Fr. Brian Hawker Interview - Priest, Where is Thy Mass?
Fr. Brian Hawker gave the following interview to Angelus Press in 2004 as a contribution to the book, "Priest, Where is Thy Mass?" where 17 priests, none of whom were members of the Society of Saint Pius X at the time, gave their testimonials about the priesthood, the Mass, and their vocations. Fr. Hawker passed to his eternal reward on February 4th, 2024.
When were you ordained, Father?
Fr. Hawker: In 1978. I entered the minor seminary in 1966, right after Vatican II. For the first year (or maybe two years), we still had the traditional Mass in the seminary. The minor seminary was a regular high school, and they actually did still emphasize Latin at that time. But, by the time I got to the major seminary, the new style of formation was fully in place.
When you entered the seminary, what was your idea of the priesthood?
Fr. H.: Well, we had been taught to have very great respect for the priest, because he represented Christ. It was sort of drummed into us at home, and also by the nuns who taught us in grammar school, that the priest was the Man of God. That certainly changed by the time I got to the college level of the seminary. By that time, you know, things were really in revolution. The whole meaning of the priesthood, as portrayed to us there, was completely different from what I had always been taught.
What was the new idea of priesthood?
Fr. H.: Well, the idea was that the priest is, in many ways, a social worker. The idea of the sacrificial nature of the priesthood in the Mass was completely thrown out, and I was kind of embarrassed by that. The priest was no longer meant to offer sacrifice–he was supposed to be just like everybody else and very much a part of the world. There was a kind of anti-clerical attitude, in the sense that it was always emphasized that we should have more contact with (and friendship with) lay-people rather than with the other priests. It was a very egalitarian idea of what the priesthood was all about. By the time I was ordained, or a little after that, there were many types of “non-ordained ministers”: lay lectors, and so on.
Since the New Mass does not emphasize the idea of sacrifice, why would we need a priest to be an offerer of sacrifice? Obviously, I think, the New Mass has really contributed to the decline of vocations–to the priesthood and in general–for that reason.
What is the role of the priest in the New Mass?
Fr. H.: In the New Mass, they all just gather together as an assembly to praise God, and the priest is supposed to be the presider, or the facilitator, of that gathering. They don’t have any idea of the sacrificial aspect, which is clear in the old Mass.
How did you react when they were trying to form you to be a presider?
Fr. H.: Well, when I was first ordained, I’m not sure if I had the same understanding of these things as I now have. By the time I was ordained, I had been in the seminary for twelve years, and we were pretty well brain-washed. I remember that I never really liked the idea of being a presider, and I never really liked the New Mass. I didn’t understand all of the problems with it at that time, but I knew that there was something wrong. I knew that this New Mass was not what the Church had always done, and that, if you looked at pictures of Protestant services, there was really very little difference. So I was very troubled by it, but, at the time, I just thought that I was doing what I was supposed to do.
One of the things that they used to brain-wash us was the idea that the New Mass was like the Mass celebrated by the Apostles in the very earliest days of the Church. I didn’t really believe that, but they really drummed these ideas into us over the years. The 1970’s, of course, were a revolutionary period in the Church and in society, so we were trained that way, and we weren’t really prepared to resist the brain-washing, since we were not given any strong spiritual life. There was really no emphasis in the seminary on prayer or meditation. Even attendance at Mass was, for the most part, optional!
Isn’t the term “brain-washing” a bit of an exaggeration?
Fr. H.: No. Brain-washing was very much a reality. We were always taught to go along with the system, even though it was very corrupt. We were always trained with the idea that Vatican II was the great hope of the Church and that everything before Vatican II had been bad. Many of our professors were ordained in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and they really had a lot of resentment toward their traditional training and toward the traditional Mass. That resentment and bitterness were drummed into us, almost constantly.
Is it possible to be a man of God, a sacrificing priest, when saying the New Mass, even in its most conservative form?
Fr. H.: I don’t think it is possible to do that with the New Mass at all, even if it is said in a very reverent way. I think that’s the mistake that some people have, who want to find a priest to say the New Mass in a more conservative way. But I don’t think it is possible to offer sacrifice when the New Mass itself de-emphasizes that aspect. Even if it is said in the Latin form, there are still some errors in it. The General Instruction on the Roman Missal does not emphasize the idea of the sacrifice of the Mass, rather, it puts the emphasis on the priest as the gatherer of the assembly.
Is there a particular feature of the New Mass which makes you say that it’s not possible to be a sacrificing priest when saying it?
Fr. H.: For instance, the Offertory prayers of the New Mass have nothing to do with the Offertory prayers of the traditional Mass. Even the Roman Canon, which is better, I guess, than the other “Eucharistic Prayers,” as they call them, is still flawed in many ways, and it de-emphasizes the idea of sacrifice by the prayers which are changed. I think that some people have a mistaken idea that the New Mass is just an English translation of the traditional Mass, which is, of course, simply not true.
Is there a built-in conflict for the priest who tries to say the New Mass according to the traditional ideas of the priesthood?
Fr. H.: Oh, yes! At least I can say that, in my case, there certainly was such a conflict. I don’t see how it would be avoidable when a priest begins to understand what the traditional priesthood is. I don’t see how he can continue to perform the ceremonies of the New Mass and live with his conscience. If he begins to find out what the priesthood is all about, and he realizes that he’s not really living up to that when he celebrates Mass every day, I think that there would necessarily be a personal conflict.
How do priests who experience this conflict manage to go along with the system?
Fr. H.: You would hope that such a conflict would cause these priests to refuse to go along with the system, but in some cases they purposely try to conquer their conflicted feelings, or to repress them. Or they just don’t want to face reality! Some of my former colleagues have found a way to justify the new system and to go along with it. They know that there is a problem, but they don’t think it is serious enough to do something radical about it. I remember, one time, telling a priest friend of mine that I had been saying the traditional Mass. He was not against the traditional Mass, but he asked me if I had permission. I said, “No, I hope I don’t need permission!” He became very upset with me, because he thought that I was being disobedient.
What finally brought you to the celebration of the traditional Mass?
Fr. H.: After I became a priest, I realized how very little I really knew! We didn’t learn very much in the seminary–nothing of philosophy and very little of theology, at least not of traditional theology! So, I started reading on my own, because I knew that I had to learn something! I also began talking with other priests who were older and had more of a sense of what the Church was supposed to be. I began reading about Church history, about the Mass, and about theology. Then, I began to realize that there was something very seriously wrong and that it all flowed from the New Mass.
What happened as a result of this reading program?
Fr. H.: When you’re a priest who has been formed with the ideals of the 1970’s, you do what you’re told! You have liturgical committees, you have lectors, and you have ministers and all these other people who are telling you the things you are supposed to be doing. Half of the time, I found myself in conflict with the people who were in those positions, because they were doing things that even went beyond the way the New Mass was presented in the Missal. So, I began to realize that there was something really seriously wrong, but it took me a while, because we had been brain-washed and conditioned to believe that this was the way the Church was supposed to be. But, gradually, after about the mid-eighties, I began to realize that that position was wrong, and I began to do more and more research and study about the traditional Mass in particular.
How did you learn to say the old Mass?
Fr. H.: Actually, I learned it from watching a video! Although I had some recollections of it from when I was an altar boy, I didn’t remember that much. I watched that video, and then a parishioner gave me some books to read about the traditional Mass. After that, I came into contact with the Society of St. Pius X in Chicago.
Were you still a parish priest when you began to celebrate the traditional Mass?
Fr. H.: Yes. I was celebrating it for small groups of people on Sundays and on Holy Days.
How did you manage to do that?
Fr. H.: At that time, I wasn’t completely aware of the situation. I was hoping to get permission to say the Indult Mass, but I was told that I couldn’t, because that option was only intended for older priests! I eventually came to the realization I was either going to have to conform to the new system or get out.
There are people, both priests and layfolk, who think that the best thing to do is to “Stay in and fight,” but I don’t believe that, frankly. The ones who are really in control of the dioceses might allow a few things that are somewhat traditional, but the entire orientation is still toward the same revolutionary brain-washing that I experienced in the 1970’s. So for me, although, I have to admit, it did take a while, the big difficulty was not how I would begin saying the traditional Mass, but how I could stop saying the New Mass! Saying the two Masses side by side, I was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Finally, after a lot of thinking and praying, I decided to leave the Archdiocese. It took me over a year from that time until I finally left.
How did you leave the Archdiocese?
Fr. H.: Well, when I had looked around for other alternatives which would allow me to stay within a normal framework, and I found that there simply weren’t any, I went to stay in Post Falls, Idaho, for a while one summer. When the summer was over, I just didn’t go back to the Archdiocese. I wrote a letter to Cardinal Bernadin, in which I told him all the reasons why I couldn’t continue being a priest in the Archdiocese. He wanted me to come and visit him, but I declined the invitation. We wrote letters back and forth for a while, and he did threaten to suspend me, but he never followed through with it. I don’t ever recall any mention of excommunication. I don’t think they really believe in penalties and excommunication any more. They may use them in some cases with traditional people, but I don’t know how much it really means, even to them. It was as if I had just quit my job. I was told, in fact, that I could come back any time I wanted.
You mentioned that, while saying both Masses, you were like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Could you develop that comparison a bit?
Fr. H.: When the priest is exclusively saying the New Mass, there’s just no sense of having to be a man of prayer or a man of sacrifice. I can say, from the experience of many of the priests that I lived or associated with, that there is a certain idea that the priesthood is a job. The morale among the priests was very low because of this idea, and I would think that it must be even worse now with all these scandals going on. There is no need to sacrifice, to give things up, in the new priesthood, and that worldly lifestyle, that consumerist lifestyle, could really be a problem for the priests.
I know that some of them are very sincere and want to do the right thing, but it’s very easy, when saying the New Mass, to get into a worldly spirit and to become very much a “man of the world,” and, from that, everything else follows. When you’re saying the New Mass, it’s hard to have a strong interior life. I suppose that there are priests who seem to be succeeding at that while saying the New Mass, but I still think that they’re really fooling themselves. The New Mass is so superficial, so empty, that it really doesn’t have a whole lot to offer to sustain the interior life of the priest.
Because of that, the priest’s attitude towards things gradually changes. I’ll never forget one priest I was associated with, who had been ordained in the 1930’s (he’s still living, actually). He had, of course, been trained with the old Mass, and he had said it until he was a priest for about thirty-five years. But I could tell that he had become more accepting of the new way of doing things. He would say, “Oh well, we were not taught that way, but that’s the way it has to be now–everything changes!”
But younger priests, who don’t really have any background in the traditional way of doing things, are not even sure what they’ve lost. I think that there is a great possibility for them to become worldly, not to pray much, and really to become social-workers.
Things change drastically when the priest begins saying the old Mass exclusively. For me, it certainly wasn’t a change that happened over night. Obviously, the fact that a priest is saying the traditional Mass doesn’t necessarily prevent him from being worldly, because you know that happened in the 1940’s and 1950’s when priests were only saying the traditional Mass! But I think that the traditional Mass helped me to understand better what the priesthood is all about, and it helped me to realize that the priest is really ordained to offer sacrifice. It strengthened my interior life in general. In my case, there was also more of a desire to say Mass. With the New Mass, it was really a struggle, especially for the last couple of years that I was in the Archdiocese, because I didn’t want to do it any more. I did it only because I had to, but I didn’t really want to.
Do you see any link between the Revolutionary training in the seminaries in the 1970’s and the current scandals among the clergy?
Fr. H.: I think that there is a connection between these ideas and the scandals, although I haven’t really thought about it profoundly. The Church of Vatican II has really become very feminized–it’s an effeminate church. The New Mass is a very feminine type of thing, because it tends to be sort of subjective, in the sense that they now put a lot of emphasis on the priest’s personality: Does he smile? Is he folksy and friendly with the people? Does he say, “Good morning”? They are concerned about a lot of subjective things that are extraneous to the real priestly ideal.
They still say that they want priests, but they don’t necessarily want priests to be strong and to be leaders. The priest is supposed to be somebody who is “one of the boys.” Everything sort of pulls together in this question. The fact that the priest is no longer really a leader makes it very easy for him to lead a not-very-exemplary life! Since the Church has “opened up to the world” (and the New Mass is really at the center of that idea), a lot of abuses have resulted, including these scandals.
If you had to advise a priest who was concerned about his priestly life and thinking of saying the traditional Mass, what would you tell him?
Fr. H.: Especially to such a priest who is searching, I would say, for the sake of his priesthood, that he should try to learn to say the traditional Mass and say it as often as he can. Frankly, knowing what I know about the corruption in a lot of the dioceses (which seems to be worse and worse all the time), I don’t see how a really good priest, who wants to do what the Church tells him and who has a good idea of what the priesthood really is, could stay in the diocese. I would encourage him to start saying the traditional Mass, because I think it’s going to help his priesthood. When I was at that point, I really believe that, if I had not done something quickly, my vocation would have been in jeopardy. The more often he can say the traditional Mass, the better it is for him, and the better it is for his priesthood. The problem is that, as far as I know, there are very few bishops who’d allow him to do that exclusively.
How can the priest who has never studied Latin hope to learn the traditional Mass?
Fr. H.: It’s not as though he is going to have to speak Latin all the time! A lot of priests, for example, speak Spanish, and if they know Spanish, they can certainly learn enough Latin to say the Mass. But I suppose he’d have to have the motivation to want to learn it. This is true for theology as well. It all depends on his level of motivation and his knowledge. You see, he’s got to understand how deeply the Church is in crisis. If he doesn’t believe that, then I guess these questions are not much of an issue.
So, these obstacles are not impossibly high as long as the priest has the motivation to try and overcome them?
Fr. H.: Right, but he also needs greater knowledge. In the case of so many priests, who go to a lot of meetings, their lives become kind of bureaucratic. The fact is that there are fewer priests now, and, although it’s true that they have a lot of lay-people doing what used to be priestly work, the priests are still very busy. I think that a lot of them don’t have the time–or don’t take the time–to read and to find out what’s really going on in the Church. But I think that, if a priest is really interested, he can do it.