Catholic World News News Feature
Who Wants Priestless Parishes? August 01, 2003
By Tara Holmes
No doubt it was a sign of the times: this past Holy Week, my local Catholic parish was not able to offer either a Maundy Thursday Mass or a Good Friday service. No one argued and no one complained.
Our diocese is facing an acute shortage of priests and we have already been warned that there may be no priest at all to serve this parish in ten years’ time. Without a sudden influx of new clergy, Sunday morning Mass could become a thing of the past. The dawn of the weekly Eucharistic service led by laity may be just around the corner. One thing is certain: the days of taking our parish priest for granted are long gone.
It is now nearly a year since my church was amalgamated with another parish, four miles away. Of the two churches, ours has come off slightly better: we still have a resident priest who celebrates two weekend Masses. Yet at the busiest times of the year around Christmas and Easter, the priest is forced to make difficult decisions about where to schedule Mass; his decisions may not please everyone. And his experience is not an isolated case.
SHRINKING RANKS
Throughout Britain, Catholics living in rural areas have been hit hard by the vocations crisis. Inevitably the small fragile communities have been the first to lose their priests, but if current trends continue the big-city parishes may soon be facing similar problems. The bishops of England and Wales keep telling us this is the "age of the laity," but without priests to minister to us, the future looks bleak.
In the Nottingham diocese, Catholics have spent the last year preparing for a diocesan assembly due to be held this fall at Loughborough University in Leicestershire. Discussions about "working collaboratively" to cope with the ever-declining numbers of clergy will be at the top of the agenda. Over the last 12 months Bishop Malcolm McMahon of Nottingham has sent a series of upbeat pastoral letters to parishes throughout the diocese. "It is my belief that there is no magic formula," he said in a message to all churches on May 11. "The future lies in us learning to work collaboratively." Yet not everyone is convinced that a weeklong assembly, culminating in an open-air Mass on the final day, is enough to promote the much-desired renewal of faith and surge in vocations.
This year the Nottingham diocese had no new candidates beginning the process of formation for the priesthood. There were four ordinations last year and five this year, but barring some unexpected change in the process, only four men—at most—will be ordained in the following four years combined. Whether a diocesan assembly or collaborative ministry will help to bring about change remains to be seen. In the meantime, amalgamations will continue to take place; more and more parishes will face the loss of their pastors and resident priests. For the moment, there would appear to be no alternative.
And again, the situation in Nottingham is not an isolated case. Today only a few more than 200 men from dioceses in England and Wales are training to be parish priests. Over the past year, there has been much talk about the prospects for closures and mergers of the Church's seven seminaries. (At present aspiring priests are thinly spread among four training colleges in England and three abroad: St. Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw, near Durham; St. Mary’s College, Oscott, in Birmingham; Allen Hall in London; St. John’s Seminary in Wonersh, near Guildford, in Essex; the Royal English College of St. Alban’s in Spain, and Rome’s Pontifical Beda and Venerable English Colleges.) The days of the postwar "priest boom," when all seven seminaries were full, are long gone. Once wellsprings of new vigor for the Church, these institutions have become an administrative headache, draining the dioceses of money and manpower. Each costs around half a million pounds to run each year; each is staffed with priests who are urgently needed for work in priestless parishes.
NEW PROFILES OF SEMINARIANS
In the 1960s it was commonplace for young men leaving secondary school to enter seminaries in England and Wales. By contrast, today's student priests are older; the average age of a seminarian is 33. Many of the students now preparing for the priesthood are not cradle Catholics; almost all of them have had some period of faithlessness in their lives. Many are Catholics who have returned to the active practice of their faith after a period away from the Church, rekindling their faith through their involvement in new movements in the Church. In Britain, these include Youth 2000, Faith, Opus Dei, the Neo-Catechumenate, and Communion and Liberation. (Youth 2000, with its strong emphasis on prayer and the sacraments, has nurtured more than 30 vocations to the priesthood and religious life since it was founded in 1990.) Others will cite an experience at World Youth Day as having provided the moment when they first considered that they had a vocation to the priesthood.
Today's seminarians, in comparison with their counterparts of a generation ago, are less likely to have come up through the familiar system of Catholic family, school, and parish, that was so common in the 1960s. They are more likely to hold conservative views on theology, heartily accepting the Church teaching and discipline on sexual morality, the male celibate priesthood, and papal authority. Many are "second career priests," who pursued other professions before discerning their vocation. A small number have been married, and decided to pursue the priesthood after the death of a wife.
Yet despite such diversity among today's candidates, the overall number of men answering the vocational call is alarmingly low.
ANOTHER AGENDA?
The decline in the number of young men training for sacerdotal ministry reflects a similar decline in the prestige of the priesthood. Once most parents would have considered it a high honor to have a son become a priest; but the honor of the priestly calling has been besmirched by the sex-abuse scandals throughout the English-speaking world. In a pastoral letter on vocations issued in June 2002, Bishop McMahon, who as head of the bishops' Seminary Commission inspected each one of the seven training colleges during the course of the previous year, acknowledged the depth of the crisis. He admitted that the avalanche of negative publicity had made the priestly vocation less attractive. The bishop observed: "All Catholics have had to bear this shame to some extent, but priests and religious in particular have suffered because of the reprehensible actions of the few."
But Bishop McMahon then took an unexpected new tack, scolding the laity for not playing their part in fostering priestly and religious vocations. In fact the bishop seemed to be laying the blame for the crisis at the door of the laity. He said:
I believe there is a prevailing attitude in the Catholic community that does not value vocations to the priesthood and religious life. How often have you heard it said that a young man or woman must be crazy to give up their career and follow Christ more closely in this way? How can we expect vocations when this is the attitude of Catholics, let alone the opinion of society at large? It is time for us all to change this way of thinking and talking. It is time for us to "talk up" the priesthood.
In his pastoral letter, Bishop McMahon accused his flock of treating the Church like a "club." He insisted that popular attitudes must change; there must be more to church attendance than "simply paying your membership fees," attending "the services as required," and turning up for the "occasional annual [sic] general meeting."
But three months after the bishop released this criticism of prevalent ideas among the laity, his plans for a revival of priestly and religious vocations began to take on a new aspect, when it came to light that the official study document being prepared for his Nottingham diocesan assembly would promote discussion of God as "She." Many lay people who had signed up for discussion groups in response to the bishops' challenge were now questioning the real motives behind this diocesan assembly.
Sparks really started to fly between the diocese and its critics after the Catholic Herald broke the story of feminist involvement in the project. By this time the official study document for the diocesan assembly, prepared by a working party of priests and lay people, had already been sent to parishes and Catholic organizations across the diocese for use in parish discussion groups.
Earlier in the year, the Catholic Herald had reported that the assembly would be looking at alternative images of God, such as "God the Mother." At the time, the diocese had strongly rejected claims that there would be a feminist agenda. But the Catholic Herald pressed the issue. Why was the official assembly prayer addressed to "Creator God" rather than God the Father? Why were many of the planned sessions apparently being hijacked by "vested interest groups" lobbying for married clergy, ordination of women, and the replacement of ordained priests by special Eucharistic ministers? The only defense offered by diocesan organizers was that the discussion of these issues would comprise only a small part of the final study document. Most participants, the organizers continued, would be more interested in the Church's responses to the critical features of everyday living: matters of life and death, drug abuse, poverty, and sexuality.
THE WESTMINSTER APPROACH
In the Westminster archdiocese, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor has announced his own initiative aimed at promoting a renewal of priestly and religious vocations. The archdiocese has imported a 3-year program from the US, called Renew. The founder of that effort—Father Tom Kleissler, a New Jersey priest—was present at the launch of the program in London last November. His project, too, faces a bumpy ride in terms of public acceptance; not all Catholics are eager to embrace the ideals that seem to lie beneath the program.
The Westminster archdiocese is currently developing its own offshoot of the Newark program, called At Your Word, Lord. This program, based on materials provided by Renew International, will carry official approval (including the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur) from Westminster. The initiative is based on the involvement of small groups, acting under lay leadership. To date, 160 of the 216 parishes in the Westminster archdiocese have signed up; about 40 remain undecided, while the remainder have declined to participate.
In March, the renowned London Oratory announced it would not be taking part in the program. The Oratorians believe that the Renew initiative does not respond to the needs of parishioners nor to the "genius of the institute of the Oratory." Father Charles Dilke insisted that the Oratory was not at odds with archdiocesan policy, but rather was acting in accordance with the guidelines set down by Pope John Paul II in Novo Millennio Inuente. Writing in the Oratory Magazine, Father Dilke observed:
Every priest knows that there are large numbers of people for whom, temperamentally or otherwise, small groups are unattractive. In the inner city parish with a large proportion of extra-territorial visitors and regular worshippers, there is room indeed for small groups ... but the bulk of people will not belong to them. I venture to suggest that a capital city like London is mainly composed of people who, while they value their own small groups, do not want to live lives dominated by such groups. Most are not going to join such groups.
Father Dilke explained that St. Philip Neri, the 16th-century founder of the Oratorians, had never taken part in such spiritual programs. He recalled how no less a figure than St. Charles Borromeo had tried in vain to lure St. Philip's priests into a program then in force for the Milan archdiocese. But St. Philip had stood firm, preferring to make use of existing material rather than devising or accepting a programmatic approach to renewal. Father Dilke noted that the priests of the Oratory were following in their founder's footsteps. He said: "If we adopted Renew we would find ourselves taking part in something we don't really believe in and which to us is lacking in realism."
But Father Stuart Wilson, director of At Your Word, Lord, said the Westminster Cathedral—which is located in central London—faced circumstances quite similar to those of the Oratory, and yet had embraced the program "wholeheartedly." In an article for the Catholic Herald, he issued a robust defense of the initiative, saying that the key would lie in attracting young adults to the Church:
In the diocese of Westminster there are 50,000 young people in our schools. But if you look around at Mass you will not see them in any big numbers. At Your Word, Lord is looking to reconnect with schools and youth leaders. We want to create a positive climate in which to explore what we can do together, and maybe for the first time in years, begin to offer good formation to them and their parents.
On the surface this sounds very promising. Only time will tell whether the program—and similar efforts like the one in Nottingham—will provide the desired response to the crisis of faith now engulfing England and Wales.
[AUTHOR ID] Tara Holmes is the former deputy editor of the Catholic Times. She now works as a freelance journalist in the United Kingdom and is a regular contributor to the Times.
