Rectory rambles,
OCTOBER 2017
I was recently asked a question by a friend: why do priests and other clergy get a stipend not a wage?
So I started to ramble:
As a PriestsI don’t get a salary. I get a stipend provided by the Church Commissioners instead. That still means an amount of money arriving in the bank every month – but there is a subtle difference.
A salary is an amount of money, pay for a task performed. A stipend is an allowance provided so that the priest doesn’t have to do a paid job.
Priestly work cannot be measured in terms of a task —and you can see immediately then how this distinction opens the path to challenge the modern idea of work.
Priests never need to concern themselves with a distinction between what is “productive” and what is not to be paid accordingly. Precisely because the nature of our work defies measurement, we are free to live into slower, healthier, more prayerful rhythms of life in “defiance of the norms of our frenetically paced society.” - or so the theory goes!
To be a parish priest is, if nothing else, to live in a world of bizarre rhythms — we don’t clock in but we also never really clock out. On one hand, we work for a volunteer organization, which means you often need to be available after 5 pm, when your volunteers are free.
On the other hand, we also work in an institution that looks in many ways like the offices many of our parishioners work in from 9 to 5 — with office hours, staff meetings, terrible coffee.
Is it okay for me to wait until the start of the traditional work day to say the morning office? If I had to skip my day off last week, does that mean I take an extra one the next? Do I count a midnight call to the hospital as “working hours”? I have time to be at church to celebrate the daily Mass and talk to people.
Some weeks (not often in Haverhill!!) I feel like I have limitless flexibility with astoundingly little to do. I can write a sermon in the garden. I can nip home for lunch. But then there are other weeks that feel like I’ve been thrown into a marathon I never had a chance to train for. Emails get missed, visits get rushed, and I eat one or two too many takeaway sandwich lunches. In a strange way, I can see both how easy it would be to become lazy in this job, and simultaneously how easy it would be to become a workaholic. And I fear at different moments of my ministryI have been seen as guilty of both.
What’s helped me as I think about the shape of my days and weeks is that I have come to see a theological significance in the distinction between a ‘salary’ and a ‘stipend’, and the freedom that comes because we priests are, in essence, paid the latter. In most instances this distinction is meaningless (if anything it only implies that if you receive a stipend, you probably are paid less), but in the bizarre rhythms of priestly life, it eases my anxiety about justifying my work pattern.
I feel the significance of this freedom the most when parishioners ask me to pray for them. Often when most of us ask a friend to pray for us, a big part of us expects them to forget and so in self-preservation we don’t really expect them to. But I feel a different and unspoken expectation when I receive those kinds of requests as a priest, which is something like: “the Church has set you aside as a priest — the Church has freed you to live an intentionally unproductive life — so that I don’t have to doubt that you will pray for me.”
We’re given an allowance, a stipend, so we can feed and clothe ourselves and our familiesand even go on holiday. But we’re given that money to live on so that we’re free to be priests. Priests are paid so that taking care of life’s basic needs doesn’t distract from our vocation.
In other words, the church isn’t actually paying us to be there on Sunday to preside at the altar. We’re not paid to preach. We’re not paid to take Baptisms, weddings or funerals, nor to administer Last Rites. To think that we are cheapens those beautiful moments. We’re paid so that we can pray for free and be free to do it.
This distinction doesn’t resolve all the tensions, but it has at least given me a different framework with which to approach decisions about when to pray, when to be in the office, and when to go to the optician, doctor or dentist. It has made me a better preacher and pastor (I hope) as I have the time to think and pray. I’ve learned the important thing is not when I pray but that I pray, not when I spend time with my family and friends but how, and how often, I’m present with them.
Being a Priest is a wonderful vocation (34 years for me this year) – but its not for the money, but for the freedom to work for God and His Church.
Fr Ian