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The short answer is yes. But I think the question is what one believes about community and what leads to much of the criticism of the modern American Roman Church. There are lots and lots of groups for "community." So if community means the mens club, or St. Vincent de Paul or religious education or RCIA or the mothers day out or the home schoolers etc there is all kinds of community.

Is this a worshiping community where the Liturgy is the focus as expressed in the Eastern Church certainly not. We have been members of this parish for seven years. On any given Sunday we might know 10 people out of the 850 in the pews. After communion 30% of the people are gone. The priest is an excellent preacher, has a beautiful voice and does the Liturgy very well. He is warm and friendly. He is totally orthodox in his views. Most of the people hardly know who he is. But he did invite 10 priests to hear confessions on tuesday night.

So the long answer is probably yes too.

That would be a *tiny* Roman parish around here . . . Apparently, we have the largest parish in the US, at 19,000 families, and I believe several in the 15,000-17,00 family range. (We *should* have something like 97 parishes, not the 17 we have, but staffing them would be impossible).

Oh, I'm sure it's doable, but it would require a definite change of attitudes. From my experience in Virginia and New York, at least, most RC parishes are grossly overstaffed in relation to Eastern Catholic or Orthodox parishes (even taking into account the matter of scale). Most Eastern parishes have just one full-time paid employee, the pastor. Everybody else, including assistant pastors, have outside jobs. Most administrative posts are filled by volunteers. We don't have paid youth ministers, music ministers, adult education ministers, and the like. We're bare bones, all the way.

I'm assuming these magaparishes must have something like four or five priests, each, which means you should have about 85 parish priests in your diocese, so you'll need to squeeze about fifteen more out of the chancery, any schools and universities in the area, and convince a few of the retired priests to pick up a Mass here and there.

The Old Order Amish are very sensible about the size of their churches. Basically, whenever they get up to about 25-30 families (100-120 people), they split the community and start a new church, picking (as is their custom) by lot from among three men nominated by the people. This ensures that no one community becomes so large that it cannot operate as an extended family.

It is my understanding that the Mormons do the same. That is when a congregation gets larger than 250 they split into two congregations. The two may meet in the same building but are separate churches for all practical purposes. The point is to keep people engaged.

We have one priest for about 1700 families. There are a lot of other paid staffers. That is pretty typical in this Archdiocese. A 15,000 member parish is unimaginable. Industrial Catholicism at its best which may well be Catholicism at its worst.

No, that's the problem

There are only a couple of parishes with exclusive claims on two priests.

Without our priest & Fr. Frances (also our eparchy), they'd be even tighter.

Bishop Pepe would instantly open three more if he had priests-but I don't think he has 30 altogether, even counting the two easterns he relies upon and a retired eastern biritual . . .

We're talking about churches with 10 or so Masses and attendance of 1000+ at each Mass (yes, Masses have been added in response to the fire marshal!)

You know, nation-wide, the ratio or priests to people is about 1500-to-1, which is pretty much the same ratio as it was in 1900, and much better than in many other (traditionally Catholic) countries, which leads me to believe the problem is in resource management more than anything else. Scrub the chanceries and the universities and send the priests there to a parish (though that might not be fair to the people of those parishes, now that you mention it), ask retired priests to do a Mass or two each month, we can get that ratio down quite a bit. Also, perhaps the bishops might consider coordinating a bit, so that those with a sufficiency can transfer priests to those who are lacking.

And, above all, bishops could think of something better to rectify the situation than "Pray for more vocations".

Yes, *but* . . . the demographics of those priests is (are?) different. The average age of priests in 1900 was probably pretty much the same as in 1890 and 1910, with a fairly even distribution from the 20's to retirement (as adjusted for mortality).

Today, the problem isn't that the typical priest is ordained 20 or so years later than a century ago, but that the average age is moving up quite quickly. It's a crisis in a decade or two, not this year.


That creates its own problem if you inform the teaching orders that they're done teaching . . .


In this diocese, most of them are doing that every weekend.




This gets back to the priests in the classroom--I strongly suspect that each priest or nun in the classroom results in more than one net vocation actually happening.

My experience at Georgetown was quite the reverse--every priest or nun in the classroom resulted in more than one net defection from Catholicism. I saw a lot of very devout Catholic kids enter Georgetown as freshmen and leave it as atheists--or at least, non-observant (I was not even a Christian back then, so avoided that pitfall). Which is why I said it might not be fair to the people of those parishes who get stuck with all those university and chancery priests.

Of course, Georgetown is a Jesuit university, which isn't quite the same thing as being Catholic, is it?

Reminds me of my time spent in diaconate formation at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary outside Philadelphia (we did not have our own diaconate program at the time-so the bishop would farm us out to Latin programs). The priest-director of the Philadelphia RC diaconate program once addressed our group by saying: "I'm going to quote to you a poem written by a man who was both a Jesuit AND a Catholic"! Enough said.

Dn. Robert

His late Eminence Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ, [fordham.edu] was a Catholic, a Jesuit, and a cardinal. It might seem an impossible combination, but my understanding is that he really was one of the great Catholic theologians of recent times. Let's pray for more men like him.

My brother doesn't think he would have kept to the Faith through high school without having gone to our Jesuit school.

My most influential faculty in both high school and college were Jesuit priests.

Of course, most of mine were old enough to be Catholic.

Bluntly, were it not for celibacy, the influences of these Jesuit priests would have led to me joining the order (and it was close anyway).


I do recall referring to them as, "A partially owned subsidiary of the Roman Catholic Church."

More seriously, though, outside of the Jesuit Sandinistas (whose heretical theology mine categorically rebuked), the "split," to the extent it existed, tended to be with the Jebbies on the substance side when it fought with form.