www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News Cleveland Catholic Diocese reveals full list parish closings

At some point we too will likely face this. :-(

Better start taking responsibilites for the Church seriously.
Prayer for vocations, proportunate giving according to income rather that the one buck approach, need I go on?
Stephanos I

As bad as the scenario looks, I often wonder how much of this is simply due to a geographic redistribution of Catholics in America. TONS of churches are popping up here, all over the South. Millions of Catholics have migrated south, leaving Church structures in their wake but building new ones here.

Alexis

Prayers for vocations are all well and good, but it is the willingness to ordain men to the apostolate - both to minor and major orders, whatever their married state - that is the key.

How many worthy candidates have we lost to Orthodoxy because of a reticence to ordain married men to the priesthood?

You want to grow? Open seminaries to married men and celebrate New Pentecosts often and thousands will be added to our number. We have to have the courage to be ourselves...to be fully EASTERN and fully CATHOLIC.

Alexis,

I think you make a good point. The American population seems to be highly mobile. Not only are people moving from city centres to suburbs, but also from the northeast to the southwest. The Church has to keep up with these developments.

ebed melech,

we are talking about the Latin diocese of Cleveland here, so ordaining married men to the priesthood is not the answer.

What the Latin Church needs is not to relax the rules on priestly celibacy. In fact, in the history of the Church, reform has always meant enforcing and strengthening the rules, not relaxing them.

I think part of the problem of vocations is that young men today don't see the priesthood as important enough to justify the sacrifice of celibacy. This is a real sacrifice for any young man: here I am not only thinking about giving up sex but giving up the possibility of marital love, intimacy and family life.

Thus, unless the Church presents the priesthood as something entirely special and uniquely worthwhile, indeed something absolutely necessary and indispensable to the life of the Church, it will not be very attractive. After all, anyone can be a community organizer, and you don't have to be celibate for that. But for a priest of the Catholic Church who stands at the altar and acts in the person of Christ, celibacy is a way to become as much like Christ as possible.

So when discussing the lack of vocation we have to ask ourselves this question: How does your diocese and your parish today present the role of the priest?

Amen. If we do this, we will bring Christ to the world.

With our challenging demographic situation, it seems that a substantial portion of our parishes will not make it over the long term. We should consider the possibility of moving to more of a mission-based strategy. Otherwise, the Cleveland dilemma will be our fate too.

Latin Catholic,

I know - my comment was in reference to Father Stephanos' advice to JohnS re: Eastern churches.


I think part of the problem is the Latin Church's effort to make the call to priesthood synonymous with the call to celibacy. But that is their issue, not mine. That said, I admire those men who make such a noble sacrifice in order to ensure a radical availability for the sake of the Gospel. So I am talking policy and practice here, not people.

There are two perspectives on marriage and the call to priesthood:

One sees the channeling of the natural calling to fatherhood into a supernatural vocation by a sacrificial offering to God of this calling in order to be radically available to spiritual offspring.

Another perspective sees the exercise of fatherhood in the natural order as a preparation - a seminal training ground - for the exercise of a spiritual fatherhood in the household of faith, that is, the Church. Earthly, natural fatherhood prepares one for spiritual, supernatural fatherhood.

Both perspectives are valid, and both are perfectly Pauline and biblical.

That the Latin Church has chosen to ignore or reject in practice the second ideal is its own loss, IMHO. But there is no reason why the Eastern Catholic churches should adopt such a view.

(from the article)


(Fr.'s comments:)


Father, bless !

Yes. And a big part of that is men and women who are willing to serve where the need is most pronounced. People pray for vocations all the time. But the last time I heard a sermon which explicitly asked men and women to consider if they were being called to a religious life was in 2003. Somebody has to get up in the pulpit and say, "If you don't serve, this will close."

-- John

I think the Southland is great mission territory personally. But to my mind, every part of the US should be seen as mission territory for the Eastern Catholic churches. Even the Holy Land of OH and PA has unbelievers in need of evangelization! We can either take a caretaker approach (which may, in the end, be more undertaker than caretaker!) or an apostolic approach. Care needs to be shown to our own, but, as Our Lord says, the fields are white and ready for the harvest. All we need are the laborers!

As saddend as I am to say this I have not had the experience of meeting many RC priests in my area that I would like my children or grandchildren to model thier lives after. In my childhood I looked up to those that served as parish priests and were involved with the lay people. Now I see mostly administrators that will bluntly tell you that they don't do this or that and their day off is not to be disturbed they golf on that day etc. Our RCIA class only sees the priest a couple times in the year and then we had to change the evenings to Tuesdays.

OTOH I have not felt this way about the Byzantine priests or the Orthodox priests. Married or not each of them have impressed me with their vocations and faith. Our three adult bible studies at the Byzantine parish are held bi-weekly and the prist is there each and every time.

Kathleen,

To be fair, Byzantine churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, tend to be smaller in size than most Latin parishes. And with the shortage of clergy, the burdens of a large parish very often fall upon a single priest and, if he is lucky, a deacon as well.

This is one of the reasons why the "megachurch" movement, even among Catholic parishes, to my mind strikes me as being somewhat out the spirit of what a parish should be. In one parish in Charlotte, I believe they have some 23,000 members. 23,000! Of course, they have more than one priest, and from what I have been told, they do a very nice job. Personally, I like the idea of the Gospels where the apostles divided the multitudes into groups of 50! Not that I am averse to congregations of thousands of people, but I think we stretch pastoral care to the outer limits if things are too large...

Not sure if that is your situation at all...

Of course, some priests are just more comfortable operating as administrators. Perhaps they were burned doing pastoral work, or perhaps they simply do not understand what being a pastor means...or perhaps they do not have the emotional intelligence to know how they are coming across. (Here is where having a wife can be a great advantage. My wife would NEVER let me get away with saying some of the things I have heard some clergy say!)

I am blessed that you have had such a positive experience with Eastern clergy. But keep in mind we have our share of the good, the bad and the ugly on our side as well.

God bless!

You're right that the Eastern Catholic Churches should keep their own tradition on this.

I think that to some extent you may be right that we in the Latin Church are missing out on something when we insist on an all-celibate priesthood. However, as you know we do have married deacons and these often have a lot to contribute, both because they are married and because they usually have other work which gives them a different experience and different perspective on things. So I would like to see many more married deacons.

Another problem is that in many places there is now only one priest in each parish, whereas in earlier days there might be a number of priests living together in a presbytery, perhaps sharing prayers, meals and recreation almost like in a monastic community. In many places this has now been lost, and that can't be a good thing. After all, human beings are fundamentally social beings.

An Eastern hierarch said in a different context [liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com] that "When these Westerners get a new idea, they always carry it to extremes". Celibacy is a wonderful thing for those who receive the call, especially in the context of a call to the religious life, but I do sometimes wonder if, as you suggest, we might not benefit from a bit more flexibility when it comes to the secular clergy... Still, this is not my decision, since I'm not the pope or even a clergyman

Part of the blame is the rise in altar girls. Having a male server at the altar was a way to get him to start thinking about being a priest.

Another is the lack of ritual in the Novus Ordo. I have a very old Catholic prayerbook with the pre-1962 missal in it. I remember praying the prayers-even in Latin. The newer ritual has many things missing in it. It keeps the essentials, but is more a lowest common denominator ritual-if I can write that.

Why would a guy want to be a priest (lets face it we have a crisis in the numbers of accepted vocations*) if he is replaceable with a middle aged woman in a power suit?

* St. John Bosco said that the Lord calls 1/10 people to a religious or priestly vocation. We are supposed to tithe our population as well.