Thus far, we have shown that the Church and its Priesthood are in crisis and the problem is becoming more acute with each passing year!
How are Bishops dealing with the critical shortage of Priests in their respective dioceses? In a variety of ways.
A practice known as "linking" has emerged, where two parishes share the same Priest but remain separate otherwise. Such was the solution applied to the parish from which I retired (Saint Jude Church) which was linked with a neighboring parish (All Souls Church), with one Priest serving as Pastor of the now-linked two parishes.
Some Bishops encourage parishes to hire a lay administrator. Churches are given guidelines on lay-led services. In some places, Mass at the local church is celebrated only every other week.
Some countries are importing Priests in large numbers from other nations. Priests in India have been saying Masses for people in the West and traveling to wealthier countries as temporary Pastors to help relieve the priest shortage in the West.
In some dioceses, there has been a growth in the number of men and women entering other forms of ministry in the church, such as Permanent Deacons and lay ecclesial ministers.
There has been a dramatic increase in the participation and activity of the laity in general. Canon law (CIC 517) does allow for a Permanent Deacon or lay ecclesial minister to be appointed as a de facto administrator of a parish, under the supervision of a Priest Moderator, in the absence of a qualified Priest. The problem remains, however, that parishioners do not have immediate availability to all the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist, Reconciliation and the Anointing of the Sick in these instances.
For their part, how are the Priests themselves coping with this crisis?
"The ever-increasing workload is threatening to turn aging, demoralized and declining numbers of Priests into Sacrament-dispensing machines who find pastoral work less and less satisfying," a co-founder of Ireland's Association of Catholic Priests has warned.
In his address to the association's annual general meeting, Fr. Brendan Hoban highlighted how suicide is on the rise among Irish Priests, a group he said was also increasingly prone to alcoholism and depression.
More and more, elderly diocesan priests are living increasingly isolated and lonely lives.
While the sense of isolation is not as acute among Religious Orders as among diocesan Priests, Religious Priests are as confused and demoralized as their diocesan counterparts about how to be a Priest in the modern world, and feel the scorn and ridicule of an entrenched secular outlook that pervades modern-day society.
The absence of a next generation of Priests means hope and energy are missing, and there is a gap in theology and ecclesiology between many newer recruits and the older generation, with the older generation sensing that the Church will move to past and failing strategies rather than courageously embracing more realistic and practical reforms.
And so, it seems the stage is set and the prophetic vision of my Dominican Professor may soon be come to pass. The Church must end its denial of the crisis and commit itself to addressing the problem.
In 2005, then-Cardinal Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires and the future Pope Francis,
attended the Synod on the Eucharist in Rome. He had seen how keen Bishops at that gathering were to discuss the access to the Sacraments of the divorced and remarried, only to have been put off by Vatican officials at the time.
In much the same way, in May 2007, when the Latin-American bishops met for their great pan-continental assembly at the Shrine of Aparecida, Brazil, the future Pope was again present. He would eventually write the Aparecida synod's concluding document. Once again, he took not of the considerable number of Bishops who wanted to discuss the painful question of the lack of access to the Sacraments because of the critical shortage of Priests. Once again, he noted that a Vatican representative assured them that it was neither the time nor the place to open such a discussion without approval from Rome.
The Bishops had been told at the time that the Synod as it was constituted was not the place for that discussion and then-Cardinal Bergoglio agreed . Perhaps that is why, after his election, Pope Francis introduced a new format that could enable such a discernment regarding Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, a discernment around which vehement arguments continue to coalesce, to say the least.
Can the Church expect that Francis will convene a future Synod at which the topic if discernment will be the crisis in Priesthood and the Priestless parish?
It seems very likely.
Just as there was a longstanding, controversial proposal in response to the divorced and remarried issue (Cardinal Walter Kasper’s invitation to consider the Orthodox approach), there is an equally controversial proposal which has been around to address the crisis of Priestless parishes.
What is this proposal and who is its advocate? More in tomorrow's third and final part of this series.
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