Keeping the Faith
Among the posts on her recent trip to Rome, Amy Welborn gave some good advice on the danger to one's faith that can come from ministry:
Beware of your desire to do ministry: Can be dangerous to your faith. Why? [...] it becomes a "job" with all of the attendant frustations, and it becomes hard to separate your own personal faith from this. You see amazing rotten things up close and personal. You are sorely tempted to fall into the Customer Service Dymanic, and see the people you're serving as customers, who are usually annoying, and you'd rather they all just go away and stop bothering you with their problems. You fall in a rut, and your motivation starts coming from other places, not the commitment to serve.I've seen this dynamic at work. There can be a tendency to adopt an "us vs. them" mentality and to think we know what's best for the common folk. This sort of pride can be poisonous. The proper attitude, I think, is to recognize that we have been given a great treasure by Christ that helps all of us "know what's best." It is our job to protect this treasure, proclaim it throughout the world, and pass it on safely to those who come after us. It's humbling.
Pray for all those in ministry. It's a tough job, with risks to those who pursue it.
How does this apply in the Catholic context? I've often seen a very dismissive attitude by some of those wrapped up in the "Spirit of Vatican II" that rejects everything that came before the Council (except for some nebulously defined "early Church"). The "we know what's best" attitude is palpable.
Conversely, some of those who recoil at the abuses in the post-Vatican II Church, make the mistake of rejecting the work of the Council. Again, they adopt the same "we know what's best" attitude. An analgous political example in the U.S. would be to conclude that because of the abuses by the Courts, the Constitution must be invalid and should be rejected.
The proper attitude (in both cases) is to root out the abuses by appealing to the (valid) prinicples in the original document (or in the case of the Council: documents).