An 'eminently symbolic change' for Emmanuel Community priests

In a technical but eminently symbolic change, the Congregation for the Clergy has just erected a clerical public association for priests and deacons belonging to the Emmanuel Community.

“This will allow for their way of life and mission to be authenticated by the Church and to become canonically viable,” explains Laurent Landete, the moderator general of the community.

Forty years after its foundation and with 11,500 members around the world, including half in France, the Emmanuel Community is now entering a new stage in its development.

“In the early days of the community when we had around twenty priests, we were able to work easily with several French bishops, who incardinated our priests,” recalls Fr Henri-Marie Mottin, who is in charge of the community’s priests.

“Our growth has changed the situation and we have found ourselves in some very precarious situations,” he added.

Although agreements had been made with some bishops to appoint priests to specific posts, their successors have often not felt bound by these commitments.

They may, therefore, be tempted to assign these priests to other tasks not always in line with the charism of the community.

Nevertheless, although there is generally a good understanding with the bishops in France, matters may become more complicated elsewhere, where the missionary specificity of the community is not understood, nor the collaborative link between priests and laity in the community.

“Some bishops have told me that Emmanuel priests do not exist, that they only have diocesan priests,” confides Laurent Landete.

In Africa, it has even happened that the leaders of the community are no longer able to meet the seminarians sent to the diocese...

“All this risks putting in question the credibility of a call born within the community,” Landete admits.

At the suggestion of Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, Fr Mottin, the ecclesiastical assistant of the movement, contacted the Congregation for the Clergy, which proposed the solution of creating a clerical association.

In fact, the Emmanuel Community’s concerns add to a broader process of reflection that is taking place in Rome with respect to the links between priests and the new communities.

At the end of May, the biannual meeting of the heads of Vatican dicasteries with Pope Francis even raised the possibility of incardinating priests in lay movements. However, it appears that the Holy See is not considering a single uniform solution.

“Our model is not a universal solution,” recognizes Landete, who emphasizes that other communities have made different choices, sometimes closer to the form of religious life.

“The priests of the Emmanuel Community have never felt religious but rather secular and diocesan,” observes Fr Mottin. He also recognizes that “this could be destabilizing for some, caught between the authority of their bishop and the charism of the community".

“The new clerical association will enable the priests’ relationship with the Church to be established on an objective basis,” he says.

And while the clerical association is able to incardinate priests, it will only do so “exceptionally", for example, for its leaders, formators or in the case of particular missions.

“For example, when the Community finds itself faced with an explicit refusal to be welcomed on the basis of its own charism or in order to avoid the isolation of a priest in a country where his community may be absent,” he explains.

The great majority of the priests of the Emmanuel Community will thus remain incardinated in their dioceses of origin.

“Above all, this is not a way of controlling the priests,” warns Landete.

The only obligation will be that the priests must be both members of the clerical association and the association of the faithful, both of which are closely linked.

Thus the moderator general will be an ex officio member of the council of the priestly association and the leader of the latter will be a member of the council of the association of the faithful.

Moreover, the Congregation for the Clergy will name the leader of the priests based on the proposal of the moderator general.

“Generally speaking, we are placing on a legal footing what is already happening. We never take a decision without the advice of the other,” emphasizes Landete. He regards these developments as falling “fully within the insights of the Council regarding a ministerial priesthood at the service of the holiness of the baptized".

It is also part of an evolution towards a sharing of priests with the dioceses that have fewer vocations and with which the Emmanuel Community wishes to establish agreements to develop its missionary projects.