Imagine There’s No Clergy

Commonweal

Two Views

By William M. Shea and David Cloutier

William M. Shea

A song in the New York seminary of my day (1955–1961) went like this:

It’s Tradition, it’s Tradition, it’s a very, very, very old Tradition.
You can ask the Roman Rota; it won’t help you one iota.
For no amount of wishin’, no, no amount of wishin’
can ever change or hope to change a very old Tradition.

My confreres in the seminary thought of this as wry humor mixed with a bit of sarcasm, and sang it with gusto. Tradition was a real determinant of our life and mind, an ever present condition of our progress toward the priesthood. Among the pervasive traditions we met daily were hierarchy, celibacy, the distinction between those ordained or vowed and the laity, the seminary horarium (up at 5:30, lights out at 10), and a whole complex of social structures and mores in which we were educated and by which we were expected to live. We were taught that the sola scriptura didn’t do it for Catholics; Catholics were marked by their acceptance of capital-T Tradition.