NEWS STORY: Priest Shortage Is One of New Pope’s Biggest Challenges

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) As Pope Benedict XVI begins his papacy, one of the most troubling issues he faces is a growing priest shortage. In the United States, as the number of priests and nuns has declined steadily since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic population has steadily risen. This has led to more […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) As Pope Benedict XVI begins his papacy, one of the most troubling issues he faces is a growing priest shortage. In the United States, as the number of priests and nuns has declined steadily since the 1960s, the Roman Catholic population has steadily risen.

This has led to more parishes without full-time priests and, in many dioceses, the closing of churches. The issue has worried church leaders and provided ammunition to reform groups that want to end celibacy requirements and see women ordained.


John Paul II did not budge on those issues during his 26-year papacy, and there are no indications Benedict XVI will, either. Before his election as the 265th pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger headed the Vatican office charged with protecting church dogma.

In threatening to excommunicate seven women who had been ordained by a Catholic splinter group in 2002, he reiterated that “the Church has no authority whatsoever” to ordain women. And in a 1997 book-length interview, “Salt of the Earth,” he said he did not expect an end to celibacy “in the foreseeable future.”

The traditionalist movement argues that when it comes to vocations, God will provide. People who know Ratzinger say he believes the priest shortage is due in part to a failure to train Catholic youth properly and encourage them to serve.

“There is no crisis in places where young men have been given authentic Catholic teaching,” said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Fla., who was taught theology by Ratzinger.

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Brian Ditullio, 28, and Robert Gelinas, 30, two students at Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., both say their own faulty Catholic education was the reason they turned toward the priesthood later in life.

“There would be many more vocations, but young Catholics are not being asked,” said Ditullio. “Pope John Paul II changed that. He went out to the kids and evangelized.”

Gelinas was 24 and working a dream public relations job for the National Hockey League when he began to hear the call.


He would pass the homeless on the way to work at New York’s Rockefeller Center each morning and think about how blessed his life had been. Raised a Roman Catholic, he had stopped attending Mass in college, but over time his thoughts had turned back toward God.

“I just really felt I had received so many blessings from the Lord,” Gelinas said. “I was very happy in the NHL; it should have been the perfect job. But something was missing.”

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Critics of church hierarchy argue that leaders are in denial about the decline of vocations in the United States and Europe, where the shortage is especially acute in countries like Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

“I don’t know what Ratzinger’s recommendation will be, but the continuation of present policy is not a good option,” said Dean Hoge, a sociologist at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. “Present policies are not solving the problem.”

Hoge, who conducts an annual survey of ordination classes for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, dismisses the arguments of conservatives that Americans were spoiled by an overabundance of priests in the 1950s and 1960s and will do fine with fewer. His 2005 survey found a continuing trend toward older, more educated priest candidates, with the average age rising to 37.

“Can Catholicism continue with half as many priests? Yes,” he said. “Will it thrive? No.”


Theresa Padovano, a reform activist and former nun whose husband, Anthony, helped found an international movement of married priests, says opening the priesthood to women and married men would help immediately.

“The church would rejoice,” she said. “They are depriving the church of the talents of half the human race in women and of ministers who understand their lives with married men.”

Asked whether she thought Ratzinger might surprise liberals on these key issues, she laughed and said, “Miracles can happen.”

With the average age of priests hovering around 60 and the number down to 44,212 from nearly 60,000 in the 1970s, dioceses are closing churches across the United States and making other retrenchments.

The Rev. Robert Wister, a church historian at Seton Hall University, said the number of priests being ordained has stabilized, albeit at much smaller numbers than in the 1960s. An average of 500 priests have been ordained annually the past five years.

“But we’re not replacing deaths and retirements,” Wister said. “Whoever is pope would be concerned about the numbers here and in Europe.”


Wister said he believes the shortage has a lot to do with societal attitudes about commitment and the dramatic loss of nuns. (Their ranks in the United States have dropped from nearly 180,000 in 1965 to 71,486 last year.)

“The sisters are gone,” Wister said. “Fifty years ago, they were doing the main evangelizing in the Catholic schools and Sunday school.”

Some point to the developing world, where great numbers of young people studying to be priests and nuns are eager to “evangelize” in North America and Europe. The number of foreign-born priests is rising in America, but language and cultural barriers can make that option less palatable.

The Rev. Michael Barrett, a priest in Houston and a member of the conservative movement Opus Dei, said a younger breed of Catholic is yearning for the faith that the church’s traditions can provide.

“The newer classes are more serious,” he said. “They are giving up more, careers and cars and apartments. They also don’t have the formation growing up, and they recognize that. They are diligently trying to learn the Catholic faith and how to evangelize.”

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Monsignor Robert F. Coleman, rector of Immaculate Conception Seminary at Seton Hall, said he sees that in the 65 seminarians studying at the school, a population that has swelled by 20 in the past five years.


“There is great reason for hope,” Coleman said. “Do we have enough priests? No, we don’t. But the Lord said he would be with his children for all ages, and he’s going to be. He will call young people to serve in every age.”

(Steve Chambers is a staff writer for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

KRE/RB/PH END CHAMBERS

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