The Perfect Priest
The results of a computerized survey indicate the perfect priest preaches exactly fifteen minutes. He condemns sins but never upsets anyone. He works from 8:00 AM until midnight and is also a janitor. He makes $50 a week, wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 weekly to the poor. He is 28 years old and has preached 30 years. He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and spends all of his time with senior citizens.
The perfect priest smiles all the time with a straight face because he has a sense of humor that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work. He makes 15 calls daily on parish families, shut-ins and the hospitalized, and is always in his office when needed.
If your priest does not measure up, simply send this letter to six other churches that are tired of their priest, too. Then bundle up your priest and send him to the church on the top of the list. In one week, you will receive 1,643 priests and one of them will be perfect. Have faith in this procedure.
One parish broke the chain and got its old priest back in less than three weeks.
The same can be said for parish music directors! My husband was really upset yesterday when our associate pastor said that his playing for six Masses (a wedding, a Scout Mass, and 4 normal Sunday Masses) plus giving a presentation on the new Missal this past weekend was "nothing."
ReplyDeletejkm- How awful! Probably the assoc. was just trying to compete and say "that's nothing...wait until Christmas" or something like that. I hope you made your husband a nice tea/cold beer and gave him a foot massage and lots of admiration
ReplyDeleteThe joke is funny because its so true. The poor priest could indeed be all those things and yet there would still be people clamoring for more from him.
ReplyDeleteI hate to break it to you, jkm, the assistant pastor IS correct. It's really nothing until you have to schedule breastfeeding in among the 6 Masses. ;) Seriously, though, I used to wonder if clerical celibacy was behind the cluelessness priests sometimes showed until I started working with married, father of several, music director who was about 10x worse.
ReplyDeleteOh man, I laughed as I read through this. I think I might show it to OUR priest, who's been told his 15 min homilies are WAY too long. (The man has a GIFT, I wish other people would see that.) Sometimes, our priest puts cute little stories or facts in our bulletin...I bet he'd put this in. ;-) He's a troublemaker like that, LOL.
ReplyDeleteFar too much truth in this. Shows how peculiar peoples' notions are.
ReplyDeleteI recall a story of one man in a group who set a number of hours for the tasks he thought the priest should be doing. The total came to 200 hours a week.
Which is peculiar, given there are only 168 hours in a week.
I like this and am going to share it.
ReplyDeleteLena
They forgot to mention that the perfect priest also speaks at least four languages fluently. Our poor parochial vicar is getting a lot of flak from people who can't understand his accent when he speaks English (his English is good, but his accent is thick), and the pastor can't make himself understood in Spanish (though he tries, bless him).
ReplyDelete