Should men of the cloth hang out ...

In bars? Taverns? Walmarts? Ordinary people places like Waffle House?

As you would imagine, clergy who spend their daily lives in clerical clothing are frequently asked some interesting questions. There is something about that clerical collar that makes them easy targets.

I am not just talking about the acid that faithful Roman Catholic priests face during the decades of the clergy sexual-abuse crisis.

I wrote a column about that long ago — “A priest keeps his collar” — based on the experiences of a Charismatic Episcopal Church priest who kept wearing black-suit clericals and a collar — in Boston. Here’s a short sample:

Father Mark Pearson can see trouble coming as he walks the sidewalks. … He can see some faces harden after people make eye contact and then see his clerical collar. Some look away in disgust. A few men deliberately switch to a collision course. Pearson said one or two angry pedestrians have spat on him.

"If someone is upset, they may find a way to bump into you or give you a shove," he said. "Then they say sometime like, 'Oh excuse me, FATHER. Hey, did you molest anybody today, FATHER.' ...

"I try to just say something simple like, 'God bless you anyway, my friend.' "

On the positive side of things, my Orthodox godfather — founder of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge — tells stories about what happens when he wears his traditional cassock while going hither and thither in the hills of East Tennessee. Things get especially interesting at Walmart and Waffle House.

People ask Father Stephen Freeman all kinds of strange and complicated questions and it doesn’t matter if the shoppers are hard-shell Baptists, Methodists or generic evangelical Protestants.

It’s the cassock. But he can handle it, with since he has both a thick Southern accent and Duke University graduate-school smarts in systematic theology. He once told me: "I'm the priest of Oak Ridge, whether people are Orthodox or not."

Father Stephen’s bottom line: A priest isn’t just someone who serves inside the walls of his Church. He is a priest for everyone.

I often wonder what would happen if he showed up — in a cassock, with his guitar — during open-microphone night at some local establishments, while assuming the alternative persona he calls “Blind Willie Carolina.” It helps to know that long ago, Freeman was in a rock band good enough to open for The Byrds.

Now, I bring all of this up because of a beautiful item that Rod “Living in Wonder” Dreher included in today’s edition of his Substack diary. Scroll down to the sub-headline “Our Catholic Priest.”

The key is a lengthy excerpt from an essay by Father Brad Doyle, a young Catholic priest who fairly recently moved to Dreher’s hometown — the colorful and quirky St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Here’s a key excerpt from “The Secular Priest for a Secular Age,” starting with images from this priest’s first days in the parish:

After a meeting with my office staff, I asked them, “Where  should I go to get dinner and meet the townies?” They directed me to The Saint, the upscale bar in the middle of town. As I walked up to the front porch, an excited woman leapt from her rocking chair, drink sloshing around, and exclaimed, “You’re our new priest!” Quite certain that she was a Catholic , I asked how long her family had been parishioners. “Oh, I’m Methodist,” she said, “but you’re our new priest.”

That shocked me. I was the TOWN’s new priest. Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, fallen away Catholics, the people that have had one too many at the Oyster Bar, the coffee crew on Tuesdays at Birdman, all had a new Catholic priest. Surely, everyone had their own preachers and ministers and barstools that they loved and cherished, but there was a place for me. And not just a place, but a duty. A happy houring Methodist slinging a gin & tonic had pithily exclaimed the true heart of Can. 528 §1, which begins, “A pastor is obliged to make provision so that the word of God is proclaimed in its entirety to those living in the parish.”

This is the universal mission of the parish priest. By that, I don’t mean he has a mission to all parts of the world. I mean, he has a mission to all parts of his parish. Traditionally this is called a pastor’s “care of souls.” The pope has care of souls for the entire world, the bishop his entire diocese, and the priest’s duty is the salvation of every person living in the parish boundaries, whether they are Catholic or not. The left end of the bar in the St. Francisville Inn is in my parish, not just technically, but truly.

His “parish,” broadly defined in true Louisiana terms, also includes “sundry other institutions, East Louisiana Hospital, the LA War Veterans Home, and Dixon Correctional Center.”

Because of COVID-19 restrictions, it had been a long, long time since a priest had visited prisoners at that facility in Dixon. Readers may (#TriggerWarning) want to make sure that tissues are nearby.

I was greeted by five  Catholic inmates in the interdenominational chapel. There was a drum set in the corner and the altar was to the side, the pulpit in the middle. Sam, the sacristan, helped me reverse the Reformation. These men had not seen a Catholic minister in 2 years. They had not seen a priest in longer, no confession, no Eucharist. Even further back they would have Mass once a year at Christmas, being faithfully served by deacons of the diocese the rest of the year.

I opened my travel kit and started laying out the vessels. After the pleasantries and before the sign of the cross, one of the inmates spoke up, “Father, do you think you could come every week?” Falling into a selfish trap, I felt a bit annoyed. I had fought to get in, driven to Jackson, gotten my car searched, waddled with gilded purple vestments past sex offenders. I have another prison, two other churches, and 550 other families. Was he not grateful? “Let’s make that the intention for the Mass,” I suggested. “I’ll pray about it.” I fully intended to commit to one day a month. We sang a cappella, and when I began to read the gospel, a tear dropped down my cheek.

“At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few; so ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.’”

I closed the lectionary. “Well guys, it looks like I’ll be coming more often.”

Dreher noted that Father Boyle regularly hosts trivia night festivities at “the Oyster Bar, a venerable dive down on the banks of Bayou Sara, where you cannot buy oysters, but you can have a lot of fun.”

The key is that south Louisiana is, to say the least, a culture steeped in Catholic life and culture. No one is surprised to see a priest in a bar, or pretty much anywhere else. This is especially true with “bars” that are actually “pubs,” in the sense that pubs in England serve as safe places that all kinds of people mix and mingle.

Maybe things have changed, noted Dreher. Also, what about ministers in Protestant traditions that reject the consumption of alcohol? And would it be even harder, in an ironic sort of way, for a man of the cloth to visit a bar without the professional calling card that is a clerical collar (let alone a cassock)?

Dreher offered this final thought:

Given the scandals of recent years, I think a clergyman should never, ever go into a gay bar, or into a straight bar that has a reputation as a place where people go looking for sex partners. Yes, there are men and women in those places who need ministry too, but it’s just far too risky. Still, if you are a minister of the Gospel and you want to speak the Word of God into the lives of broken and hurting people, the bar is a pretty good place to start. In my own life as a non-clergyman, I have probably had more substantive conversations about the things of God in bars than anywhere else, because that’s where people (especially men) open up about their struggles.

Then again, as I noted in a recent Rational Sheep post (“That voice from the past, on the Paul Finebaum Show”) it may be possible for pastors of all kinds to talk to regular folks elsewhere in the real world.

Does anyone remember this lively exchange from an “On Religion” column about a Methodist pastor in Alabama — The Rev. Gary Liederbach — who takes his Bible to Waffle House for his “office hours”?

… Liederbach sat down at the diner's middle bar, where the line of side-by-side chairs almost requires diners to chat with waitresses and each other. He didn't see the empty coffee cup of a rough, 50-something regular that, as a matter of pastoral discretion, he called "Chuck."

When Chuck came back inside from smoking a cigarette, he lit into Liederbach with a loud f-bomb, blasting him for taking his seat.

"The two waitresses who were standing there almost jumped over the bar and verbally attacked Chuck," wrote the pastor, in an online reflection. "One said, 'Now you listen here you mother f***er, this man here is a f***ing man of God and if you ever talk to him like that again I will kick your f***ing @ss!' " Another added: "He's my f***ing pastor! … Show some f***ing respect!"

The waitresses exchanged high fives and one shouted an image – sort of – from a recent Bible lesson with Liederbach: "Sword of the spirit, b*tch!"

Chuck walked out.

However, you may recall that this clash was not the end of Liederbach’s contacts with that Waffle House regular. At one point, “Chuck” needed to talk about the results of a cancer test.

Then he started talking about Vietnam and his nightmares about killing enemy soldiers, including children and the elderly. After the war he stopped going to church, sure that God could never forgive him.

Soon after that, Chuck's son was killed, accidentally shot in the head while handling a handgun he thought wasn't loaded. The son died a few hours later.

With this wave of grief, said the weeping father, his Vietnam nightmares returned with a vengeance. Was this God's judgment?

Yes, ministers (my father was a Baptist pastor) can run into all kinds of hard questions in their own church parking lot after an ordinary Sunday service. Pastors never know what they are going to hear when their telephones buzz, these days.

But my ruminations on the wisdom of pastors Freeman, Doyle and Liederbach have me wondering about the potential for shaking-hands and hugging-necks ministry in the digital age of screen culture. Where should pastors be going? What corners of public life should they avoid?

Where can clergy meet the unchurched? Trust me, I realize that many pastors — such as Father J. Stephen Freeman (Ancient Faith Ministries podcasts here) — have touched the lives of many people through podcasts, weblogs and other online forums. It would be crazy to ignore that reality in this day and age.

But where are the face-to-face “pubs” that are open to all in the larger “parishes” of ordinary towns, suburbs and cities?

Just asking.

FIRST ART: “Jesus Eats with Publicans and Sinners,” based on the art of Albert Robida — for sale at Meisterdrucke.ie