In the first reading Jeremiah complains that God has seduced him. He thought that following God would lead to success and an easy life, but instead he faced what seemed a total failure. Jesus spells out the conditions for those who wish to follow him, and again, before glory there must be the cross. This is reality, not spiritual masochism. I have quoted below an extract from an article I came across recently which acknowledges the often- unseen struggles of the clergy and the consequential burnout that many experience. In the coming weeks I will unpack a little more from the article, because it speaks truths that will help each one of us – priest, married, single, old and young – confront and deal with our own fragility.
“On August 19, 2026, the Holy See announced that Pope Leo XIV had accepted the resignation of Bishop Karl-Heinz Wiesemann of the Diocese of Speyer, Germany, which he had led since March 2008. He is only 66; nine years short of the age of retirement for Bishops. In a letter to the faithful, the bishop wrote: “I have been a Christian and a bishop for you with all my heart and with great inner joy. Nevertheless, the burden of extensive
responsibility has left serious traces in me, physically and above all mentally.” The bishop named the immediate trigger of that depression: the work of confronting and processing sexual abuse cases within his own diocese.
We see, in this gesture, a courage that very few members of the clergy allow themselves: the courage to say “I cannot go on” in plain, exact words, without wrapping it in the vague, unquestioned language of “health reasons.” He did not speak of ordinary fatigue. He named a recurrent depressive disorder, a clinic, an ongoing course of psychotherapy. The psychological fragility of a man of the Church is not a betrayal of his vocation; it is sometimes its direct consequence, given the pastoral, administrative, and human weight that rests on one man’s shoulders alone. But let us ask the real question, the uncomfortable one: how many priests across the world
are living exactly what Bishop Wiesemann lived, without ever having the vocabulary, the space, or the inner permission to name it? We call them, in our own words, the “silent bearers”; priests and religious who exercise a ministry of constant presence and listening, without any structure in place to let them, in turn, be heard.
We are not speaking into a vacuum. A 2024-2025 systematic literature review published in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture, drawing on twenty-two studies conducted between 2013 and 2023, identified significant rates of professional burnout, “spiritual dryness,” depression, and anxiety among Catholic priests; with excessive workload, lack of social support, and stigma around seeking help all named as key risk factors. The Journal of Pastoral Care & Counselling estimates that roughly one in five Catholic priests worldwide
experiences a high level of burnout. In Italy, several diocesan-level tallies indicate a suicide rate among clergy higher than that of the general population. In India, the picture is documented with a precision that should, we believe, shake every episcopal conference: at least thirteen Catholic priests have died by suicide over the past five years, a figure that points to the isolation and depression these men carry; and according to several observers, the number of suicides or unnatural deaths among women religious is even higher, though it rarely receives the same media attention.'”
Adapted from an article by Duchess Audrey | August 23, 2026
