EWTN News reports that the Diocese of Phoenix has created a novel administrative position — a “vicar for priestly life and ministry” — tasked with ensuring the spiritual, physical, and mental well-being of its priests. Auxiliary Bishop Peter Dai Bui and Father Greg Schlarb presented this initiative as a response to the loneliness and burnout allegedly afflicting the diocesan clergy. Bishop John Dolan, whose personal history with suicide has made him an outspoken advocate for mental health, is credited with deepening the diocese’s commitment to treating priestly well-being as “a distinct and primary pastoral priority.” The diocese spans 44,000 square miles and serves more than 2 million Catholics across 94 parishes. Schlarb, who assumes the role on July 1, described his mission as being “a sounding board, a listening ear, and a compassionate brother” to his fellow priests, ensuring that “no priest has to walk alone.”
A Vicar for Priestly Life: Bureaucratic Medicine for a Terminal Disease
The creation of a “vicar for priestly life and ministry” is not a sign of vitality. It is an admission of failure — not the failure of one diocese, but the failure of the entire conciliar experiment. When the structures occupying the Vatican found it necessary to invent an entirely new bureaucratic office whose sole purpose is to keep their priests from collapsing under the weight of their own ministry, they are confessing what faithful Catholics have known since 1958: the post-conciliar reform has produced a clergy that cannot sustain itself on what it has been given.
Consider the logic at work. The Church founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ endured two millennia of persecution, heresy, schism, and martyrdom. Her priests went to the lions, to the scaffold, to the gulag. They did not need a “vicar for priestly life” to hold their hands. They had the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the sacraments, mental prayer, the rosary, the discipline of the religious life, and the unchanging doctrine of the Catholic faith. Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi — the law of prayer is the law of belief is the law of life. Destroy the first, and the other two follow into ruin.
What has the conciliar reform given its priests? A “Mass” that is a table of assembly, stripped of its propitiatory character and its orientation toward the adoration of the Most Holy Trinity. Sacraments whose validity is gravely doubtful due to the new ordination rites of Paul VI. A “formation” steeped in psychology, sociology, and the horizontal anthropocentrism condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici gregis. And a “presbyterate” that is less a brotherhood of men configured to Christ the High Priest than a professional association of ecclesiastical middle managers, complete with “personnel issues,” “stumbling blocks” from “actively disengaged” parishioners, and the need for “sabbaticals.”
The Language of Therapeutic Modernism
The vocabulary employed by Bui and Schlarb is itself a diagnostic instrument. Bishop Bui declares that priests are not merely “workers in the vineyard” but “sons and brothers who need to be accompanied.” Father Schlarb wishes to be “a sounding board, a listening ear, and a compassionate brother.” Bishop Dolan asks: “How do we make sure our priests have what they need, that they are healthy: spiritually, physically, mentally?”
This is not the language of the Catholic priesthood. It is the language of the therapist’s office, the corporate human-resources department, and the support group. The word “accompaniment” — that signature term of the Bergoglian and post-Bergolinian era — appears repeatedly, and its presence is no accident. To “accompany” is not to teach, correct, admonish, or sanctify. It is to stand alongside someone in their subjective experience without making objective demands upon them. It is, in the language of the Church before 1958, a dereliction of pastoral duty dressed up as compassion.
St. Paul did not “accompany” the Corinthians. He commanded them: “Be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). St. John Chrysostom, that model of the preaching bishop, did not offer his priests “sounding boards.” He thundered against their vices, their worldliness, their neglect of souls. The Council of Trent, in its decree on reform, demanded residence, preaching, and the diligent administration of the sacraments — not “well-being programs.”
When Bishop Dolan speaks of priests being “formed and transformed in their relationship with Christ,” one must ask: formed in what image? Transformed by what means? If the “formation” is the conciliar seminary system — with its emphasis on “human formation” over doctrinal and spiritual formation, its replacement of St. Thomas Aquinas with the phenomenology of Rahner and the historicism of Schillebeeckx — then the transformation is not toward sanctity but toward the dissolution of the priestly identity itself. A priest who has been “formed” by the post-conciliar system is a priest who has been systematically deprived of the very things that make the priesthood bearable: certainty of faith, the reality of the sacrificial Mass, and the knowledge that he acts in persona Christi.
The Omission That Condemns
Read the article carefully. Search for any mention of the root cause of the crisis. You will not find it. There is no mention of the New Mass and its devastating effects on priestly vocations and perseverance. There is no mention of the systematic destruction of seminary formation after the Council. There is no mention of the replacement of the Roman Catechism with the relativism of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. There is no mention of the silence of these same bishops on the dogmatic questions that define the faith — the Real Presence, the necessity of baptism, the existence of hell, the evil of contraception.
Instead, we are offered “mental health advocacy.” Bishop Dolan, who “has lost four family members to suicide,” is “known for his mental health advocacy.” This is presented as though it were a credential of pastoral excellence. But what good is mental health advocacy to a priest who has lost his faith? What good is a “listening ear” to a man who has been told by his formation that the Mass is a meal, that the sacraments are symbols, and that the Church’s two-thousand-year teaching on faith and morals is subject to “continuing development”? The crisis in the post-conciliar clergy is not primarily psychological. It is theological. It is the crisis of men who were promised a “renewal” and received a revolution.
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, diagnosed the disease of modernity with surgical precision: “This plague is the secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors… It began with the denial of Christ the Lord’s reign over all nations; the Church’s authority to teach men, to issue laws, to govern nations, which authority she received from Christ the Lord to lead men to eternal happiness, was denied.” The conciliar sect embraced this laicism at the very moment it claimed to be opening the windows of the Church to the world. Dignitatis Humanae proclaimed religious liberty. Nostra Aetate embraced false religions. Gaudium et Spes reduced the Church’s mission to “reading the signs of the times” — that is, to conforming herself to the world rather than converting it.
The priests of Phoenix are the children of this revolution. They are men formed in a system that told them the world has nothing to fear from the Church, that the Church has much to learn from the world, and that the purpose of the priesthood is not to offer the Holy Sacrifice for the salvation of souls but to “accompany” people in their journey. And now the system wonders why these men are lonely, burned out, and in need of a “vicar for priestly life.”
The Presbyterate as Professional Guild
Bishop Dolan’s remark that “you’re not just ordained a priest, but you’re ordained a priest in the presbyterate — that means there’s a community of priests of which you belong” is revealing in its banality. Of course the presbyterate is a community. But the conciliar reform has reduced it to the functional equivalent of a professional guild — a community defined not by shared faith, shared worship, and shared sacrifice, but by shared employment in a diocesan bureaucracy.
The true presbyterate of the Catholic Church is united by the bond of the Holy Sacrifice. When priests offer the Traditional Latin Mass together, they are united in the most profound act possible on this earth: the re-presentation of Calvary. When they recite the Divine Office together, they are united in the prayer of the Church. When they study the Summa together, they are united in the pursuit of truth. The post-conciliar “presbyterate” is united by nothing more than a common employer and a common crisis of identity.
Father Schlarb speaks of priests in “remote parishes” who need to “feel supported, heard, and loved.” But the priest in the remote parish who offers the true Mass, who preaches the full doctrine of the Church, who hears confessions with the gravity the sacrament demands — that priest is not alone. He is united to every priest who has ever offered that same Sacrifice, from the Catacombs to the present day. He has the communion of saints. He has the Blessed Virgin Mary. He has the Real Presence of Our Lord in the tabernacle. What he does not have — and what no “vicar for priestly life” can give him — is the support of a hierarchy that has abandoned the faith it was ordained to guard.
The Suicide of the Clergy and the Suicide of the Church
The article’s reference to Bishop Dolan’s family losses from suicide is deployed to lend emotional weight to the mental health initiative. But it raises a question that the article dare not ask: why is the post-conciliar clergy suffering from such catastrophic rates of depression, substance abuse, sexual scandal, and abandonment of ministry?
The answer is not complicated. A priest who does not believe in the Real Presence has no reason to remain celibate. A priest who does not believe in hell has no urgency about preaching repentance. A priest who does not believe that the Church is the one true Ark of Salvation has no motive to endure the sacrifices that the priesthood demands. The sexual abuse crisis, the vocations crisis, the crisis of faith among the clergy — all of these are fruits of the same tree: the conciliar revolution’s destruction of Catholic identity.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the sacraments merely serve to remind man of the presence of the ever-benevolent Creator” (Proposition 41) and that “the Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57). The entire post-conciliar project has been the systematic implementation of these condemned propositions. The result is a clergy that has been “reminded” of everything except the supernatural, “accompanied” in every direction except toward heaven, and “formed” in every discipline except the science of the saints.
Conclusion: The Remedy Is Not a Vicar but a Return
The Diocese of Phoenix has not pioneered a solution. It has pioneered a more elaborate form of denial. By creating a bureaucratic office to manage the symptoms of the crisis, the diocese ensures that the cause of the crisis — the conciliar apostasy — is never addressed, never named, and never repented of.
The remedy for the loneliness of priests is not a “compassionate brother” with a new title. The remedy is the restoration of the priesthood as Our Lord instituted it: men who offer the true Sacrifice, who preach the fullness of the faith, who live in the state of grace, and who know with supernatural certainty that they are alter Christus — other Christs. No amount of “mental health advocacy” can substitute for the grace of the sacraments. No “vicar for priestly life” can replace the Vicar of Christ — a office that, since the death of Pius XII, has been occupied by men who have used their authority to dismantle the very faith they were sworn to protect.
The faithful must reject these palliative measures for what they are: the death rattle of a dying system. The Church does not need new offices. She needs the old faith, the old Mass, the old sacraments, and the old hierarchy that was willing to suffer and die rather than compromise with the world. Statuat Deus quod optat mundus — let God establish what the world desires. But let the world know that what God has established cannot be improved by human invention, and what God has condemned cannot be reformed by human compassion.
The priests of Phoenix — and of every diocese in the conciliar sect — do not need to be “accompanied.” They need to be converted. And the first step in that conversion is the recognition that the system in which they serve is not the Church of Jesus Christ but the abomination of desolation foretold by Our Lord Himself (Matt. 24:15). Until that recognition occurs, every new “initiative” will be nothing more than rearranging the furniture in a house that is already on fire.
Source:
Diocese of Phoenix pioneers role for priestly well-being: No priest should walk ‘alone’ (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 17.04.2026