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Catholics tend to move priests around every few years so that no one priest gets a "cult of personality" around them. A priest is hopefully knowledgeable about matters of faith, might be able to dispense good advice, might be well read enough to give a decent homily, but the essential thing is that they live out their ministry in obedience and love.
I wouldn't say that a priest is only supposed to be a technician. Ideally he is someone who can guide the people in a parish towards a better relationship with God through his words, actions, and prayers. It is a creative vocation, requiring thinking on your feet about how God is calling you to be here for a wide variety of people, often strangers.
But, if the priest isn't very quick witted, isn't a master theologian, maybe commits more than the average amount of sin, is a drunkard like the Whisky Priest of Graham Greene, or has even lost his faith entirely... he's still a priest. To a Catholic that means he can still say Mass, hear confessions, anoint the sick, provide a blessing. That's infinitely better than going to a church where none of that happens, even if there's a preacher down the street with sermons that box your soul. (I've always said that a homily should be like a punch to the face - fast, it came out of nowhere, and it's all you can think about for the next hour. And the punch connects, of course. Alas, my current pastor is one of those who likes to put three sermons in one and thinks he's really clever doing it.) Because Jesus is the best, and His power is made perfect in weakness.
I'll try to combine two different replies into one here.
I admit this is a somewhat odd position for me to take, because in my experience, almost all of the Catholic priests I've known have been, though possessing their various human flaws, genuinely warm and faithful men offering up their lives for the sake of the gospel, and the Protestant ministers I've known have been an incredibly mixed bag, ranging from people I genuinely consider non-Christians or heretics to people who just seem to be interested in social status and conforming to trends while seeking high status to, thankfully, the small minority of devoted servants of Christ. If I were just judging by what I think of them as people, Catholicism would have a very easy win over Protestantism.
I also agree in principle that the quality of the priest as a person is not the important thing. I am not a Donatist; the sacraments are valid even if they are performed by people who are inconstant, foolish, un-virtuous, or in the most extreme cases, even unbelievers. I tend to think there is a tension here in the church. The efficacy of the sacraments does not depend on the priest's holiness, but nonetheless we do validly want priests to live holy lives. We want all people to live holy lives, after all, and priests are seen as representative of the community, and their lives affect many others. So the tightrope to walk is that priests must strive to be good and holy men, learned, faithful, compassionate, good speakers and wise counsellors, etc., but that priesthood does not depend on any of these things.
However, all that said, I do stand by the observation that, in my experience, lay Catholics do not know their priests as well as lay Protestants tend to know their pastors. I think Catholic priests are often felt to be interchangeable in a way that Protestant equivalents are not, and I take that to be because of the role of the wider ecclesial structure. In general I think Catholics care more about the structure and institutions of the church than Protestants, so the specific individual priest in front of you can be less important than the office he represents and the function he performs.
In defense of the Catholic position, you could argue that's the way it should be. You go to mass to meet Christ, not the priest. I myself think about my role in those terms. (I don't want to get into institutional details, for reasons of privacy, but I am a kind of pastor.) My role is to be 'transparent' - I want people to look through me and my service and see God. All ministers must, in a sense, be like John the Baptist: "he must increase, but I must decrease". We make ourselves small for the sake of the gospel. Protestantism is much more vulnerable to 'celebrity pastors' than Catholicism is. There are celebrity priests, unfortunately, but I think Catholicism has resisted that more effectively than Protestantism has.
That said, no human being is ever fully interchangeable, and ultimately we encounter Christ not through ecclesial offices, but through other living human beings, and sometimes I do worry that the human is lost. Sometimes I do speak to a priest and realise that somewhere beneath his ministry is a very lonely man, and I feel a compassion for him. I remember one priest telling me once about how precious he finds the friendships he has that go back to before his ordination - people who are still able to know him as just 'my friend X', not 'Fr. X'.
At any rate, as far as individuals go, I think the average of Catholic priests is better than the average of Protestant priests/ministers/pastors. No doubt standardisation helps with that. Possibly it's also just because my background has exposed me to a great many mainline Protestant leaders who have been slowly selling out the gospel. In my case, therefore, it has been very important to distinguish between the church's representative (frequently corrupt), the visible institution of the church (also frequently corrupt), and the invisible church (resplendent throughout eternity, terrible as an army with banners). So I put an especial value on practices of resistance, which allow one to remember and hold to the gospel even in the face of straying leaders and institutions.
I largely agree.
There is also a weird dynamic in that Catholic priests are celibate men and I am a woman, so I have to try to balance friendliness with...
One of the new, younger priests at my parish looked tired during mass one day. I know he's active with hospice ministry which often involves being called at night and I started praying for him that God would help him meet the challenges of his role. He mentioned once in a talk about an experience he had with a dying man and I gave him my CD of David Crowder Band's "Give Us Rest; or, A Requiem Mass in C" because his talk reminded me of the album so much. When I was having trouble with assessing my autistic daughter's ability to receive sacraments, I went to him for help.
I had confession with him and at the end he told me to keep up the good work and I realized... I needed to create distance here. No one did anything wrong, but there is a danger inherent in a friendly woman interacting with a lonely man. I started going to a different confession line. I still pray for him.
I don't think it would necessarily be different if more priests were married though. I wonder if it's similar in Protestant congregations with solely male ministers.
I don't know what it's like for men. Why don't men befriend priests more?
I don't know. I suspect that if you're Catholic, it's difficult to have an open relationship with your priest, because there's a hierarchy between you.
Some years ago, when I was in my late 20s, I remember having a chat with a local priest, a man in his 50s. In theory we met so that we could have a chat about my own spiritual life and my engagement with the parish (I was, at the time, in the church's choir), but after half an hour we got to talking more casually, and he told me about the departing parish secretary. He had apparently been very disappointed with her, and as he was bellyaching to me, I realised that the roles had switched and I was giving him pastoral care. I'd guess that he just didn't have people to casually talk to like that. Most of us do have people in our lives who will listen to us if we need to just get something off our chest. It's often unfair, but we need friends, a spouse, family, etc., who will listen sympathetically if we need to say, "Ugh, I had a terrible day at work, can you believe what my co-worker said to me?" It may not be virtuous (and perhaps this priest was guilty of the sin of gossip), but it's nonetheless something that a priest, living alone in the presbytery, may not have access to.
I think people do see priests as like islands sometimes, separate from the rest of society? I once ran into that same priest in the supermarket in the evening one day, after mass. I was shocked - wait, you're a priest, what are you doing wearing normal clothes wandering up and down the aisle putting food in a shopping basket? - and then felt stupid for being shocked. Where did I think priests got food? I felt ashamed of myself for thinking of him as another species.
Unfortunately he's since been rotated to another parish and I never see him any more. I hope he's still doing all right.
Every now and then I hear homilies, or bishops' messages, reminding parishioners to pray for their priests. I encourage them to do so, and more than that, if it's possible to do so in a safe way, be kind to priests. They need friends too.
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