Jean Khoury
Summary: This article takes as its point of departure the reflection of a priest who, having recently completed a course of formation in spiritual direction, found himself asking a deceptively simple question: what, precisely, distinguishes spiritual direction in the strict sense from the many other things a priest already does — preaching, hearing confessions, catechising, visiting the sick — and what, if anything, is unique about spiritual direction when it is given by a priest rather than by another member of the faithful? The article argues that spiritual direction retains a real and irreducible specificity as a personal, sustained accompaniment of a soul in its discernment of grace, and that this specificity is not dissolved but rather intensified when the director is a priest, because the priest directs souls in virtue of his configuration to Christ the Head and Shepherd. It is this same sacramental grace, radiating outward, that allows the priest’s other ministries to participate, analogously, in the movement of spiritual direction — without thereby collapsing spiritual direction into everything the priest does. The article closes by drawing out what this means for the formation of priests as spiritual directors.
Introduction
A priest, having just completed a course of formation in spiritual direction, wrote the following reflection on his own experience of priesthood:
“It has become clear to me that there is no sharp dividing line between spiritual direction in the strict sense and all sorts of other things we do as priests: hearing confessions, preaching, catechising, and pastoral visiting. What are the implications of this? For instance, it often seems to me that during a homily I’m in effect giving a kind of spiritual direction to the whole parish.” (a Priest)
This reflection is worth pausing over at length, because it names, from lived experience, a real theological question rather than a merely practical one. Having just been trained in the specific discipline of spiritual direction — its methods of listening, its discernment of the movements of grace, its patient accompaniment of a soul over time — this priest now notices that the boundary between this discipline and the rest of his priestly life does not seem, in practice, to be a sharp one. Is this an illusion, a blurring that formation in spiritual direction should in fact correct? Or does it point to something true and important about the nature of spiritual direction when it is exercised by a priest specifically? The present article argues for the second reading, and in doing so seeks to answer the question this priest is really asking: what is spiritual direction, what is unique about it when given by a priest, and how is it related to, without being dissolved into, the whole of his priesthood?
I. Spiritual Direction in the Strict Sense
Before asking what is unique about priestly spiritual direction, it is necessary to say clearly what spiritual direction is. In the strict sense, spiritual direction is a personal and sustained accompaniment of a soul, over time, in its discernment of the movements of grace and its growth towards union with God. It is distinguished from a single conversation of advice, from a homily addressed to many, and from the sacramental absolution of sin, by its continuity, its attentiveness to the particular history and grace of one soul, and its explicit aim of helping that soul recognise and cooperate with the action of the Holy Spirit within it.
This is precisely the discipline that formation courses in Spiritual Direction exist to teach: a real competence, involving real skills of listening, discernment, and accompaniment, which is not simply infused automatically by ordination or by good will. It has its own pedagogy, its own tradition, running from the desert fathers through the great masters of the Carmelite and Ignatian schools, and its own requirements of humility, patience, and docility on the part of the director. Spiritual direction, in other words, retains a genuine specificity. The priest’s own formation in it was necessary precisely because this specificity is real.
II. What Is Unique About Spiritual Direction Given by a Priest
Spiritual direction is not reserved to priests. Men and women religious, and indeed lay men and women of proven wisdom and holiness, have long exercised this ministry fruitfully in the Church. What, then, is unique about spiritual direction when it is given by a priest?
1. The priest directs in persona Christi Capitis et Pastoris
A non-ordained director accompanies a soul primarily by the gift of personal wisdom, experience, and the charism of discernment. The priest possesses these too, or ought to cultivate them through formation such as the course this priest has just undertaken. But the priest’s spiritual direction carries, in addition, the specific grace of Holy Orders. As the Second Vatican Council teaches, priests “exercise the function of Christ the Head and Shepherd” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 6). When a priest directs a soul, he does not merely offer his own insight; he becomes, by the grace proper to his configuration to Christ, an instrument through whom the Shepherd himself continues to seek and to guide his sheep. This does not make priestly direction automatically superior in a psychological sense — a wise and experienced lay director may see more clearly on a given day than an inexperienced young priest — but it gives priestly direction a specific sacramental density that direction given by the non-ordained does not possess in the same way.
2. The proximity of the internal forum
The priest, and the priest alone, can also absolve. This means that the same person who accompanies a soul in spiritual direction is very often also the one through whom that soul receives sacramental forgiveness in Confession. Spiritual direction and the sacrament of Reconciliation remain formally and canonically distinct — direction is not itself a sacrament, and confession is not therapy — but in the priest these two ministries of the internal forum meet in a single person, configured to Christ in a single way. The discernment the priest exercises in direction and the judgment he exercises in absolution flow from the same grace of Orders, even though they remain two distinct acts. This proximity gives priestly spiritual direction an integration between the discerning of a soul’s path and the healing of its wounds that is proper to the priest’s ministry.
3. Direction ordered to, and flowing from, the Eucharist
Because the priest is also the one who celebrates the Eucharist for the soul he directs, his spiritual direction is naturally ordered towards, and nourished by, the same sacramental source that sustains the whole Christian life. He can lead a soul towards a Eucharistic and Paschal reading of its own interior history in a way that is connatural to his own daily configuration to Christ the High Priest offering himself on the altar. Spiritual direction given by a priest, therefore, tends spontaneously towards the sacramental and liturgical centre of the Church’s life, even when the conversation itself remains, as it must, focused on the concrete discernment of the person before him.
4. A share in apostolic responsibility for souls
Finally, the priest directs souls as one who has received, through Orders, a specific responsibility for the cura animarum, the care of souls, within a portion of the People of God entrusted to him. His direction is not a private service offered independently of the Church’s structure; it is an exercise of the pastoral office itself. This is why Pastores Dabo Vobis insists that priestly ministry flows from configuration to Christ rather than from functional competence alone: the priest is made a shepherd of souls, including in the intimate ministry of spiritual direction, because he participates sacramentally in the life and charity of the Good Shepherd.
III. Why Spiritual Direction Seems to Radiate Into the Rest of Priestly Ministry
This helps to answer the priest’s own question. If spiritual direction given by a priest flows from his configuration to Christ the Shepherd, and if this same configuration is what he brings to preaching, to confession, to catechesis, and to pastoral visiting, then it is not surprising that the boundary between spiritual direction and these other ministries should feel, in his experience, less sharp than a purely functional description of priestly tasks would suggest. The priest is, before anything else, a shepherd. He is called to nourish his sheep with the food/words that give life, and his ability to do this in a homily, in the confessional, or at the bedside of the sick, draws on the same interior source as his one-to-one accompaniment of a soul in spiritual direction: the charity of Christ the Shepherd who gives his life for his sheep.
This does not mean that spiritual direction loses its specific discipline, or that a homily simply is spiritual direction. The distinctions named in Section I remain real and important, which is precisely why this priest was right to seek formation in the specific competencies spiritual direction requires. But those distinct ministries — the homily, the confession, the catechetical instruction, the pastoral visit, and spiritual direction properly so called — are, as this priest intuited, distinct modalities of one and the same mission, the cura animarum, all proceeding from the single grace of a man configured to Christ the Head and Shepherd. Christ himself is the principle of this unity: it is not the priest who first unifies his ministries by skill or by will, but Christ who unifies the priest from within, through the grace of Orders that spiritual direction, among all the priest’s ministries, brings to its most personal and sustained expression.
This is illuminated by Christ’s own words: “the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (Jn 6:63), and by his prayer that those who believe through the apostolic word may be drawn into the same communion he shares with the Father (cf. Jn 17:20): “but I do not ask for these only, but also for those believing in Me through their word“. Whether the priest speaks this word to one soul in the quiet of spiritual direction, or to a whole parish gathered for the homily, it is the same Word, spoken through an instrument configured to Christ, that seeks to draw souls into communion with God. What differs is not the source, but the mode: a sustained and personal accompaniment in the one case, a public proclamation in the other. Recognising this difference of mode, without losing sight of the one source, is exactly what allows a priest to exercise spiritual direction in the strict sense with the rigour it requires, while also understanding why his other ministries can feel, to him, so continuous with it.
IV. Implications for the Formation of Priests in Spiritual Direction
If spiritual direction given by a priest carries this specific sacramental density, then the formation of priests for this ministry cannot be reduced to the acquisition of listening techniques borrowed, however usefully, from psychology or counselling. A course in spiritual direction for priests must form them, first, in the discipline itself — discernment of spirits, the tradition of the great spiritual masters, the patient art of accompaniment — and, second, in an ever-deepening awareness of the specific grace they bring to this ministry as men configured to Christ the Shepherd. A theology of priesthood that remains purely functional, describing priestly acts as a list of tasks a competent man could in principle perform, cannot account for what this priest discovered in his own experience. What is needed is a theology capable of forming the priest-director sapientially: not only informing his mind about the nature of spiritual direction, but disposing his whole person — intellect, will, and affectivity — towards the communion with Christ from which fruitful direction of souls actually flows.
Practical Conclusions
1. Teach the specificity of spiritual direction explicitly
Formation programmes should clearly distinguish spiritual direction from preaching, catechesis, and confession, so that priests can exercise each with the rigor and discipline proper to it, rather than allowing the ministries to blur together through neglect.
2. Name the sacramental grace proper to priestly direction
Alongside the transferable skills of listening and discernment, formation should help priests understand and appropriate the specific grace of directing souls in persona Christi Capitis et Pastoris, so that they approach direction not merely as a skill but as an exercise of their configuration to Christ.
3. Attend consciously to the relationship between direction and confession
Priests who both direct and confess the same souls should be formed to understand the proper distinction and the fruitful proximity between these two ministries of the internal forum, so that neither is reduced to the other.
4. Allow direction to illuminate, without displacing, the rest of priestly ministry
Priests can be helped to recognise, as this priest did, the continuity between spiritual direction and their other ministries, provided this recognition deepens rather than dissolves their attentiveness to the specific discipline spiritual direction requires.
5. Root formation in ongoing communion with Christ, not technique alone
Since the fruitfulness of priestly direction flows from the priest’s own configuration to Christ the Shepherd, formation programmes should include sustained spiritual accompaniment of the priest-directors themselves, and not only instruction in method.
Conclusion
The priest who wrote the reflection at the beginning of this article had rightly sensed something true: that his ministry of spiritual direction and the rest of his priestly life are not, in the end, two separate things. But the reason for this is not that spiritual direction loses its specificity once a man is ordained. It is rather that spiritual direction given by a priest draws, more explicitly and more personally than any of his other ministries, on the very grace that also animates his preaching, his confessional ministry, and his pastoral presence: his configuration to Christ the Head and Shepherd. Spiritual direction remains a distinct discipline, requiring the very formation this priest had just completed. And yet it is also, among all the priest’s ministries, the one in which the shepherding charity of Christ touches a single soul most directly and most personally — which is why, having learned to exercise it well, this priest could recognise its quiet resonance in everything else he does.
Bibliography
Magisterial and Scriptural Sources
Second Vatican Council. Presbyterorum Ordains, Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests, no. 6.
John Paul II. Pastores Dabo Vobis, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Formation of Priests.
The Holy Bible: John 6:63; John 17:20.
School of Mary — Related Studies
Khoury, Jean. “The Meaning of Sapiential Formation in Priestly Formation.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Restoring Theology.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Theology, Spiritual Theology, and the Question of Method.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Wisdom and Knowledge: Spiritual Formation and University Theology in the Christian Tradition.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Rethinking Theological Method and Theology.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Reforming Spiritual Formation.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Reforming Theology, A Call for Deeper Engagement.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “Integral Theology Project.” School of Mary.
Khoury, Jean. “One Shepherd, One Charity, The Inner Unity of Priestly Life and the Sapiential Renewal of Theology.” School of Mary.