As we continue “Archbishop Mark Coleridge’s Reflections on 50 Years of Pastoral Service” series, reflecting on his early years in parish ministry, Archbishop Mark shares his journey as a young assistant priest facing challenges that stretched beyond his training and abilities.
He opens up about feeling unprepared to address issues like marital conflicts and birth control counselling. Seeking guidance from a more experienced colleague, he discovers the value of acknowledging his limitations and seeking assistance, leading to personal growth and innovative solutions. Despite the obstacles, these foundational years in parish ministry played a pivotal role in shaping his pastoral identity, equipping him with practical skills before transitioning into academic and leadership positions within the church. Archbishop Mark highlights the significance of maintaining a “pastor’s heart” in all aspects of his work, emphasizing the importance of effective communication and a humble recognition of one’s limitations.
Watch the Archbishop’s reflection here:
Ep2 – Pastoral Mud on the Boots
Well, my first parish was a very large parish I was the second curate as we used to say, so the third priest in the parish. There was the parish priest, and then there were two assistants and I was the junior assistant. In fact the parish needed a religious education coordinator but they couldn’t afford a religious education coordinator, so they got a second priest, I was cheaper. So a lot of what I did when I looked back was the kind of stuff a religious education coordinator would do now. In the parish there were many, many young married couples. And what I was faced into was marital strife, marital bust up, all the agonising over birth control. And none of that was I equipped to deal with. You know, at twenty-five.
So I can remember feeling I was floundering so badly in some of these situations I went and sought advice from a very wise old priest with whom I occasionally had lunch on Saturday. And that was providential because he gave me advice that I’ve never forgotten simple advice, it wasn’t anything, you know, sort of mysterious or mystical. But I just, I had that sense of myself floundering and needing someone else to help me.
Now I’d grown up in a world where self-sufficiency was highly prized. My experience of parish ministry was that I can’t do it on my own. Now, that experience of not being able to do it on my own can be very, in a sense, threatening and even painful. And at other times of my life later on I had the same experience, I can’t do this on my own, I need help. Now for all that it can seem threatening it also is extraordinarily creative. So I look back on those years in parishes where it wasn’t always easy living with other clergy in the house, I have to say. It wasn’t easy dealing with real, raw human emotion and highly charged situations like marital bust up and that sort of thing and at the age I was, and given the Seminary formation I had received I just was not equipped to be doing much of what I was asked to do.
But that, learning your own limitations again is painful in its way, but that was a very creative experience that as a priest you have to learn what you can’t do. Sometimes you’ve got to learn to do things you can’t do but other times there’s a limit that you have to recognise, a limit to your capacity or to what’s appropriate for a priest to do. For instance, I’m not a trained psychologist and I can’t get into areas of psychological counselling that are not my competence. So learning your limitations is also about focusing what a priest is and what a priest does. And what a priest does not do, what I can’t do and perhaps shouldn’t do.
So look, I think the five years that I had in three parishes, I had two longer stints in two parishes and then one, six months in a third just as I was preparing to go overseas to study. But I look back now fifty years later and I think to myself, those five years were absolutely critical. Because it gave me some pastoral mud on the boots before I went into academic ministry and teaching and eventually into the episcopate. And with the stint I had in the Vatican. The danger is, and I saw this in some of my friends and colleagues in Rome, when I was studying they had come straight from ordination to study and they had never been in parish ministry. In that sense they hadn’t been able to put down roots in the priesthood. And I think they paid a price for that.
So I was always grateful that I was given five years in parishes and those years shaped me I think they gave me, I hope, something like a pastor’s heart and I’ve never lost that sense of being a pastor, whether I was teaching or as an academic or as a Bishop. Inevitably I’ve been a scholar, but I like to think that I have been a scholar, a teacher, but always with a pastor’s heart and always with a very strong sense of the need to communicate. And not just to be an ivory tower academic who doesn’t communicate, that’s not my thing. Son of a salesman.