Great article, and this issue is undoubtedly the most important reason to go back to the way it was done before in the US. Additionally, there is also the issue that frequent moving makes it difficult for Priests to have a long-term vision for their parishes, which negatively affects things like expensive maintenance that has to be done for old church buildings. It can also cause parishes to be run by their lay parishioners, who know that the priests will come and go, and they can simply outlast him.
I know that I'm almost a year late to this post, but this is such an important topic I had to comment and restack. I've always heard that the rationale for frequent priestly transfers was to "avoid attachment." Yes, attachment to anything of this world, including human relationships, can be an impediment to the spiritual life, but there must be a distinction between attachment and connection. Humans are rational, social beings after all. There are hermits and missionaries, but the vast majority of human beings throughout history have spent their lives being "rooted" in a specific place with specific persons. Preventing a parish priest from "growing roots" in a particular community may prevent attachment, but it also prevents genuine human connection, and this is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Diocesan priests have a different vocation than missionary priests.
In this case, the human connection has a supernatural component. God intends vocations for each person to serve the common good, but also to save the soul of the person with the vocation. A married person, through becoming a spouse and a parent, serves the broader community and co-creates with God to populate heaven, but the marriage is also intended to help the person save his or her own soul. Just as the pope represents Christ, the Spouse of the Church, each diocesan bishop represents Christ for the particular Church and likewise each pastor for the parish, and these men are, in a spiritual sense, "wedded" to a bride who is the subset of the Church entrusted to their care. It is not an administrative position to be filled by just one priest or another, as though the priests were just sacramental dispensaries and office administrators. Not respecting the charism of the diocesan priest and forcing him into a missionary mold does a disservice to both his soul and the good of the faithful.
All of this comes down to a quasi-Jansenist attitude that implicitly denies the sufficiency of God's grace and our ability to cooperate with it. Uprooting entire communities in the name of preventing a spiritual problem like attachment shows a lack of trust in God, Who created human beings as social creatures, and Who will provide us all with the graces to see clearly the difference between unhealthy, ordinate attachment and healthy, normal connection. Ultimately, the sterile Jansenistic view of God treats Him not as a someone, but as a something, which likewise carries over into a faulty ecclesiology which prioritizes functionality over vocation, "agere" over "esse," and the bureaucratic elements of Church governance over the essential identity of the Church herself, who is not an "it" but a "she."
Great article, and this issue is undoubtedly the most important reason to go back to the way it was done before in the US. Additionally, there is also the issue that frequent moving makes it difficult for Priests to have a long-term vision for their parishes, which negatively affects things like expensive maintenance that has to be done for old church buildings. It can also cause parishes to be run by their lay parishioners, who know that the priests will come and go, and they can simply outlast him.
I know that I'm almost a year late to this post, but this is such an important topic I had to comment and restack. I've always heard that the rationale for frequent priestly transfers was to "avoid attachment." Yes, attachment to anything of this world, including human relationships, can be an impediment to the spiritual life, but there must be a distinction between attachment and connection. Humans are rational, social beings after all. There are hermits and missionaries, but the vast majority of human beings throughout history have spent their lives being "rooted" in a specific place with specific persons. Preventing a parish priest from "growing roots" in a particular community may prevent attachment, but it also prevents genuine human connection, and this is a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Diocesan priests have a different vocation than missionary priests.
In this case, the human connection has a supernatural component. God intends vocations for each person to serve the common good, but also to save the soul of the person with the vocation. A married person, through becoming a spouse and a parent, serves the broader community and co-creates with God to populate heaven, but the marriage is also intended to help the person save his or her own soul. Just as the pope represents Christ, the Spouse of the Church, each diocesan bishop represents Christ for the particular Church and likewise each pastor for the parish, and these men are, in a spiritual sense, "wedded" to a bride who is the subset of the Church entrusted to their care. It is not an administrative position to be filled by just one priest or another, as though the priests were just sacramental dispensaries and office administrators. Not respecting the charism of the diocesan priest and forcing him into a missionary mold does a disservice to both his soul and the good of the faithful.
All of this comes down to a quasi-Jansenist attitude that implicitly denies the sufficiency of God's grace and our ability to cooperate with it. Uprooting entire communities in the name of preventing a spiritual problem like attachment shows a lack of trust in God, Who created human beings as social creatures, and Who will provide us all with the graces to see clearly the difference between unhealthy, ordinate attachment and healthy, normal connection. Ultimately, the sterile Jansenistic view of God treats Him not as a someone, but as a something, which likewise carries over into a faulty ecclesiology which prioritizes functionality over vocation, "agere" over "esse," and the bureaucratic elements of Church governance over the essential identity of the Church herself, who is not an "it" but a "she."