Anyone who has dealt with young people in extensive
counseling relationships knows that the question "Who
am I?" is all too frequently a self-pitying and self-deceiving
question. It is a demand for sympathy, for special treatment
and for the right to withdraw from one's ordinary obliga-
tions and commitments. It is an "identity crisis" aimed at
stagnation and immobility, and, while it provides ample
occasion for serious conversation, it is also a permanent
excuse from activity and growth.

It often seems to me that much of the discussion about
"priestly identity" or about the "identity crisis of the priest-
hood" is of the variety which Erikson is not willing to
permit to be called "identity crisis." When a priest, young
or old, says "I don't know what the priest is," he frequently
seems to me to be in the more or less "transient, morbid
state" which, in itself, has nothing to do with identity.
I am also afraid that the morbidity is likely to be less
transient rather than more transient.

If, therefore, we are to take Erikson's whole psychology
seriously and not merely use one of his terms carelessly,
the important questions to be asked in an authentic identity
crisis of the priesthood are: what do we want to make of
the priesthood, and what do we have to work with? The
questions then are dynamic ones. They ask not so much
what the priesthood is now, but where it came from, and in
what direction we intend to move it. There is no room for
self-pity in such a question, no room for withdrawal of
commitments, no room for a refusal to grow or to move.
Erikson's identity crisis, like that of Cardinal Suhard, is a
crisis of growth and not of decline, much less of immobility.

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