again with the Collects.
I rather like a lot of Collects. It’s nice to have a lot of different subjects of conversation when you are going to talk to God. When people ask us to say a prayer for some particular intention, our first reaction is perhaps to think it a nuisance. But surely we ought to regard each intention as a new excuse for claiming God’s attention, like a child that thinks it fun to be sent on a message to its father, because it is so splendid to be allowed, for once, to interrupt him in his study. So with these obscurer saints, these much-thumbed imperatas; an excellent opportunity for making our conversation with God last longer. The Collects we out to think of perhaps as SOS messages expressing, in as brief terms as possible, the needs of the Church. Then, for the Epistle, there is a relaxing of strain. The Epistle is a letter, written quite a long time ago, to us; and we read it out in a leisurely way. For once – it is the only part of Mass of which you can say that – you stand at ease. Your hands escape from their rigid discipline. It is an interval, a pause; accidentally protracted by one or two bits of liturgy which were so obviously meant to be sung that they do not go naturally at Low Mass. Even the Sequences, beautiful as they are, seem to cry out for the music; they are not reciting pieces.
And now you have an expedition to make; a sort of Polar expedition to the unvisited wilds at the north end of the altar. Nothing is ever said or done there, except for the reading out of the words of life, extracts from those precious fragments which tell us what happened when God came to earth. Accordingly, we brace ourselves for this unaccustomed journey by a special dedication of our lips, those unclean lips of ours which are responsible, all day long, for so much gossip, uncharity, unkindness, grousing, flattery, boasting, and perhaps even profanity; they need a kind of salve before we take the words of life on them. And not only our lips, you will notice, but our hearts. That’s the tragedy of it, that the Gospel never seems to grip us … you see, we know it by heart. What an odd phrase that is, isn’t it, “knowing a thing by heart”. Because, when we are talking about the Gospels, that’s just the way we don’t know them. Still, one reads the Gospel, and kisses the book at the end, and hopes that somehow the message of it will steal through those lips into the heart which has read through it so coldly, so inattentively.
Then, if it is one of those big days, you get the Credo as something of a relief; if charity has burnt so low, there is still faith anyhow; the Credo, with those phrases at the beginning which send your mind, sometimes, rocketing up heavenwards without very much consciousness of what it is you are saying; and the splendid dramatic moment of Et homo factus est, with the noise of kicking and scraping behind you, where rheumatic knees are being laboriously bent in honour of God made Man. And then follows the odd Dominus vobiscum and Oremus which isn’t followed by a prayer; I suppose it once came just in front of the Secret prayers, or something like that. Standing inconclusive as it does, it has the suggestion of being a mere excuse for taking a peep behind you, and seeing that the congregation are still there. Good, they are. This is where the congregation get their look in. The Offertory is, in theory, the whole congregation surging up into the sanctuary and presenting you, the priest, with the bread and wine, their contribution to the mysteries.
Actually, in their name, a small boy emerges from the background, probably with hiccoughs; at first sight you are tempted to regard him as an unwelcome distraction, then you remember that he stands there in the name of the congregation, offering you unconsecrated wine, and saying, “I suppose this wouldn’t be any use?” Then the Lavabo, with the psalm in which you start protesting your own innocence, just as at the Praeparatio. Once more, the lodge is being tiled; the catechumens are supposed to be going away; once more we remind ourselves that we are a family party. The Secret prayers are said over the unconsecrated bread and wine, and are always about them. It is as if we had to whisper them in our embarrassment, feeling, like the boy with the five loaves again, how ridiculously inadequate they are as the raw material for a miracle; just as everything we give to God is ridiculously inadequate to the purposes for which his grace makes it effective. You will often find that apologetic note in the Secret prayers.
Then comes the first of those three sudden emergences from silence into sound, with the words Per omnia saecula saeculorum, that lend to the Mass, from the unliturgical layman’s point of view, a good deal of its atmosphere of mystery. When you hear it from the congregation, you feel as if the priest was being torn between two different instincts; one of which tells him that what he is saying is much too sacred to be said out loud, while the other tells him that it is much too important not to be said out loud – first one instinct, then the other, getting the mastery. From the priest’s own point of view, I think this first Per omnia has an evident psychological value. The mind tends to accompany the voice, by force of habit; and the mere fact of breaking out into speech after a happily-arranged preface of silence encourages the mind to an outburst of praise, just at a moment when it is apt to have gone off day-dreaming. And I think it has a symbolic value in that way. We ought, obviously, to be praising God at every moment of our lives. Obviously we aren’t. Consequently, when we do start praising God it is right that we should do it in a sort of nervous scurry, like a man who has just remembered that he has got a train to catch. The Sursum corda which invites us to praise incites us, at the same time, to contrition; how terrible that our hearts should be continually groveling, and have to be hoisted up in this almost undignified way on the rare occasions when we really do praise God!
And then the splendors of the Preface, with the various ranks of Angels flashing past us like the names of suburban stations as we draw closer to the heart of a great capital. The holy Angels, I think, have a knack of drawing up one’s mind to God, by being at once so awe-inspiring and at the same time so obviously inconclusive; the attitude of the Angel in the Apocalypse, who will not let St John worship him and bids him worship God instead, is permanently their attitude. And at the same time, the glimpse we catch of those Angels who veil their faces before the throne warns us that the loud, confident tone in which we cried Sursum corda must be modified a little as we reach the threshold; that slight drop of the voice for the Sanctus just chastens our praises with a salutary touch of awe.
On that threshold, we pause a little, to remind ourselves that we are not alone. In case we were in danger – the younger of us, anyhow, fresh from the splendor of ordination – of feeling self-important about the tremendous office we hold, the tremendous business we are transacting, we reflect that the man who stands here is only a priest of the universal Church; at the moment when he consecrates, he is a particular unit in whom her prayer is being manifested. He is the particular sentry who happens to be posted at this particular spot, under orders from his Bishop. He must think of himself as an inconsiderable unit of this great army whose whole cause now, all the multitudinous needs of the Church of God, he proceeds to recommend to God: then, and not till then, he may make his private Memento. A sudden close-up; for a moment, the features of one particular individual, or one particular situation, disentangle themselves from the general muddle God’s world is in, and stand out clearly before your mind; there, that is enough, we shall not add to the value of the Mass by interrupting it with our wool-gatherings … Our intention is not the only intention; each of the worshippers behind us has a private one; et omnium circumstantium, take just as much notice, Lord, of theirs as of mine. But, after all, we are all communicantes, we are all part of this tremendous whole, the Church; and we all share the intercessions of the saints, who are the Church’s property. “Whether Paul, or Cephas, all are yours”; then the familiar string of names; Italians, most of them, what does it matter? All are yours; and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s; let us get on with the Mass.
You hurry on to the Consecration, after a few more last-moment gestures, as if to make the still unconsecrated elements less unworthy of what they are going to become. And then, with the Consecration itself, you go off on to a quite different tack. You stop making up prayers, thinking up reverential epithets, piling strings of participles together; you don’t ask God for anything or apologize for anything or try to induce any attitude or any frame of mind in yourself; you simply stand there and record a piece of history. In recording that piece of history, it becomes necessary to recite some words our Lord used; and so, as if absent-mindedly, almost as if unintentionally, you do what you came there to do; or rather, you don’t do it, you suddenly pull yourself together and realize that our Lord’s words, even relayed on such lips as yours, have done it. A moment ago, you could move your hands quite freely; now, an extraordinary sort of paralysis has fallen upon them, so that it is impossible to separate the thumbs from the index fingers. Christ has used you to do a miracle, and everything has become quite different. You elevate the Host, the Chalice; or are they trying to fly upwards out of your hands? You hardly know, it is all so strange.
Anyhow, you start offering this precious Thing that has fallen between your hands; you connect it with this and that, the mysteries of our Lord’s life, the Old Testament sacrifices, the ministry of the Angels in Heaven, the expectation of the faithful dead; another string of saints’ names occurs to you; but all this you do in a half-dazed way, still thinking about what it is that lies before you; and then, boldly, you take up Host and Chalice together and hold them up for a breathless moment. And then suddenly you are talking out loud again, and feel the ground sure under your feet as you find yourself saying the Pater Noster. I suppose each of us has a clause or a phase of the Mass at which, if it wasn’t for the trouble and confusion it was going to cause, he would like to die. Mine is the Pater Noster. It is, to me, the moment in the Mass at which one is most consciously, most fearlessly, talking to God.
Almost immediately afterwards, at the end of the Libera nos, we start doing something we haven’t yet done in the Mass since we said the Gloria, except perhaps momentarily in a Collect; we start talking to Jesus Christ. The sacrifice is over, the banquet has begun; and we do what we can to reconcile ourselves to the bewildering fact of his condescension to our needs. A te numquam separari permittas – that is the kernel of it; when that is said, all is said. So the priest gives you Communion. If the priest is yourself, you are hardly conscious of that. You are receiving, not giving. As for the Communion of the Faithful – at least if there are many – how difficult it is not to feel this as an interruption in “my Mass!” But of course there is no such thing as “my Mass”; we are ministers before we are priests, and it is for us to wait (hours, if need be) on our ministering.
And so the Mass comes to an end, in a whirl of purifications and postscripts, that do not seek to impress themselves deeply on the mind; one has not enough capacity left for receiving impressions. There is a tag which occurs frequently in the Old Testament, and once in the New, “And every man went to his own house”; that is what we do at the Ite missa est; the coming of Christ to our souls is a thing too intimate for liturgy; we must be alone. As the priest gives the Blessing and says the last Gospel, he is only (as it were) covering his retreat; we know it is all over, really.
So much of drama, every day of our lives; and we, how little we are thrilled by it!
The Mass in Slow Motion, Sheed & Ward, 1948
ST PHILIP NERI This sermon was preached at the London Oratory on the Feast of St Philip Neri, 26 May 1951. If salt loses its taste, what is there left to give taste to it? – Matthew 5:13 Last Wednesday was a centenary; unmarked by the world, but in the world’s history, if we could read the world’s history from the inside, one of high significance. On 23 May 1555, Giovanni Lunelli, Bishop of Sebaste, conferred the sacred order of the priesthood on a young Florentine living in When I say that, I am not thinking of political liberty, and the world-problems which exercise us today. Yet it is perhaps worthwhile to remember that his later boyhood was spent in If he was not a rebel, Philip was nevertheless a reformer. So were all the saints of his age. The sixteenth century was such a crisis in the history of religion that you could not be sensitized to its atmosphere without becoming either a rebel or a reformer, or both at once. And because I say, St Philip in particular, because God raised him up to be, in a special sense, the Apostle of Rome. All the great founders of religious institutes have made their way to But it would be grossly unhistorical to suggest that his was a lonely protest. On the contrary, he lived under a series of reforming popes; he was the contemporary and the friend of St Charles Borromeo, who did more than any other man to restore Church discipline in accordance with the canons of I have tried to suggest the answer when I spoke of St Philip as the saint of freedom. Reforms brought in from above may change the habits of society without changing its heart. You may repress luxury without repressing the love of luxury; you may drive paganism into the catacombs, but it is paganism still. Organization and discipline, the multiplying of rules and methods whether for clergy or laity, produce little effect unless they are freely accepted by the will; they develop scruples in the timorous, command but a lifeless acquiescence from the indifferent. All the salutary reforms which the Council of Trent initiated might have succeeded in their measure, and yet left us with a dull, flat, uninspired level of performance. That they produce more than that, we owe in great part to St Philip. It was the sharp tang of his unwonted spirituality that acted as seasoning to the Tridentine experiment. The little world of But it was an influence freely exercised, and one which made for freedom. And, partly because it was an influence of freedom, not depending on regulations or formulas, it remains the same influence today, reasserted in his children. Wherever the Congregation of the Oratory flourishes, there you will find an atmosphere that breathes liberty; an atmosphere which is at once spacious, and completely natural, and intensely personal. Spacious – St Philip, I think, liked space; liked to say his prayers on the roof, liked to go out for a walk in the country round Natural – of all the saints, none is so full of nature as St Philip; that is why he shocks some people, that is why he attracted Goethe. He remained, all his life, very much of a schoolboy; loved to make himself look ridiculous by pulling the beard of the beadle in church, loved to make his fashionable penitents look ridiculous by carrying his cat through the streets. How much was it a calculated effect? Did he sometimes go out of his way to play the fool, force himself to be natural? It is hard to say; but, whatever the secret of it, he was always himself; never for a moment were you tempted to say “There goes Ignatius”, or “There goes Charles Borromeo”. And he wanted all his disciples to be themselves, once they had overcome that razionale, that spirit of pride, which is the enemy of all holiness. He would not mould them into a type; they should live by a tradition, not by a rule. In this, as Newman wisely saw, his spirit accommodated itself to the English genius. I have been privileged to know many Oratorians, but never one of whom I felt inclined to say, “He is typical”. And – personal; with the saint himself, that is a point hardly worth proving. His apostolate was neither of the pen nor, chiefly at any rate, of the pulpit; if you came under his influence, it was because he plucked you by the sleeve, folded you to his heart. And he was always there; as well expect to find Ars without St John Vianney, as Reverend Fathers, you do not keep St Philip to yourselves; you share him with the world. Pray for us others, that we too may learn something of his spirit. from Pastoral and Occasional Sermons, 2002, Ignatius Press
LIMERICK OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
O.K., how many of you ever noticed the following limerick in St.Thomas Aquinas? Msgr. Knox did!
Sit vitiorum meorum evacuatio
Concupiscentae et libidinis exterminatio,
Caritatis et patientiae,
Humilitatis et obedientiae,
Omniumque virtutum augmentatio.
If you'd like to find out more about this interesting piece of minutiae concerning Knox and St. Thomas go to www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/limerick/stthomas.html
The following retreat meditation was delivered to a group of school boys:
VOCATION TO THE PRIESTHOOD
God knows what you are going to do. But is the thing which God foresees that you are going to do the thing which God wants you to do? Alas, not necessarily. It is God’s will, yes, I grant you that, in the sense that he allows it to happen; if he did not allow it to happen, it wouldn’t. But is the thing that each man does the thing that God really meant him to do, really wanted him to do? You can see for yourself that it is not.
Our Lord chose twelve apostles, and one of those, Judas Iscariot, turned out a traitor and a suicide. Our Lord knew, all the time, how it was going to end; all the time that Judas was stealing money from the petty-cash account, our Lord knew about it, and knew more than that, knew all about what it was going to lead to – the thirty pieces of silver, and the rope’s end – and yet he chose Judas. He did not choose Judas to be a traitor; he had a vocation for him to be a saintly apostle, if he would; to carry his name before the Gentiles, to confess him before kings and rulers, to win the crown of martyrdom, if he would. There is, for each of us, a plan marked out in God’s mind, so to speak, of our life as it actually will be lived; but side by side with it a plan is marked out of that same life as God wants it to be lived; and how far those two plans correspond depends on the care we take to find out what God’s will is for us and the faithfulness with which we do his will when he makes it plain to us.
Of course, when I say that, you will immediately assume that I am going to talk about a vocation to the priesthood. You are perfectly right; I am. Not indeed, that I regard myself, or would have you regard me, as a particularly competent authority in such matters, as a particularly skilled discerner of spirits. I remember a boy coming to me who had quite made up his mind to become a priest, but was not quite certain whether he ought to be a Benedictine or a secular priest. I told him that he ought to be a Benedictine, and I thought that was rather nice of me, because we secular priests have our pride too. Well, he went into the novitiate and stuck that for two days; and then he went straight off to a diocesan seminary and has been perfectly happy there ever since; I suppose he will be getting the subdiaconate this summer. That is just to show you that I am not really an authority on the subject of vocations. Anybody else could tell you far more about it than I can. But I do just want to put one or two quite commonplace points of view before you.
In the first place, whatever else you make of it, I hope you will agree with me that the question “Ought I to be a priest?” is one that stands all by itself. It must not be one of a series of questions under the general title “What to Do with Our Sons”. I have seen such a series running, not very long ago, in one of the more fatuous monthly magazines, and I am sorry to say that a bishop of another church contributed Number Three of the series, and his article was headed something like “Holy Orders as a Career”; nor was the body of the article much less painful than the title of it.
The question “Ought I to be a priest?” admits of only one alternative; the question in its full form runs: “Am I to be a priest or a layman?” You cannot lump it with the rest and ask: “Am I to be a tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief or a priest?” Whatever be the right way of looking at it, that is certainly the wrong way of looking at it. If for no other reason, for this – that the career of a priest does not call for any particular set of natural gifts which mark a man out as suitable for it. The natural gifts which can be employed in it are very various; but it does not demand any specialized capacities. You do not need to be a heaven-sent classical scholar, for example, or a heaven-sent mathematician; you need enough Latin to say your office, and enough mathematics to count the collection; not necessarily more. It is impossible, therefore, for a person of ordinary intelligence to say, “I cannot be a priest; I have not got the natural gifts which such a career demands.”
And the same principle works in the opposite direction; you cannot say, on the ground of any natural gifts, “So and so is just the kind of person who ought to be a priest.” There is no kind of person who ought to be a priest; no one kind more than another.
Well, when we have got that much clear, we try to solve the question from the other end. We think to ourselves that perhaps the only people who are meant to be priests are the people who are very much holier and much more self-sacrificing and devout than their neighbors; really half way to being saints already. And that seems to be a complete solution of the problem for you; because you feel certain that you are not any better than your neighbors in ways like these. And if you read spiritual books that are meant for priests, like Bishop Hedley’s Retreat, you will probably get that same sort of impression, that all priests live on a plane of spirituality which would be quite impossible for an ordinary person like you.
And then perhaps you think of some priests you know, and the retreat fathers you have seen, and you say to yourself, “Well, dash it all!...” I cannot remember which school it was the story came from about the boy who was asked to give a list of the corporal works of mercy; and he said the first was to give food to the hungry, and the second was to give drink to the clergy. That shows, doesn’t it, a quite different estimate of the clerical vocation. So that this test does not do either; priests, we hope, are all aiming at their own sanctification; but they do so from very different levels; they do not start, at any rate, by being half saints already, and if the bishops did not accept anybody for ordination unless he was half a saint already, you and I would have a precious long distance to go on Sunday if we wanted to hear Mass.
And so we get driven back on the bare doctrine of vocation; the doctrine, I mean, that God does want some people to serve him as priests, and wants other people to serve him as laymen. Neither extraordinary natural gifts nor extraordinary supernatural gifts will mark the difference. And it is not always his best friends that he calls to serve him in the priesthood; St. Thomas More, for example, tried his vocation as a Carthusian and found he had no vocation; yet he was saintly, I think, in his life as well as in his death. The question, therefore, becomes a personal one for you. You have not to ask, “Does God want all his friends to become priests?” – you have to ask, “Does God want this particular friend of his, me, to become a priest?”
Now, I think this is a perfectly fair thing to expect, though it is ordinarily a presumptuous thing to expect this or that of God. I think it is fair to expect that, provided you do your best to cultivate his friendship and to be worthy of his friendship, God will let you know if he does want you to become a priest. He will give you some indication of it, some drawing towards himself. When I say that, you must not expect too much; you must not expect a kind of supernatural revelation, visions or ecstasies or anything of that sort. No, but the idea will come to take shape in your mind, at first perhaps only as a vague and distant possibility, then more clearly as time goes on; your friendship for God will make you want to do something for him, and your desire to do something for him will take this form.
Such inspirations come easily, where true friendship subsists. The idea may come simply from within or it may come by some warning from outside which is apparently accidental; from some alteration of circumstances in your life, or from something you have read in a book, or from something you have heard in a sermon – it may even come to you from what I am saying now; God is not particular always about the instruments which he uses, and he sent a warning to the prophet Balaam, you will remember, from the mouth of a donkey.
If you do find yourself wanting, with God’s will, to be a priest, commit your aspiration to God with full confidence. If he means you to be a priest, you will be one; there is no need at present to worry about family difficulties or things of that sort. Go on quietly asking him to make you less unworthy than you are of such a vocation. At the same time, remember that the choice in the last resort is not yours; “It is not you that have chosen me, it is I that have chosen you”, our Lord says to his apostles. No harm, then, in having a second string in your bow; in thinking out beforehand, if you are already old enough for plan-making, what you are going to do if it proves that God doesn’t mean you to be a priest.
I say that because I think there is sometimes a certain temptation for people who are aspiring to the priesthood to go rather easy over their school work, on the ground that after all you don’t need much education in order to be a priest. That is not, perhaps, a great compliment to the priests you have met; but I daresay we deserve it. Only, as I say, it isn’t certain that you are destined to be a priest; and it is a pity, when you make that discovery, to find that you have really no sort of aptitude for any other job in life. Don’t neglect mathematics or chemistry or whatever it may be that you happen to be good at, on the ground that it can’t ever help you towards achieving your main ambition in life. Any kind of knowledge can be useful to a priest; and really educated tastes can make him, I won’t say a better priest, but a more useful priest; in fact, some people think it is a pity that we haven’t more of that kind. God bless you and grant you your heart’s desire.
Retreat in Slow Motion, Sheed & Ward, 1960