At Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium, during the vigil with young people on 9 June, a young woman told Leo XIV that she had struggled for years in silence with depression, until the Friday evening when she tried to take her own life. The Pope did not respond with an uplifting formula. He did the exact opposite of what too many pastors do every day with their priests in dioceses across the world. He said that mental health is “increasingly threatened” in societies that consider themselves advanced, that there is a need for a healthcare system capable of making “this invisible and widespread malaise” one of its priorities, and then he uttered a sentence that should be posted at the entrance to every bishop’s residence and diocesan curia: “We must not spiritualise pain, superficially attributing it to ‘God’s will’ or to some mysterious plan of his, because this risks minimising that suffering, silencing it and hurting people.” And again: “God does not want suffering. He carries it with us.”
These words were addressed to young people, yet anyone who knows clerical life from within knows exactly whom they sound like an indictment against.
The Priest As Stopgap
In the ordinary governance of too many dioceses there is an unwritten hierarchy of priorities. At the top is the number of parishes to be covered with a clergy that grows thinner year after year. Immediately beneath that comes the care of relations with civil authorities, benefactors, friendly media, and the public image of the institution. Then come agreements, contracts and conventions. Somewhere much further down comes the person of the priest: his psychological and physical resilience, his loneliness, his balance.
The result is a pastoral model that treats the priest as a functional resource to be redistributed - three, four, five, ten communities each - rather than as a man with limits. Pope Francis denounced this more than once, yet it is worth recalling how certain bishops listened to him: they applauded him as long as he touched on themes that suited them - migrants, “frociaggine”, little plants to water - and then suddenly became deaf as soon as he moved on to serious matters. So too many priests end up living as “functionaries of the sacred”, dispensing services to increasingly indifferent faithful, crushed by the multiplicity of commitments and the complexity of situations. It is the ideal breeding ground for burnout. And when burnout arrives, the very apparatus that helped produce it looks the other way.
The Figures The Church Prefers Not To Have
The most embarrassing figure is not what we know, but what we stubbornly refuse to know. In 2020, the French Bishops’ Conference had the courage to commission a serious study on the physical and mental health of active diocesan priests: more than six thousand priests consulted in over one hundred dioceses. It emerged that almost two in ten priests show depressive symptoms, that some reach genuine professional exhaustion, that alcohol abuse affects an alarming proportion of the clergy, and that more than half of priests live alone. In the background were seven priestly suicides in four years. The French bishops chose to publish those figures without hiding them.
In Italy there is nothing comparable. Those who have been dealing with the issue for decades have had to admit publicly, and with shame, that in the Bel Paese systematic and up-to-date studies on the distress of the clergy are simply not carried out. Not because the tools are lacking, but because the will is lacking. To measure a problem means taking responsibility for it. And responsibility is exactly what many episcopates prefer to avoid.
Cannobio, And The Silence That Comes Afterwards
Last 5 July, Fr Matteo Balzano, thirty-five years old, parish vicar in Cannobio in the Diocese of Novara, was found dead in the flat attached to the oratory for which he was responsible. He had not appeared to celebrate morning Mass. The previous evening he had organised bingo in the village. Those close to him said that he had “tried every” path to take hold again of his own fragility, “including those involving professionals”.
That clarification would deserve an investigation of its own because, in Fr Matteo’s case, figures were involved who have only ever created problems for the clergy, such as Fr Enrico Parolari, and have never helped. Serious psychologists - not the Amedeo Cencinis of this world - are not taken into consideration by bishops and seminary rectors. On the contrary, they push them away and flee from them. And yet a priest’s therapeutic and support pathway should be sustained, protected and integrated into the life of the diocese. Too often, instead, clinical reports end up in a drawer. They are minimised, downplayed, at times openly contradicted by superiors with no competence whatsoever, who set their own little spiritual exhortation against a clinician’s diagnosis. It reaches the paradox of blaming the suffering priest: it is insinuated that he does not pray enough, that he lacks the spirit of sacrifice, that his illness is really a lack of faith in disguise. This is the spiritualisation of pain in its most poisonous form, and it is precisely what Leo XIV condemned in Barcelona.
From Spain, which the Pope is visiting in these days, came one of the clearest reactions to the tragedy of Cannobio. A priest of the Diocese of Getafe wrote that “we are not superheroes”, that “indifference kills more than hatred”, and that too many communities “demand a great deal but offer little support”, leaving priests to silence their pain “out of fear or shame”. The diagnosis, from one end of Europe to the other, is the same. Only the hierarchy’s willingness to listen to it changes.
Pain Is Neither Spiritualised Nor Minimized
When a priest is clinically depressed, answering him with “come on, it is just a time of trial” is not charity: it is an act of institutional violence disguised as consolation. It is not theology, it is abdication. It is an attempt to offload onto God - and, by reflection, onto the supposed spiritual inadequacy of the person at the centre of the matter - a responsibility that belongs entirely to men: to those who assign unsustainable pastoral workloads, to those who leave priests in residential and emotional isolation, to those who throw therapists’ reports in the bin because they contradict the narrative of the “strong” priest who is always available.
Leo XIV also indicated the opposite path. Close to those who suffer, he said, one must remain “with discretion without rushing to explain that pain”, taking them by the hand and accompanying them. This is the exact opposite of those bishops who summon, admonish and reassign. It is the opposite of the system that wants everyone to be “victorious and perfect” and that relegates limits, fragility and pain to “the deafening silence of loneliness or even shame”.
That silence is no longer tolerable. It is not tolerable from an ecclesial point of view, after the words spoken by a Pope before a young woman who survived a suicide attempt. It is not tolerable from a human point of view, after Cannobio and after the French figures that the Italian Church pretends not to have. Care for the health of priests is not optional, nor is it a paternalistic concession: it is a duty of justice. And pastors who continue to place parishes to be plugged and the public image of the institution before the lives of their priests must be called by name. Because the first night to be crossed today is that of a hierarchy that has stopped looking its sons in the face.
fr.F.G.
Silere non possum