Imported priests face task: Ironing out English

NEWARK, N.J. (RNS) When he moved to the U.S. in 2001 to study to become a Catholic priest, the Rev. Viktor Markovic spoke only Russian and his native Croatian. The Newark Archdiocese sent him to English classes, and now, a month after his ordination, he is close to fluent. But he still struggles with occasional […]

(RNS4-JUL13) The Rev. Viktor Markovic of  St. Francis of Assisi Church in Ridgefield Park, N.J., spoke no English when he arrived in the U.S. from his native Croatia in 2001 and can now communicate with most parishioners. For use with RNS-FOREIGN-PRIESTS, transmitted July 13, 2010. RNS photo by John O'Boyle/The Star-Ledger.

(RNS4-JUL13) The Rev. Viktor Markovic of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Ridgefield Park, N.J., spoke no English when he arrived in the U.S. from his native Croatia in 2001 and can now communicate with most parishioners. For use with RNS-FOREIGN-PRIESTS, transmitted July 13, 2010. RNS photo by John O’Boyle/The Star-Ledger.

NEWARK, N.J. (RNS) When he moved to the U.S. in 2001 to study to become a Catholic priest, the Rev. Viktor Markovic spoke only Russian and his native Croatian.

The Newark Archdiocese sent him to English classes, and now, a month after his ordination, he is close to fluent. But he still struggles with occasional phrases.


“My language maybe not perfect,” said Markovic, 48, who’s been assigned to St. Francis of Assisi Church in Ridgefield Park, N.J. “But I think people understand what I say. I understand what they say.

“Sometimes, if they say something that is part of dialect or idiom, I ask them, if I don’t understand, I ask what they mean. They respond well to that.”

Foreign-born priests have been increasingly populating Catholic pulpits for years in the U.S., helping to fill a void left by the decrease of American men entering seminaries. Nationwide, nearly one in three Catholic priests ordained this year were born in other countries — most hailing from Mexico, Colombia, the Philippines, Poland and Vietnam.

Already, about one in five U.S. priests are foreign-born, and in some places, the trend is especially pronounced. In the Archdiocese of Newark, which perennially leads the nation in the number of new priests, 10 of the 12 priests who were ordained in 2010 were born elsewhere, as were 10 of the 13 ordained last year.

Catholics have a mixed reaction to the trend. Foreign-born priests bolster the declining ranks of U.S. clergy, providing dioceses with more priests to celebrate Mass at parishes. And their language skills can help them interact with non-English speaking parishioners.

Yet some parishioners say language and cultural barriers can hinder the priests’ interaction with English speakers.


“There often needs to be — and there are — efforts within the church to help with accent reduction and so forth, through classes and things like that,” said the Rev. Shawn McKnight, executive director for the Secretariat of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

“We are experiencing a shortage of indigenous vocations in the U.S., and they supply what the church needs,” he said.

In a recent survey of U.S. parishes by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, 34 percent of parishioners said a priest from outside the U.S. has served at their parish regularly over the last five years. Fifty-three percent of people in these parishes said they were “very” satisfied with the ministry, while 34 percent said they were “somewhat” satisfied.

It’s hardly the first time foreign-born priests have made their mark on American Catholicism. A century ago, when Ireland had more Catholic clergy than it needed, priests with brogues began holding their own in American pulpits, noted the Rev. Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

“It used to be that the immigrants from Europe — the Poles, the Italians, the Irish — when they came in the 19th and early 20th centuries, they came with their priests also, who ministered to them and could minister in their own languages.

“What’s been different about the immigrant (priests) today from Mexico and Latin America is that there are shortages of priests in Latin America already.”


Many of the foreign-born priests in Newark were trained at the Redemptoris Mater missionary seminary in Kearny, N.J., whose high graduation rates have kept the archdiocese rank near the top among annual ordinations in U.S. dioceses.

Four of the archdiocese’s 10 new foreign-born priests are from Colombia; the others are from Croatia, the Dominican Republic, India, Nicaragua, the Philippines and Portugal.

Newly ordained Colombian Camilo Cruz, 28, has wanted to be a priest since he was a child, he said. He entered the seminary in Colombia and transferred to Immaculate Conception Seminary in South Orange, N.J., in 2007, he said, after receiving a call from God to come to New Jersey.

In many ways, he said, life would have been easier in Colombia, where he had “family and friends, everything. … But when you say yes to God, you have to continue saying yes to what he says and what he asks you later.”

He said he never spoke a word of English until he moved to the United States three years ago. But three years of study have gone well, and he continues to study.

“I practice pronunciation and writing,” he said. “It’s still a challenge. But always what I do is, I think of the people. I think of the people who want to hear the homilies, the people for whom I have to preach the gospel. So I always encourage myself to continue learning English.”


(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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