Formation of Catholic Priests as Artisanal and not Policing - Pope Francis and the Formation of Catholic Priests for the 21st Century

Academic Paper from the year 2020 in the subject Theology - Practical Theology, grade: 1.0, Kwame Nkrumah University, language: English, abstract: This article is about formation as an art and not a science. It is about accompaniment and discernment towards evangelical empowerment driven by the Nazareth Manifesto by mature mentors who are human-spiritual whisperers of their charges. I was beginning to get paranoid at the number of times the word 'rotten' or 'broken' pops into my head in reference to the priestly formation system until my friend Elizabeth Mphande told me in an email, 'It's really sad and pathetic. It's like the whole system is rotten and some guys are just out there to do a job to get easy money from parishioners. Taking its point of departure from Pope Francis' concern about initial formation for the priesthood, I suggest that in the light of the Ratio Fundamentalis, formation must operate on the principle of 'small is beautiful' by avoiding mass manufacture of priests. The focus of such formation needs to be accompaniment and discernment. Failure to do this, we risk in the words of Pope Francis, churning out little monsters in circumstances that are akin to policing rather transformative formation. Pope Francis never defined what he meant by 'little monsters' but I opine that it has to do with the style of leadership. Little or big monsters would be the equivalent of an ecclesiastical Donald Trump. These monsters eventually grow into big monsters as bishops, archbishops and cardinals with a heart of stone instead of a heart of flesh whose default exercise of authority is hard power rather than soft power. As the Pope says, formation and we might add episcopal oversight 'is a work of art, not policing' [è un'opera artigianale, non poliziesca].

Tarcisius Mukuka [Dipl. Pastoral Theol & Counselling, Dipl. Phil. & Rel. Studies, STB, SSL, PhD] is a biblical exegete by training. He holds a Licentiate in Biblical Exegesis from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and a doctorate in Biblical Hermeneutics from the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Orality as Casualty: Contextual and Postcolonial Analysis of Biblical Hermeneutics in Bembaland" (2014). He is currently a lecturer in Religious Studies Education at Kwame Nkrumah University in Kabwe. His research interests include postcolonialism and the Bible, gender and the Bible, religion, politics and power. He is the author of "Spoken Voice/Written Word: Negotiating How We Hear/Read the Bible" (2016) published by Lambert Academic Publishing and "In the Eye of a Very Catholic Storm" (forthcoming), by Crown Arts Publishers