More than Seventy years ago, while I was a student in a Catholic school, I was in great malaise from the things that I used to receive about Christianity from those monks, and no Orthodox priest was able to tell me a word about our faith. Regardless of the piety of my priest, I missed the Gospel and dogma, and I was sad because I had to go to strangers from my Church in order to know something about Christ.
I am even sadder because the scene of ignorance that we have didn’t end completely even though we have made a lot of progress. During my youth, I didn’t understand how does a bishop that studied in Halki or Athens or Moscow and mastered languages accept this difference in knowledge between him and his priests. He didn’t used to put any effort to teach them something. How did he accept them to have empty minds while his book tells him that there exist teachers and preachers and Church history has revealed to him that Church leaders were St. Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Theologian, John of Damascus and others? Emptiness can only give emptiness. Forty years ago we created a Theological Institute in Balamand, and this is a great achievement, but the number of students that register there is not the required number that we need. This means that we have to ordain illiterate or half-illiterate priests. There is no enough effort put to accept students and the pretext is that we don’t have enough money. Therefore our quest should be to find money to fill the expenses of the institute and we must perform a statistic in order to know the number of priests we need after the death of old priests. Let us assume that in the next twenty years we need to graduate four hundred or six hundred students to fill all vacancies; by that we would have solved the problem of the parishes that wait for educated priests.
The remaining question is: why don’t we receive the required number although we have an obvious spiritual sense in a lot of our young people that are involved in Church service? The only answer for me is that some of those who don’t get involved in this education are afraid from poverty in the life of the priest. Consequently, the problem of the priest’s living is related to the affiliation to the theological institute. Therefore, the main question is how to get ready in all the archdioceses from now to find sufficient salaries to be paid for the four hundred or five hundred priests that we need in a way that we say to the graduate: After four years, you spend a year or two in training for priesthood in a certain Church as a deacon for example or as a clerk for the bishop and you earn a sufficient salary and you do not search feverishly for a rich Church because we must reach a time in which our graduates become ready to be enrolled in any Church in the city or countryside.
This means that the love for studying exists in some of our youth and that the only problem is financial and could be solved on the level of the whole Antiochian Church because of the poverty of some archdioceses. If the Orthodox faith must be nurtured in all places, brotherly love requires that the relatively rich archdiocese helps the archdiocese that cannot pay the salary of the future priest. This requires a great brotherhood and a feeling for the weak brother.
Therefore, let us enter the science of statistics and let Jesus’ love be inflamed in us to find suitable priests for him.
Translated by Mark Najjar
Original Text: “علم الكاهن” –Raiati 49- 04.12.2011
