Priest shortage: Your bishop needs your advice

priest shortage

Thank you for coming!

My name is Bishop Pascal. I am the ordinary in the Diocese of Heartlands, and I need your help.

Let me first tell you my situation and some of the options that are being proposed to me for dealing with it. Then I’ll welcome your suggestions or proposals.

Our diocese has 83 parishes to staff. Up until 3 years ago we were able to supply a priest-pastor for each one.

Since then, due to deaths, resignations, and retirements, the number of our priests capable of active ministry has declined to 76.

I need your help in figuring out how to proceed.

Priestly vocations

I am sure many of you will suggest that we begin by storming heaven with prayer for new vocations. And I assure you we have been and are doing that.

We have had rosary crusades and Chalice programs and “Come and See” visits to our regional seminary. I promote vocations at every Confirmation ceremony or Boy Scout ceremony I am part of.

We are grateful that this past year we were able to ordain two new priests and we rejoice at the six solid candidates in Theology as well as the 10 men coming along behind them.

But in the past year, we also lost 11 priests who either died or retired. The bottom line is that, right now, our new vocations are no way near achieving replacement levels.

I believe strongly in the power of prayer and will continue to urge our people to pray for new priests. They want good new priests and they support every effort we make in that direction.

God always gives us the resources we need

But I also believe in a God who is present and acting in the realities we confront, using them to transform us and help us to grow. Is it possible that through the shortage God is challenging us to become a different kind of church?

A person of faith once said that our God is magnanimous and always gives us the resources we need—whatever those are. But we have to determine what the need really is and not close our eyes to resources right in front of us. It’s called stewardship.

And may I ask you, please, not to use our precious time together to tell me all the ways we’ve gone wrong, what brought us to this pass. Besides being tiresome, these lamentations aren’t very helpful, are they?

I’ve got decisions to make. Real communities have immediate sacramental needs to be addressed right now. I don’t think we have the luxury of paralysis by analysis.

The “big” options

Some of you will probably propose that we begin right now to expand the pool of those eligible for ordination.

The options under that heading are easily named. Each one would involve challenging beliefs that have shaped our Church’s way of ministering for centuries.

Ordain married men?

That would call us to re-think a long-standing commitment to a celibate priesthood.

It’s true that the practice is not a matter of faith but of Church discipline. It remains within the province of the pope to change it.

Still, many of our Protestant brothers and sisters caution us against assuming that you just say, “Let’s ordain married men,” rub a magic lamp three times, and—voila!—the Parousia arrives.

Ordain women?

That would call us to challenge a belief that Pope John Paul II (but few serious biblical scholars) believed is a matter of faith.

It is that the practice of having only male priests constitutes a norm that binds the Church forever regardless of cultural changes across the centuries.

Bring resigned priests back to active ministry?

That would challenge our understanding of choices once made and raise issues of fairness as if the priesthood were a matter of an individual’s personal sense of calling rather than a call by the church community.

What about time-conditioned celibacy, along the lines of Shinto priesthood?

You serve as a celibate for 7 years and then return to the lay state. That would challenge long-held beliefs about the life-long commitment required by the model of Jesus’ life.

What are actually “doable options”?

I do see some kind of potential in each of these options, but I call them “the big options” for two reasons.

First, they fall within the compass of the Church’s universal authority. They are way beyond my pay level.

And second, even if they were to be adopted it would take years to think through all their consequences and develop reasonable plans for implementing them before they would be ready to meet the road.

Mind you, I’m not averse to bringing up their possibility—in discreet circles! I stepped off the clerical career ladder long ago.

I happen to like our diocese and am happy to stay where I am, thank you. But I’ve got decisions to make in the coming year. Some, in fact, that I probably should have made five years ago.

So let’s just keep those conversations going “on background”, shall we?

What are my “doable options” in the immediate future? And what beliefs might each of those options challenge?

Closing parishes

In one sense, closing parishes is the easiest option to carry out. Administratively.

But what does it do to our belief that once formed, a faith community is not just a branch office of the diocese (as the diocese is not a branch office of the universal church, by the way; how would my brothers react to the notion of closing a diocese? Especially his diocese.).

A parish is rather a unique incarnation of the body of Christ in a particular piece of geography. How is the “easy” choice for closure to be reconciled with the dignity of such a gathering of the faithful?

The parishes being considered for a decision on closure will probably be those with fewer parishioners than the rest of the parishes in the diocese, but is the mere fact of smaller or larger numbers a Jesus criterion?

Closing the parish may “gain me a priest” who can provide for the sacramental services of another parish with more parishioners, but what does that say about our concept of priesthood?

There was, after all, a time in the Church when it would have been unthinkable to ordain a man for “at-large” service; the validity of his ordination was tied into life-long service of a particular faith community.

It was analogous to the connection symbolized by a bishop’s ring: that he was to be married for life to a single diocese.

Appointment of a non-ordained person as the pastoral agent of the parish

I’ve seen wonderful lay men—and women—give excellent leadership to parish communities. As effective as any ordained priest, frankly: theologically, spiritually, and pastorally. But appointing a non-ordained person doesn’t really help us with the directly sacramental needs, does it?

Liturgical presiding, absolution and sacramental anointing require an ordained priest.

The number of regular weekend liturgies doesn’t go down, and the pastoral agent still has to call for help from a sacramental minister coming into the parish from “outside”.

What does that do to our belief that effective sacramental liturgy needs to be acculturated, to issue forth from the unique faith-life of a particular embodied community with its own integrated leadership?

Import priests from other priest-rich parts of the world

Several of my brother bishops are pursuing that strategy. It does attain the goal of a quick replenishment of priest-presiders to “cover” the number of liturgies needed.

But, so far, the results of that strategy appear to be mixed at best.

The idea that every priest was cut from the same cookie-cutter and you could just substitute one for another, with no regard for issues of cultural sensitivity, runs counter to the rich development of Eucharistic theology over the past 35 years.

Do we want to risk returning to the mechanistic understanding that, as long as the rite is performed validly, that’s all that matters?

Change the day of the community’s weekly gathering around the table of the Lord

I have recently heard of dioceses in Europe where a priest is assigned as sacramental minister to as many as six parishes.

On Sunday he presides at liturgy in one of them; on Monday evening in another, on Tuesday in another, and so on.

The people in each of those communities view that (chronologically) “mid-week” liturgy as the central act of worship for that community in that week—fulfilment of Sunday obligation if you will.

Of course, an arrangement like that also challenges our identification of Sunday with the Lord’s day.

On the other hand, I have to ask myself: did our Church already fracture that identification when it introduced Saturday-night Mass?

Cut back the number of Masses priests are called to preside at

It is true that in some communities pastors have so tried to accommodate the desires of their people that too many “Masses of convenience” have come to be expected.

Add expected multiple Saturday wedding Masses and, at times, many priests find themselves violating canonical prescriptions concerning the number of Masses a priest can celebrate on any weekend.

I can mandate reducing the numbers but that won’t, of itself, be sufficient to deal with the communities where I will need to find presiders in the coming years.

Introduce regular “Sunday Celebrations in the Absence of a Priest”

Mid-week “Communion services” are common in many parts of the country. The Church permits and has created officially sanctioned rituals, for this kind of service.

I can inform my priests that when they have a sound reason—vacation, retreat, study program, etc.—to be absent from their parish over a weekend, they are not to scramble around trying to find replacements but have a trained layperson conduct such a service.

Does this practice risk treating the reception of Communion as something separable from the sacrifice of the Mass? Do we want to take that risk?

Anecdotal evidence has people remarking that they like “Sister Elaine’s Mass” more than “Charley O’Toole’s”.

In sum

You see, whichever option I actually choose—and I do have to make a choice—we will be challenging some conviction that has shaped our identity as Catholic Christians for a long time.

If we aren’t willing to challenge any of them, we will just continue trying to do what we’ve always done and our situation will become more and more stressful.

My question to you is painful but simple: which traditional conviction do you want me to challenge—this year?

  • George Wilson is a Jesuit priest and retired ecclesiologist who lives in Baltimore. He is the author of Clericalism: The Death of Priesthood(Liturgical Press, 2008).
  • First published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.
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