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KARL KEATING'S E-LETTER
TOPICS:
BITTERNESS AT NCR
PRIESTLESS PARISHES?
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Over the last two decades the number of priests serving the Catholic
Church in America has declined by about a fifth, even as the total
number of Catholics has grown. In contrast, the number of clergy serving
the Episcopal Church has increased by more than a quarter, even as that
body has lost membership.
The shortage of Catholic priests will be resolved over time. As I said
in a previous E-Letter, there is no shortage of vocations. The problem
is that many priestly vocations are not fostered at the diocesan level.
In many places, men with authentic vocations and orthodox beliefs are
obstructed from moving toward ordination. This is an eminently solvable
problem.
The situation in the Episcopal Church is different. Now that a
practicing homosexual has been ordained as a bishop, even more
Episcopalians will leave. The declining church will decline even faster.
But there likely will be a continuing increase in the number of
Episcopal clergy, leading, in theory, to the amusing situation of a
church in which there are more chiefs than Indians.
A CRABBED ATTITUDE
Tim Unsworth, writing for the "National Catholic Reporter," packed a lot
of complaints into his most recent column. It's clear he doesn't like
the church he professes to be a member of.
His first complaint was that his friends David and Margaret found it too
inconvenient to be married in the Catholic Church. Margaret is Catholic,
and David is Jewish and previously married. He didn't want to go through
the annulment process, so he and Margaret got married in a Buddhist
ceremony.
No problem, said Unsworth. His friends are "two good people of deep
faith and exquisite taste." Deep faith in what? Unsworth doesn't say,
but apparently Margaret's faith isn't deep enough to restrain her from
attempting marriage outside the Church. But no matter. During the
ceremony David's daughter sang Schubert's "Ave Maria" in Latin, which
apparently made up for any defects in matter or form.
After praising Buddhism's "rich liturgy," Unsworth turns to his next
complaint. He despises the new liturgical regulations issued by Rome:
"In a statement frozen solid by the absence of doubt and larded with
disdain and dismissal, the Vatican instructed bishops to have their
priests lambaste the faithful, pot-roast Catholics in the pews to bow
before receiving Communion, to keep their nonordained feet out of the
sanctuary, to nail their squirming kids to the pews, and a pile of other
minutiae that is supposed to increase respect for the central
sacrament."
The purple prose obscures commonsensical regulations, not one of which
is new. What is Unsworth's problem? A partial explanation is given in a
later paragraph, when he writes about a priest he used to know:
"Even as an old man, he used to walk up and down the aisle before Sunday
Mass. He played the jester or the clown. He chatted with the children
and asked the elderly about their lumbago or fallen arches. He created a
community of friends. He asked about the recent death of a spouse.
Unlike the new regulations that render them comatose, he warmed up the
crowd."
The last phrase holds the key. To Unsworth, Massgoers are a "crowd" that
needs to be "warmed up." They are not participants in a divine drama,
not present at the sacred and awe-filled representation of Calvary. No,
they are an audience come to be entertained. The Mass is the main act
(did his priest friend, as some have done, dress up as a clown for the
Liturgy of the Eucharist?), but the main act needs a warm-up act, and so
Father gladhandingly walked the aisle before Mass.
Is it good for a priest to chat with children, to ask the elderly about
their lumbago, and to "create a community of friends"? Sure, but those
can be done outside of Mass. There is a time and place for everything,
and Mass isn't the place to play entertainer or schmoozer.
The priest Unsworth mentions is dead. Dead too, apparently, was his
understanding of what the Mass is. Granted, there still is a
constituency for Mass-as-entertainment, but it is a declining and aging
constituency. Priests who cater to it are aging too.
Whenever I hear of an liturgy led by a showman-priest, I know with
almost complete certainty that the priest is older than I am. He was
ordained in the sixties, maybe in the seventies, and he is caught in a
time warp of his own making.
Writing of himself and his wife, Unsworth says, "Jean and I now live a
stripped-down religious life. We are there on Sundays. ... We try to see
the plus side of negative things, but lately, we've ceased to care about
the future of the church, only about the people in it." Another telling
remark.
What bitterness Unsworth unleashes in his weekly column! Everything
seems to be going wrong; the high hopes of half a lifetime ago are
fading. There is no real prospect that the Church will be refashioned as
he once thought it would be.
Tim Unsworth has lived his three score and ten, and his old age is
proving more sour than he ever could have imagined. The biographical
squib at the end of his column says that he "writes from Chicago, where
he awaits eternal fire." The sad thing is that the squib may not have
been meant as a joke.
PRIESTLESS PARISHES? NOT REALLY SO MANY
Those lobbying for married or female priests keep saying that unless
their recommendations are taken up, lots of parishes will have no
priests. Just look, they say--that already is the case. Is it really?
Statistics from the 2003 edition of "The Official Catholic Directory"
indicate otherwise.
There are 19,055 parishes in the U.S., and 16,014 of them have resident
pastors. Another 2,516 are overseen by non-resident priests. But almost
all of these parishes are rural or mission churches with small
congregations. They never have had resident pastors, not even in the
heyday of vocations in the 1960s. The priests who celebrate Mass in such
parishes live down the road in the area's main parish.
Very few parishes are headed by people who are not priests. Permanent
deacons run 134 parishes, brothers run 17, and sisters run 229. Lay men
or women run another 133. And 12 parishes are overseen by an outside
team of priests.
This means that out of more than 19,000 parishes, barely 500 are not led
by priests. Granted, we have a shortage of priestly ordinations, but we
are not yet where some people claim we are, only a few steps shy of
leaving most Catholics priestless.
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