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2008 Touchstone Award Acceptance Address
 NATIONAL FEDERATION OF PRIESTS’ COUNCILS
Touchstone Award Acceptance
Rosen Plaza Hotel - Orlando, Florida
April 23, 2008
Rev. J. Ronald Knott
I cannot begin to tell you how honored and excited I felt when I heard that I was going to receive this award. I have been associated with this organization, in one way or another, since its foundation. I have attended many of these conventions over the last 38 of its 40-year history.
Receiving this award is an honor for all my priest-brothers in Louisville. To paraphrase Saint Paul a bit, I have always believed, and try to teach in my presbyteral formation programs that, “if one member of the presbyterate is honored, all the members share the joy!”
 Receiving this award is an honor for the seminary community at Saint Meinrad as well, especially for my cohorts Father Gabriel Hodges, OSB and Ms. Lean Ann Osterman who work with me in our Institute for Priests and Presbyterates
Receiving this award is also a personal honor. To have these ideas slowly and consistently validated by so many individual priests, and now by the largest priests organization in the country, has truly been humbling and amazing.
In a certain sense, this is an honor that I share with Father Lou Cameli, the principle editor of the USCCB document, The Basic Plan for the Ongoing Formation of Priests. My work evolved from one of the closing lines of that implementation document for Pope John Paul II’s Pastores Dabo Vobis. The Basic Plan ends with this observation, “The corporate sense of priestly identity and mission, although not fully developed even in official documents, is clearly emerging as an important direction for the future.”
Because of that challenging insight, tucked away somewhere in the very end of the book, I set out to gather together in one place the few crumbs about presbyterates that do exist in church documents, to comment on them from my experience and to make some suggestions on how we might go about implementing these ideas, my ideas, and the ideas of others, to build stronger and more life-giving presbyterates. Once I packaged all these ideas and put them out there, I gradually began to find out that priests were ready, and the time was right, for such a vision.
I would like to do two things with the time I have been allotted. First, I would like to quickly share with you the conditions out of which these ideas evolved and second I would like to highlight some of the things I have learned from sharing these ideas.
How These Ideas Evolved
Two thousand two was the worst of my 38 years of priesthood. I was a vocation director the year the sexual abuse scandal broke across the country. I never felt more powerless and more demoralized than I did back then. For the first time in my life, I seriously wanted to quit.
Things got especially bad for me in June of that year when one of my best friends was dismissed from the priesthood on the Monday following the Dallas vote. I felt like I sinking further and further into a depression. By the time fall rolled around, I had asked to resign from my job as vocation director and for six months off to pull myself together.
At my very lowest point, I sat down at my computer one day to delete and destroy the ideas that I had developed over the seven previous years. At the very last second, I decided not to delete those ideas, but rather to think about turning them into a book. I ended up calling the book Intentional Presbyterates: Claiming Our Sense of Purpose as Diocesan Priests. I ended up writing a Workbook to go with it, as well as From Seminarian to Diocesan Priest: Managing a Successful Transition and The Spiritual Leadership of a Parish Priest: On Being Good and Good At It.
Intentional Presbyterates has been read by many American priests and studied by seminarians in several US seminaries, as well as by priests and seminaries in India, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and several others, I am told. I have spoken to over 30 presbyterates in this country. This September, I will be given the chance to address the National Conference of Priests of England and Wales in Leeds, England. Cardinal Sean O’Malley quoted my ideas extensively at the Chrism Mass in Boston this year. At the National Catholic Educational Association Convention’s seminary division gathering in Indianapolis recently, this work was mentioned so often that it started to get embarrassing. Now the National Federation of Priests’ Councils is recognizing these ideas as ideas worthy of consideration by priests around the country. Five years ago, I couldn’t have imagined this day!
What Have I Learned
1. US priests, in general, have had no formal education in the theology of presbyterates. As a result of this neglect, many priests have fallen into the habit of a priesthood of “private practice.” As a result of a continuing neglect and lack of a common vision, many of today’s priests are forming “tribes” within their presbyterates, struggling against each other over who has the right vision. Some of these “tribes” are actually cultivating new members from among the seminarians. If problems like these are being caused by neglect rather than some insidious outside force, imagine what we could become if we were to become more intentional about strengthening presbyteral unity? The biggest misconception priests have had of the “intentional presbyterate” idea is that it is about making priests happy. While that may be an important by-product of the process, the main reason for an “intentional presbyterate” is to offer the People of God a more coherent and effective ministry.
2. US priests, in general, have had no formal education in the diocesan “promise of obedience.” As a result they tend to see it mainly in terms of a personal relationship with the bishop that is invoked in cases of interagency, rather than seeing it as a communal relationship with the bishop and the presbyterate as a whole. While seminaries are almost obsessing over celibacy programs, some still neglect to teach “that other promise,” the promise of obedience which, when understood well, could actually be more important in developing a common sense of purpose in our ministry.
3. US bishops get no training in how to lead presbyterates. As a result, they do not always know how to direct individual ministry accomplishments toward the ministry goals of the presbyterate as a whole. Priests are waiting to be led by shepherds whose voices are convincing enough to follow. Bishops are the designated leaders of presbyterates, but some of them may need help in becoming real leaders of presbyterates.
4. Presbyterates need to pay better attention to the transition of new priests out of seminary and into ministry, to the transition of priests into first pastorates and to the transition of international priests into new local presbyterates and parishes. Presbyterates need to see themselves as mentoring communities for these newest members and spend more time learning to be such mentoring communities. Presbyterates need to understand how risky it is for both sides for new priests to be made pastors without proper training. Presbyterates need to understand as well that it is risky, for both sides, to accept international priests without a plan to receive them well.
5. An intense, complete and ongoing study of the teachings in Pastores Dabo Vobis would do more than anything else to help priests find common theological ground on which to heal ideological differences. As it is, both sides of the divide tend to pick and choose citations from church documents to bolster their already arrived at conclusions.
6. A general acceptance of the theology that the ministry of priests consists in helping the bishop carry out his ministry and making him present in the places where they serve would do wonders in building a sense of presbyteral unity among priests.
7. The best program to promote vocations today, I believe, would be one that is directed at building intentional presbyterates. Young men today will not be attracted to a loose association of “lone rangers,” but to the religiously saturated environment of a happy and effective presbyterate with a clear identity and mission. As Vatican II said so many years ago, “Let priests attract the hearts of young men by their own humble and energetic lives, joyfully pursued, and by brotherly collaboration with their brother priests.” If this is true, when we pray for more vocations to the priesthood, we ought to move away from asking God to change his behavior and toward asking God to help us change our behaviors––that we might be more humble and energetic in our individual ministry and see it as our share in a collaborative ministry, especially with our bishop and fellow priests.
8. Seminaries need more ways to introduce reality into their curriculums. As they continue to add more and more communal experiences, the numbers of priests living alone continues to rise––42 percent at present and growing. Seminaries need to prepare young priests to creatively live alone by experimenting with small group living and individual living situations while they are still in the seminary. They need to teach seminarians to respect and negotiate the various cultures of ecclesial life in today’s church rather than conspiring with them in protecting them from those cultures. Seminarians should be taught to identify and distinguish their own preferred learning culture from the learning cultures of other priests and be prepared to respectfully engage the needs and assumptions of other priests.
9. I have tried to emphasize all along that I am not selling a new program, but a new mindset because I believe at the root of things is a need for a radical conversion of mind and heart toward the good of one another. Likewise, we need to replace our downward spiraling talk of diminishment with some upward spiraling talk of abundance. If it is true that in many ways we create the reality we experience, we must learn to imagine a better future and “fake it till we make it,” if necessary. Not only must we know what we want, we must really want what we want, if we are to get what we want. As Nikos Kazantzakis put it, “By believing passionately in that which does not exist we create it. That which is non-existent has not been sufficiently desired.” For those who are suspicious of some kind of “just believe it and you will see it” approach, I would refer to Dale Carnegie’s words, “Believe that you will succeed…believe it firmly and you will do what is necessary to bring it to success.” Believing is different from wishing. Believing leads to positive action on our part. Wishing simply waits for others to act on our behalf.
10. The Church cannot afford infighting and demoralization among its priests. We need all hands on deck. If we need all hands on deck, we need to start seeing our diversity as a blessing. We must firmly and consistently reject the Rush Limbaugh approach to presbyterates, where we feel free to demonize and attribute the worst possible motives to those with whom we disagree. If “every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty,” we must individually reverse the process and begin to practice the spiritual discipline of blessing each other by intentionally looking for goodness to affirm in each other - realizing that a diverse group of priests can actually reach more individuals within our diverse population of church members than any one priest’s perspective ever could!
Thank you for this honor. The last few years have been a truly wonderful spiritual adventure––a gift that just “keeps on giving”––an adventure that I could not have imagined back in 2003. Your validation of these ideas, and the fact that many priests are finding them helpful, is icing on the cake!
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