O’Reilly’s In Persona Christi is no easy read, not because of any error in its masterful presentation of St Thomas’s metaphysics and morals, nor in its characterisation of priestly holiness and perfection, but because it makes clear how far this robust vision of priestly life differs from the reality we find in the contemporary Church.

The difficulty of facing up to the issues in priestly formation and life in the Church today is that it often obscures much of the good that is happening. If not a ‘Quiet Revival’, there are certainly more people seeking the sacraments, and doing so at a younger age. The nadir of life in the Church was not so much the period of explosive deterioration in the years immediately around the Council, which, as related by those who endured them, really do attest to the accuracy of David Lodge’s novels. Rather, the true nadir seems to be the 1980s and 1990s, when those who had endured, or perhaps even relished, the chaos around the Council were charged with forming the generations of priests who followed them. We are, however, somewhat past this period, and the necessary seriousness of the systematic preparation of men for priestly formation has only become more apparent in light of the scandals that have rocked the Church in the last twenty-five years. Liturgical celebrations have taken on a new reverence and dignity as it has become clear that nobody is well served by folksy, relaxed celebrations, and as younger faithful and younger clergy have become more instinctively traditional in faith, morals, and worship. The hopes of St John Paul II for a renewal of moral theology, articulated in Veritatis Splendour, have not perfectly flowered, but have at least taken root. The articulation of mutual enrichment in the Liturgy and the call for a hermeneutic of continuity in reception of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council have, despite the restrictions and confusions of more recent times, continued to gain ground in the mainstream of the life of the Church.

Still, there are difficulties, and they are not dealt with by avoiding discussion of them, and it is here that Kevin O’Reilly’s work will hopefully prove invaluable. We can chalk the malaise up to any number of difficulties: the ongoing battles over the manner of celebrating the Sacred Liturgy, the moral integrity of the clergy, and the crisis of confidence in the truth and goodness of the Church’s moral teaching, found mostly among older generations of clergy. All have their part to play, but the real strength of O’Reilly’s work is that, through a focus on a Thomistic account of virtue, all of these problems are really revealed to be intertwined.

In O’Reilly’s presentation of the life of priestly perfection, we see a distinctively Thomistic and Dominican approach to the question of virtue. Not only is obedience – the only professed vow of the Dominican – placed at the centre of consideration, but O’Reilly also shows how the counsels of chastity and poverty are informed by obedience. Yet, while obviously Dominican, the book’s Thomistic grounding makes its content readily available and applicable to the formation of all priests, especially given the place that St Thomas continues to hold as a theological guide for those in priestly formation (Optatam Totius, §16). While under no obligation to undertake a particular manner of life by way of becoming an oblate or tertiary of a particular Religious Institute, O’Reilly’s presentation makes clear that the evangelical counsels are ways to perfection for those in all forms of priestly life, not only conforming them to Christ but freeing them from affections of the world that build a kind of pusillanimity in the full preaching of the Gospel. It is striking that this approach to formation, which seems, from my own conversation with seminarians, to be largely absent from their experience. While it was perhaps true to say that at certain points in the last fifty years, seminary education prepared men to be social workers rather than priests, the servant leadership model of the priesthood which endures in seminary formation, and has substituted the vision of priest at the service of worship and Eucharistic sacrifice, will continue to offer a skewed vision of priestly life. This anti-cultic vision of priestly ministry can be seen quite clearly in the suggested revisions of the Ratio Fundamentalis by a Synodal Study Group (see La Revisione della Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis in Prospettiva Sinodale Missionaria).

Thomas’s careful articulation of the moral psychology found across the Prima and Secunda Secundæ of the Summa Theologiæ makes clear the peril that is at the heart of poorly lived priestly life. In this sense, O’Reilly’s work stands as a mirror that all priests would do well to hold up against themselves during times of retreat and reflection. It contains fruitful material for consideration in ongoing and permanent formation sessions, covering the intellectual (chapters five and six), moral (chapter seven), spiritual (chapter eight), and liturgical (chapter nine) life of the priest. O’Reilly’s work makes clear that when one part of priestly life is eroded, others can quickly follow, and that the only way to ensure any kind of integrity in priestly life is to apply the moral teaching of Aquinas in order to bring about integrity. Here the wisdom and humanity of the Angelic Doctor’s moral teaching come to the fore, and in the face of those who see St Thomas’s moral theology as too theoretical or cold, it shows the practical and everyday wisdom it contains. How often are serious sins and scandals preceded by other, less significant moral failings?

If there is one difficulty with the book, it is perhaps the way in which it will inevitably bump up against a grammar of self-care that has become central to professional life, and so, inevitably, to the life of the Church. Fleshly interests – films, sports, literature – and lower forms of knowledge are, on O’Reilly’s account, to be eschewed. While there is some truth to this, and priests are as likely as anyone else in our high-speed, high-dopamine world to waste time on mindless activities, a negative approach to these kinds of activities, which can be easily integrated into a recollected religious and priestly life, will not sit so easily in a contemporary formation environment. The question of how these are balanced is surely up to the individual priest, religious, and seminarian, taking account of the fact that they are the primary agents of their own formation and ongoing formation (Pastores Dabo Vobis, §69; §79; Ratio Fundamentalis Institutionis Sacerdotalis, §§150–51).

Still, this is a minor caveat to an impressive volume, and probably one of the most systematically theological accounts I have read in some time. It addresses the very serious questions at the heart of the malaise in priestly life in a tone that is honest, open, and humble. It does not engage in the kinds of polemics which are so often used by the very people O’Reilly quotes. We do have to square up to the fact that the reason for the moral chaos in our contemporary Church is not unrelated to the fact that many who have held and some who continue to hold positions in our contemporary Church lack the conviction that what the Church teaches in the area of faith and morals is the truth which alone can make us free (c/f D. Vincent Twomey, SVD, Moral Theology After Humanæ Vitæ, p. 66). We have to address the fact that the reverent and obedient celebration of the Church’s Liturgy is integral to priestly holiness, cultivating the virtue of religion, and fostering charity. These are serious questions, but just as St Thomas’s moral theology shows us that things can unravel quickly in the moral life, a little work can begin the process of change and make a considerable difference in the fabric of the Church’s life.

It has become popular in our contemporary Church for priests to claim no greater holiness than the laity: all of us are really muddling along together. O’Reilly’s book shows the tragedy of this vision, in which priests stop striving for holiness, muddling along with everyone else and, in the case of those in Religious Institutes, forgetting that the externals of life are not to be scorned in favour of internal conversion, but are the means to it. When priests give up on holiness, it is deleterious to the life of holiness in the Church. As the Cistercian abbot Jean-Baptiste Chautard put it in his classic Soul of the Apostolate,