The Devolution of the American Vocations Crisis
I wrote this in the spring of 1997 when I was Director of Adult Education at St. Michael Church in Houston. I welcome reactions that would help me correct it and expand it into a book.
Aged and frail as he is, Pope John Paul II is said to be looking forward eagerly to the upcoming World Youth Day in Paris. As well he might: his visit to Denver in August 1993 for World Youth Day turned out to be a four-day love fest. But I found one thing disquieting: the problem that the Pope and the bishops unwittingly revealed by their well-publicized appeal for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Although no better opportunity for inspiring vocations could possibly have been devised, nothing was said that had not been said for years before to little effect. Needless to say, the few years that have passed since haven't seen much effect either. I expect nothing different from Paris; indeed one cannot help noticing that the hierarchy as a whole is worried about vocations but doesn't really know what to do about them. That's because most bishops see the problem as arising more from secular than from intramural causes and regard it more as a crisis than as an opportunity. But in light of my personal and professional experience over the last twenty years in Catholic universities, parishes, and seminaries, I have a different view of the problem and of what can be done to address it.
As of now I see no crisis in the strict sense of the word, i.e., a brief period of decision imposed by an acute problem. Nor is it theologically correct to say we have a shortage of vocations, in the strict sense of 'vocation': is anyone prepared to argue that the Holy Spirit is not "calling" enough people to serve the Church whose soul he is? What we do have is a growing shortage of priests that stems from a past crisis and heralds a future one. The past crisis was brought on mostly by the clergy itself; the present problem is attributable to both clergy and laity, but more to the clergy; and the future crisis, if it comes, will also have been brought on by both. At that stage we may discover in the laity the seeds of positive change.
To judge from its rhetoric, however, the Catholic hierarchy blames the priest shortage almost entirely on secular factors that diminish respect for and interest in the priesthood. Most often cited are the following (in no particular order): resistance to celibacy caused by a sex-saturated culture; the failure of parents to present the priesthood positively; the materialism of the secularized Western world; and aversion to commitment in a culture that over-emphasizes personal freedom. One might add that, of late, the sex-abuse scandals rocking the American Catholic clergy have not exactly helped. Such factors clearly play a part in many cases. But there is no reason to believe that they suffice to explain the shortage.
First, despite what our trashy media lead some to believe, celibacy is no harder today than it's ever been. The priesthood remains a realistic option for idealistic, single young men who aren't bent on marriage. Similarly, it is hardly new that parents tend to prefer more lucrative careers for their sons than the priesthood and also look forward to grandchildren. But adolescent rebellion isn't new either, and I have seen it mature into the act of entering a seminary. As to America's rampant materialism, it has sparked a back-to-simplicity movement in secular society; why shouldn't it similarly affect a Church pledged to a "preferential option for the poor"?
Aversion to long-term commitment cannot be so easily dismissed as an explanation when one notes that the divorce rate among Catholics now matches that of the general population. The Pope in particular is fond of making that point. If it were sound, then U.S. seminary applications would stay down across the board and attrition among seminarians would be mostly voluntary. What we actually see, however, is rising applications to some of the more "conservative" seminaries (e.g., in the Lincoln, Peoria, and Arlington dioceses); and these days a man's decision to leave his seminary is often made with the wholehearted cooperation of his superiors. In any event, the cult phenomenon shows that Americans today can keep quite onerous commitments, even to leaders who exploit them and lie to them, so long as they find the setting secure and affirming. Our seminaries and novitiates are not exploitive, but I can attest that some of them confuse and alienate their charges.
Finally, the sex scandals evince nothing new either. Anyone who knows medieval and Renaissance history well should be thankful that things today are not worse than they are. What has changed is that the bishops have finally been forced to take the dirty linen out to wash. That is a change for the better: henceforth it can only enhance the Church's credibility.
Over time, I have become convinced that the problem lies mainly with a Church leadership that sincerely wants to encourage priestly vocations but often ends up doing the opposite. Now I am not going to trot out the easy and standard prescription that the priesthood be opened to women and/or the generality of married men. Assuming the former is even possible, which I doubt, anyone who imagines that doing either would solve more problems than it would create shows only that they understand the experience of Protestant churches even less than most Catholic bishops understand their own vocations problem. All the same, it is quite telling that plenty of Catholics who want to be priests are not going to be ordained.
Those excluded as ineligible are women and nearly all married men; those excluded as undesirable are single men who are not otherwise the sorts of men that vocation directors want. Leave aside for the moment the question whether some such people should be ordained. What ought to be obvious, and in "progressive" circles is obvious, is that the sheer number of such people seriously undermines the usual explanations for the priest shortage. The problem is not that too few Catholics today respect or aspire to the priesthood: most respect it and, for weal or woe, many aspire to it. Despite what some of their statements suggest, the bishops know perfectly well that the problem they face is not how few but rather the sorts of people who want to be priests. They also know better than anyone that it has gotten harder to function as a priest since the Second Vatican Council. So for fairness' sake, let's be a bit more precise about what the priest shortage comes down to: there aren't enough people of the sort Church authorities want who are both able and willing to become priests as that role is currently defined.
As always when something is amiss in the Church, the world, the flesh, and the devil can be found nearby. But most of the precipitating causes of the shortage can be found in the bosom of the Church herself as she has tried to implement the needed reforms of Vatican II. And even without reference to the Holy Spirit's unfailing solicitude, it is profoundly misleading to call the problem a "shortage of vocations."
Confusions about Catholic doctrine and identity that spread in the Council's wake succeeded, among other things, in obscuring the value of the ministerial priesthood in the eyes of some Catholics. But Vatican II, and the problems generated by how it was presented, were not initiated by the laity. In fact, a disproportionate number of Catholics who lost interest in the priesthood and religious life during that time were priests and/or religious themselves: their ranks suffered massive defections during the years following the Council. That had less to do with American society than with problems of formation among Catholic clergy. Recent books such as Paul Hendrickson's Seminary and Raymond Hedin's Married to the Church abundantly illustrate that many Catholic seminarians, both before and during the Council, were ill-prepared to sustain a sound priestly spirituality in the world that the Council Fathers summoned them to serve. The reasons for that are complex and beyond our scope. But among its results are that a troubling percentage of ordained men are not functioning as priests today and too many active priests are unclear about the value of what they are. By the standards of the not-so-distant past, the priesthood is aging, depleted and demoralized; it lacks the afflatus, and the ésprit de corps, that were once so noticeable in it. And so the sort of young Catholic man who once might have entered the priesthood often becomes, say, a lawyer or a psychotherapist instead. But that is less a societal problem than a natural reaction to the disarray and polarization the Church has suffered for at least a generation now.
And it does not of itself pose a vocations shortage. For one thing, the present Pope has been permitting laicizations of priests rather rarely, so that the tide of defections has slowed to a trickle; for another, most bishops now accommodate ineligible aspirants to the priesthood by inviting them to lay ministry or the permanent diaconate. To everybody's net benefit, more and more Catholic women and men are coming forward to work full-time in important Church ministries. Such people should not be regarded just as employees: most of them have vocations too. It is insulting to them to refer to the shortage of priests as a shortage of "vocations." Although there aren't enough priests to do everything we used to expect from priests, it doesn't follow that too few laborers hear the call to the harvest.
Nonetheless we do face a real shortage of priests in North America. The current numbers are well-documented and ominous. For a generation now, ordinations have not kept pace with the combined rates of death, retirement, and defection. If that continues, then without mass consolidations more than half of U.S. parishes could lack resident priests a generation from now. Even with consolidation, the ratio of priests to laity will have plummeted. That could pose a crisis because priests could end up being too scarce to afford every Catholic a realistic opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist and other sacraments fully. One would think that the tens of millions who want such things could manage to produce the tens of thousands necessary to provide them; but that has apparently ceased to be so.
As I've already implied, the roots of this situation can be found in the ecclesiastical history of the mid-1950s through the late 1970's. And clergy formation is by no means the whole story. During the Council, the Church leadership started encouraging the laity to embrace Church ministries even as many priests and religious saw fit to abandon their vocations or modify them radically. Perhaps much of that was necessary: some priests and religious had had putative but not real vocations to their state, and some laity had had real but unacknowledged vocations to ecclesial ministry while remaining lay people. In the aftermath of the corresponding shifts, it was only natural that fewer Catholic men found reason to enter to the priesthood. But the persistence of the priest shortage that has developed since warns of a future crisis that few American Catholics are ready to contemplate. If and when it comes, the laity will have contributed to it to some extent, and to a greater extent it will be up to the laity to resolve it. Since I have minimized explanations of the current priest shortage that cite the usual secular factors, I shall take some care to explain why I still assign part of the problem to the laity.
St. Paul taught long ago, and Vatican II explained for our time, that Christians are called to become little "Christs" in virtue of their baptism. Every Christian thus has some vocation to build up the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ that is the sacrament of unity and salvation for the world. More so than at any time since the pre-Constantinian Church, some local faith communities have absorbed that message. But in many pews on Sundays, and among the masses of nominal and "holiday" Catholics, both the concept and the reality of vocation remain largely obscure. For well-known historical reasons, most Catholics still think of a vocation as something that a select few have and that they lack. For related reasons, people in general understand the Church primarily as the hierarchy or the institution—not the "People of God," or "God's covenant family," or the "priestly nation" to which the baptized-and-confirmed fully belong. Whatever they may explicitly profess, therefore, too many Catholics still believe instinctively that the Church consists primarily in the corps of celibates who have full-time "vocations" to the religion business and secondarily in the institutional apparatus facilitating the work of that corps. The rest of us fit in as the more-or-less captive clientele—offered what we are told we need and exhorted to do what we must.
That kind of passivity, which involves a nearly complete failure to understand the baptismal vocation, is the stubborn residuum of Church history between the Emperor Constantine and Vatican II. Lay passivity did not then usually cause shortages of priests and religious because people assumed that those who thirsted for holiness should become one of "the holy," i.e., those in holy orders or "religious" orders. But as a result of Vatican II's teaching, Catholics today are less disposed to equate the path of sanctity with that of a priest or religious. On the whole, that is a positive development. So is the fact that, when Catholics took their place in the American mainstream during the baby-boom years, professional alternatives to the priesthood opened to many more young Catholic men. Along with lingering lay passivity, such developments help to explain why fewer people of the sort bishops want aspire to the priesthood than before.
But positive developments do not really explain why the priest shortage is worsening. Lay Catholics who understand that all the baptized are called to the fullness of Christian perfection are more ecclesially aware and active than most laity used to be. Such people are quite interested in meeting the needs of the Church; that includes wanting to meet the need for priests as much as it includes lay ministry and charitable works. And the fact that more alternatives to the priesthood are open than in prior generations entails that far more young Catholic men receive higher education today than before. Accordingly, more young men than before are getting the extent of liberal education that is requisite for the seminary. So, what's the problem?
Mainly, I think, it is that we stand today at the dangerous intersection of the old passivity with the new consumerism. Many American Catholics have come to regard the Church as the spiritual equivalent of Sears, Roebuck & Company: a venerable, lumbering multinational corporation that offers, through its ubiquitous local branches, a wide variety of goods and services from which the customers can pick and choose to suit their needs. What has always sold—such as lavish weddings, inexpensive counseling, and good schools—keeps right on selling. The most distinctive offerings—Mass and the sacraments—lose sales when done badly and gain them when done well. Items carrying steep and long-term maintenance costs—mostly, the teachings about social justice and birth control—get left on the shelves more often than not. Yet despite some losses to the competition, many keep coming—partly because they still find things they want, partly because the stores are all over the place, and partly because it's the family tradition to go there. That is why there are so many "cafeteria Catholics" who believe that they can reject key Church teachings and live just like other Americans while remaining good Catholics. Whatever their beliefs or lifestyles, they can still bask in the solidarity of a brand loyalty that shapes one's inmost self by force of memory and habit and that helps to reassure one of being "good."
Such spiritual consumerism is not just the counterpart of material consumerism. It is the Catholic node for other social trends we have seen since my generation, the baby boom, started coming of age: the breakdown of real community, skepticism of authority, and the sexual revolution. As long as spiritual consumerism pervades the Church in America, the notion that every Christian has a vocation to establish God's kingdom in themselves and bring it to the world won't receive more than lip service from the majority, who seem to believe that being saved requires only that one die without having become a child molester or mass murderer. By the same token, the idea of spending one's life in sacrificial service to God's people will occur to most only as an eccentric "career option" for those unable or unwilling to live fully as independent adults. So even as they still expect be served by priests, American Catholics have grown less willing to supply them.
As I said at the beginning, that has not yet brought on another crisis of vocations. The demographics of the previous generation were such that what we have now is merely a chronic problem we still have time to temporize about. But if and when the current shortage gets bad enough, American Catholics will confront another, true vocations crisis when their leaders will be forced to decide not whether but how the basic shape of ministry is to change for the sake of Catholicism's survival in this country. It might not be a bad thing to be forced into such a choice, and the choice then made might not be a bad one. But those are very big "mights." Catholicism in America could just as easily cease to be authentically Catholic.
Apparently, progressives don't seem fazed by that possibility: they actually welcome the "starve the beast" approach. Like the Reagan Administration, which welcomed a ballooning budget deficit as a way to force Congress to curtail spending, many people on the Catholic left shrug cynically when the priest shortage is mentioned. Their stock reaction is: "Why don't they just wake up and ordain women and the married?"; one might then hear expressed a fervent desire to see a single mom elected to the Papacy. The hope is that, when things get bad enough, "they" will finally get desperate enough to do what they should be doing now. That reminds me not only of the Reagan years' chronic deficits but also of what many progressives used to say about birth control in the 1970s: "Humanae Vitae was a disaster; let's wait for a new Pope who will wake up and change the teaching." Well, here we are in the mid-1990s, and we have a Pope who was not only a prime architect of Humanae Vitae but has developed better arguments for its teaching than Paul VI did. Chances are that John Paul II will reign past the turn of the millennium, and my belief is that we will have to wait infinitely longer than a millennium for the ban on contraception to be lifted. Willy-nilly, that ban has become just as integral a part of the Church's ordinary and universal teaching as the more widely praised, but just as widely flouted, principles of papal social teaching. Similarly, given the Pope's doctrinal legacy and the College of Cardinals he has built, his successors will almost certainly refuse regard themselves as authorized to ordain women. We could see more married men ordained; but for reasons I shall shortly give, the number of married priests will probably be too small to forestall a crisis. It is no more possible than desirable for demographic brinkmanship to solve the problem.
All the same, the Catholic population is growing and remains unwilling to dispense with the Mass. I say so although, as a full-time pastoral associate, I have felt privileged to preside at communion services on weekdays when none of the priests who ordinarily celebrated Mass at the parish church were available. Even the more conservative among the congregation have liked the way I conducted the service, but both they and most of the more progressive congregants would prefer the Mass. I can well understand why. Although daily (as opposed to Sunday) Mass is unnecessary for the Eucharist, the Mass makes the Paschal Mystery present and dynamic in a way that no communion service can do, and thus constitutes the tangible focus of Church life. The devout have always appreciated that; yet now they have begun to notice that they cannot take the availability of Mass for granted anymore. What is one to tell them?
First, let's reiterate the good news. Although far fewer eligible men aspire to the priesthood today than a generation ago, it does not thereby follow that too few of them want to be priests. The revival of the permanent diaconate and the growth of lay ministry have afforded priests many more colleagues in parish ministry than they had at the Council's end in 1965. That relieves priests of many burdens they used to carry by themselves, so that the ratio of priests to laity can now safely be lower than it once was. Couple that fact with the current rate of applications to some seminaries and male novitiates, and it seems unduly alarmist to say that eligible aspirants to the priesthood are too few to meet the basic needs of the Church. But the bad news is that the men who are too few are not the aspirants to but the graduates of seminaries and novitiates. The explanation for that can be found less in young Catholic men than in many seminaries themselves.
This is a problem we should lay squarely at the doorstep of the higher clergy. Consider a phenomenon hardly noted outside conservative Catholic circles: many single men who, by traditional criteria, fittingly aspire to the celibate priesthood, have been unable to make it into or through a seminary or novitiate. During the 1980's I taught several dozen such men as an adjunct lecturer at three different centers of priestly formation in the Northeast. I could not help becoming involved in their experiences. Going by what I have since heard from seminarians and read about, those experiences remain depressingly common.
For one thing, what had attracted many of those students to the priesthood was the opportunity to do things that only priests are empowered to do—chiefly, confecting the Eucharist and absolving penitents. Accordingly, they were not quite as interested in social work, avant-garde theology, and certain other things that those in charge of their formation thought important. So to the mind of such faculty, such seminarians' motives were too narrow. And that set of ordinands overlapped with another who breathed poorly in the sexually ambiguous atmosphere of two of the institutions where I taught. Now I shall not make charges of illicit activity that I cannot prove and that in the majority of cases would not be true. But I will say that anyone who is familiar with such places today, and yet retains enough distance to be objective, will know precisely what I mean by 'sexually ambiguous'. I have heard dozens of remarks from both visitors and insiders that report the same impression.
Even more troubling, the theological orthodoxy of many seminarians I knew made them suspect in the eyes of progressive faculty. The suspicion was not always misplaced: the orthodoxy of some seminarians was a defensive, almost fanatical way of coping with personal and social challenges that they would have to meet better if they were to become pastorally effective priests. As any vocation director could confirm, the same goes for seminary applicants, who come disproportionately from the self-styled "traditionalist" movement that hankers for the authoritarianism of the pre-Vatican-II Church and retains a strongly priest-centered form of piety. But I have known many other aspirants whose orthodoxy shaped a more mature and solid faith than that of some of the faculty members sitting in judgment over them. Neither during my teaching days nor now could I dismiss the spirituality of such aspirants as a reaction formation. Yet some formation directors tarred all the "orthodox" with the same brush. At one place where I taught, the formation director told me point-blank that he had to "break the faith of the young fogies" in order to make it "authentic." And so I watched in dismay as the prejudices of people who saw themselves as broad-minded ran my best students right out of the program. In retrospect, I can only say that the failures of those young men were to their credit. Given similar firsthand accounts I've heard about other places, it seems truer today than ever that nobody has a vocation to be a seminarian.
To be fair, I must acknowledge that not all seminaries suffer such problems and that and I have seen strengths in ones that do. But the problems remain widespread enough to account, in large measure, for the fact that today's seminary graduates are pitifully small in number and sometimes dubiously trained. Given what many seminaries are like, it would be truly miraculous if the number of priests were waxing instead of waning.
To be sure, lay spiritual consumerism is a more general phenomenon. But the laity do not control the selection and formation of ordinands; and it is the laity who suffer from deficient seminaries inasmuch as the graduates of those seminaries serve the laity. Yet the official explanations for the priest shortage, which adduce secular causes as primary, imply that it is the laity who are chiefly to blame. So it's the main victims of the problem who are getting most of the blame. As any psychologist would point out, blaming the victim both exacerbates the problem and prevents one from dealing with it effectively. Mind you, I have already blamed the laity to some degree. But no matter what they may preach to the laity, and no matter what the laity's response might be, the bishops will make little progress on priestly vocations unless and until they get their own houses of formation in order.
Another major cause of the shortage, albeit an indirect one, is that too much is expected of parish priests. Very few professionals could possibly be good at everything that parish priests are normally called upon to learn and do these days. Not only must all such priests perform the duties that are limited to the priesthood, but those who expect and are expected to become pastors in due course (i.e., the majority) will have to act as administrators, counselors, and fund-raisers. Some of the more ambitious and/or talented priests also hold responsible posts at the diocesan level. Demands of that scope may have been in order during a simpler time when priests were among the few college-educated members of a largely immigrant Church. But in the developed countries—which is where the priest shortage is most widely marked and lamented—we no longer live in such a time. In Europe and America today, it is only the poorest inner-city or rural parishes where the priests are likely to be those with the best education; in affluent parishes and college towns, it is not uncommon to find parishoners more theologically knowledgeable than their pastor. Inevitably, priests carry less authority and must serve a less cohesive and supportive flock than they did before Vatican II. For that reason as well as the others I've cited so far, the considerable rejection rate for seminary applicants, as well as the equally considerable attrition rate for seminarians, is attributable as much to unrealistic expectations as to any other single factor. For that matter, the burdens placed on the already ordained make it surprising that the day-to-day work of the institutional Church gets done to the extent it does. The glaring limitations of many priests, though understandable, reduce the credibility of the priesthood in the eyes of an increasingly educated laity and thus also contributes in some measure to the priest shortage.
Once again, we run up against an obvious but curiously overlooked truth: there would be no shortage if priests were expected to concentrate mostly on things that pertain to the priesthood as such. At any rate, the recruitment of candidates for the priesthood and their work subsequent to ordination would be easier than they now are. Maybe priests could then tackle more effectively the biggest challenges within their purview: improving liturgy and preaching, praying more, and reconciling people with God and the Church through the sacraments intended for that purpose.
In sum, I have found bad personnel policy to be the most egregious and destructive cause of the priest shortage's worsening in America. Given how the role of priest is defined by Roman canonical norms, warped formation, and prevailing expectations, there simply aren't enough people who both can be and are considered suitable. But such a state of affairs is within the hierarchy's power to correct over time. So whenever I hear the Pope or a bishop decrying the priest shortage by citing secular ills it is largely beyond his power to cure, I feel the urge to mail the hierarch in question a quotation from the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous: "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
If change is to come anytime soon, the hierarchy will need a lot of courage. For by and large, the laity retain the prevailing expectations I just mentioned. People still expect priests not only to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, and anoint the sick, but also to preach, perform their weddings, baptize their children, and conduct funerals—things that permanent deacons have long been authorized to do. Moreover, many of the non-liturgical, non-sacramental things priests do—such as counseling, administration, and fund-raising—could be done at least as well by trained lay professionals. But people often feel deprived when they don't get priests for things non-priests could do because they have been led for centuries to expect priests to do them. And so, as the status quo ante gets harder and harder to sustain, the hierarchy responds less by redirecting expectations than with fatuous recruitment efforts, glorified hand-wringing, and open blame-shifting. Some bishops also order their parishes to establish the devotion of Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist. That could make a difference in the long run, but it doesn't seem to have so far. Perhaps the Spirit has other aims.
Indeed, bishops who accept Vatican II need not flinch from the two most feasible solutions: draw candidates for the priesthood from a wider pool and assign a greater percentage of the work currently done by priests to non-priests. By way of implementing those solutions in the short term, the American bishops could not only recruit more and better married deacons, but normalize the option of making them priests if they become widowers or get their wives to agree to sexual abstinence. The Latin-Rite episcopate could also allow the Uniate rites in America to ordain married men as priests—just as the bishops of those rites do in their home territories abroad—while making it easier for Latin-Rite Catholics to transfer to those rites. The resentment and embarrassment caused among the Uniates by the current policy are wholly natural and constitute part of the price we pay for an outmoded pastoral vision.
It has become well-known that, in the English-speaking countries, married Anglican or Lutheran priests who convert to Catholicism and want to be Latin-Rite priests are ordained without being required to give up a normal married life. Such conversions are usually quite genuine and present the Church with an unusual opportunity to evangelize both Protestants and alienated Catholics. But such men are rarely assigned to parish ministry for fear of creating confusion among the laity and envy among the celibate clergy. That is a tragically short-sighted blunder which there is little time to correct. And although the policy barring married, cradle-Catholic laymen remains in effect for many reasons, it could be modified without jeopardizing celibacy as the norm for Latin-Rite clergy. For example, in areas of Latin America where priests are particularly sparse, married Catholic laymen can be ordained if they and their wives agree to sexual abstinence. Such a pool of course consists, and would consist, mostly of older men. But so what? Given the priestless Sunday Eucharists that more and more American parishes are facing, it won't be that long before a similar situation, calling for a similar response, arises in North America.
Unlike the ordination of women, such changes would not constitute an unprecedented break in the practice of the Church and hence would be unlikely to precipitate a greater crisis of authority than already exists. To be sure, there are good and well-rehearsed arguments for celibacy—a valuable form of life to which some servants of the Church are mysteriously called. But even this Pope has freely admitted that celibacy is not of the essence of the priesthood. The question whether married men should be ordained is essentially a pastoral rather than a doctrinal question, and one may well argue that the practical considerations favor change. But there is every indication that the Pope wants not only to retain celibacy as the norm for priests of the Latin Rite, but also to retain the priesthood, as opposed to the diaconate, as the most common degree of holy orders. In view of that, some have observed that North America and Europe will be forced to rely more and more on priests imported from countries or ethnic groups where "vocations" are more plentiful, such as among the Nigerians or Vietnamese. But the experience of countries traditionally short of native clergy suggests that such an expedient is unlikely to galvanize already indifferent laity; and my own experience suggests that active young laymen feel no great desire to emulate priests whose culture is alien to them and whose very accents they can hardly understand. Hence, for the time being there is only one realistic way to address the difficulties posed by the priest shortage: delegate even more of the tasks currently performed by priests to lay people.
As we've seen, the lay ministry movement has become indispensable. But whatever they may say for public consumption, it seems clear to me that a lot of bishops don't have their hearts in it. That is because, despite the inexorable devolution of ministry, bishops pine for priests in roughly the numbers once produced. And that in turn, I think, is because most of the men who are now bishops were trained as priests on an essentially Counter-Reformation model during the halcyon days of plentiful priestly vocations. By that I mean that, at quite a young age, they entered seminaries where they were set apart from the people and formed by methods derived from the discliplinary decrees of the Council of Trent. In effect, they were initiated as adolescents into a distinctive clerical subculture that grew out of a certain historical period and that formed their social and psychological horizons. That model served well for a long time; but for reasons I cannot spell out here, it is now hopelessly out-of-date and should be scrapped. In some places it is being scrapped, albeit with little fanfare. But the mentality it produced in the current generation of bishops makes them more resistant to the devolution of ministry than is generally realized or admitted.
Despite the false treatment of the Church-as-department-store that spiritual consumerism produces, it is helpful to compare the American bishops to corporate executives who are accustomed to a certain way of recruiting and managing employees and who have not quite adjusted to the changed composition of their labor pool. In their heart of hearts, they would prefer that the Church's work be done mainly by people like themselves. Their personal achievements would not have been possible unless they were comfortable with a quasi-military culture: an hierarchical, top-down style of management by a male-only élite whose members are guaranteed full employment and social status in exchange for total loyalty and self-sacrifice. But the trends of American society, especially among bright young people, are running in the opposite direction toward a less centralized and more flexible model of labor relations. That the bulk of work currently performed by priests should devolve to people who are not nearly so subject to the discipline of the Church as priests normally are is quite discomfiting to your average bishop.
That, I suspect, is why scandalously little effort is made in many dioceses to recruit more married men to the permanent diaconate. Since most permanent deacons have secular careers and many have grown children, they are usually unpaid part-timers whose futures do not depend on the favor of ecclesiastical superiors. That is why, no matter how many worthy women present themselves for full-time, professional jobs in chanceries or the larger parishes, many bishops and priests would rather try to placate them with essentially peripheral tasks than delegate genuine authority to them. And that is also the main reason why we won't see many more married men ordained as priests, at least for the time being. If necessary in his eyes, a married man could and would devote his better energies to his family or seek supplementary employment; and there is always the possibility of the breakup of a priest's marriage, which would no doubt be realized on occasion if there were many married priests. A married clergy would be less reliable servants of the Church if one thinks of reliability, as do most bishops, primarily as the worker's commitment to the Gesellschaft. Accordingly, the bishops as a whole want to continue maintaining the celibate priesthood as the backbone of the Church. They would rather not have married priests or non-priests doing most of the things that celibate priests still do.
But that is going to change. If and when we arrive at the next crisis in priestly vocations, the active episcopate will consist entirely of men who entered the seminary after Vatican II. They will be less ambivalent about the permanent diaconate, lay ministry, married priests, and even female religious. They will have to be, because most of those sharing genuine pastoral responsibility with them will be non-priests. And that will have several other positive effects.
First, bishops will finally be motivated enough to increase the quantity and quality of permanent deacons. Despite what many older priests say about deacons, that can be done if the will to do so exists. Second, bishops will be forced to restrict the shrunken corps of priests largely to duties that only priests may perform. As pastors, priests will come to regard themselves less as quasi-autonomous administrators and more as episcopal delegates whose job is to maintain the liturgical and sacramental focus of their parishes. With the role of priest more narrowly and thus more realistically understood, it will become easier both to locate a qualified pool of potential priests and to standardize the formation of ordinands on a healthy model. And a new Pope might even allow a lot more married priests.
But if I read the trends correctly, that might not be necessary. For the most important shift will be that a greater proportion of the active laity will, naturally and correctly, share with the clergy a sense of genuine responsibility for the welfare of the Church. I do not refer simply to paid lay ministers who already count as junior colleagues of the clergy. I mean that Catholics in general, who will be more thoroughly post-Vatican-II in outlook, will realize that things everybody still wants and expects—such as liturgy in the local church building, sacramental catechesis, support for the sick, dying, and bereaved, etc.—won't happen unless regular lay volunteers do most of the actual work. The clergy would perform strictly clerical functions and set general guidelines; paid lay ministers would do much of the coordinating. That is now the case in many parishes. In the future it will be so just about everywhere.
The devolution of both ecclesiastical and ecclesial responsibility will bring with it another devolution: that of the vocations crisis itself. When the pre-Vatican-II era departs from living memory, people will no longer assume that a diminished priesthood spells the twilight of the Church. So long as there remain enough priests to allow most Catholics to worship at a Sunday Mass or seek reconciliation if they really want to, there will be fewer complaints about a shortage of priests. But if it turns out that there aren't enough priests for those purposes, then the question whether there will be again will have been posed to a Church rather different from what those of us born before Vatican II remember. As the foot soldiers of the Church, an apostolically vigorous core of laity will be the main source of candidates for the priesthood. Though far from certain, it is distinctly possible that that will result in more and better ordinands even as the range of what is expected of them narrows. The key will be the extent to which such laity are faithful to, and thus willing to work with, the hierarchy.
On that matter I am cautiously optimistic. For if, as I expect, the next generation of Catholics comes of age without any far-reaching change in Church doctrine or discipline, then probably the only active laity left will be those disposed to cooperate with the hierarchy. That, at any rate, is the most likely alternative to near-total devastation. But whatever its outcome, the crisis itself will have been effectively taken out of the hands of the clergy. We will have a "bottom-up" rather than a "top-down" Church in this country—or we will have, for most practical purposes, no Church at all.
© Michael Liccione 1999. Permission is granted only for private, non-commercial use of this article. Reproduction or use in any other form without the express written consent of the author is prohibited.
Aged and frail as he is, Pope John Paul II is said to be looking forward eagerly to the upcoming World Youth Day in Paris. As well he might: his visit to Denver in August 1993 for World Youth Day turned out to be a four-day love fest. But I found one thing disquieting: the problem that the Pope and the bishops unwittingly revealed by their well-publicized appeal for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Although no better opportunity for inspiring vocations could possibly have been devised, nothing was said that had not been said for years before to little effect. Needless to say, the few years that have passed since haven't seen much effect either. I expect nothing different from Paris; indeed one cannot help noticing that the hierarchy as a whole is worried about vocations but doesn't really know what to do about them. That's because most bishops see the problem as arising more from secular than from intramural causes and regard it more as a crisis than as an opportunity. But in light of my personal and professional experience over the last twenty years in Catholic universities, parishes, and seminaries, I have a different view of the problem and of what can be done to address it.
As of now I see no crisis in the strict sense of the word, i.e., a brief period of decision imposed by an acute problem. Nor is it theologically correct to say we have a shortage of vocations, in the strict sense of 'vocation': is anyone prepared to argue that the Holy Spirit is not "calling" enough people to serve the Church whose soul he is? What we do have is a growing shortage of priests that stems from a past crisis and heralds a future one. The past crisis was brought on mostly by the clergy itself; the present problem is attributable to both clergy and laity, but more to the clergy; and the future crisis, if it comes, will also have been brought on by both. At that stage we may discover in the laity the seeds of positive change.
To judge from its rhetoric, however, the Catholic hierarchy blames the priest shortage almost entirely on secular factors that diminish respect for and interest in the priesthood. Most often cited are the following (in no particular order): resistance to celibacy caused by a sex-saturated culture; the failure of parents to present the priesthood positively; the materialism of the secularized Western world; and aversion to commitment in a culture that over-emphasizes personal freedom. One might add that, of late, the sex-abuse scandals rocking the American Catholic clergy have not exactly helped. Such factors clearly play a part in many cases. But there is no reason to believe that they suffice to explain the shortage.
First, despite what our trashy media lead some to believe, celibacy is no harder today than it's ever been. The priesthood remains a realistic option for idealistic, single young men who aren't bent on marriage. Similarly, it is hardly new that parents tend to prefer more lucrative careers for their sons than the priesthood and also look forward to grandchildren. But adolescent rebellion isn't new either, and I have seen it mature into the act of entering a seminary. As to America's rampant materialism, it has sparked a back-to-simplicity movement in secular society; why shouldn't it similarly affect a Church pledged to a "preferential option for the poor"?
Aversion to long-term commitment cannot be so easily dismissed as an explanation when one notes that the divorce rate among Catholics now matches that of the general population. The Pope in particular is fond of making that point. If it were sound, then U.S. seminary applications would stay down across the board and attrition among seminarians would be mostly voluntary. What we actually see, however, is rising applications to some of the more "conservative" seminaries (e.g., in the Lincoln, Peoria, and Arlington dioceses); and these days a man's decision to leave his seminary is often made with the wholehearted cooperation of his superiors. In any event, the cult phenomenon shows that Americans today can keep quite onerous commitments, even to leaders who exploit them and lie to them, so long as they find the setting secure and affirming. Our seminaries and novitiates are not exploitive, but I can attest that some of them confuse and alienate their charges.
Finally, the sex scandals evince nothing new either. Anyone who knows medieval and Renaissance history well should be thankful that things today are not worse than they are. What has changed is that the bishops have finally been forced to take the dirty linen out to wash. That is a change for the better: henceforth it can only enhance the Church's credibility.
Over time, I have become convinced that the problem lies mainly with a Church leadership that sincerely wants to encourage priestly vocations but often ends up doing the opposite. Now I am not going to trot out the easy and standard prescription that the priesthood be opened to women and/or the generality of married men. Assuming the former is even possible, which I doubt, anyone who imagines that doing either would solve more problems than it would create shows only that they understand the experience of Protestant churches even less than most Catholic bishops understand their own vocations problem. All the same, it is quite telling that plenty of Catholics who want to be priests are not going to be ordained.
Those excluded as ineligible are women and nearly all married men; those excluded as undesirable are single men who are not otherwise the sorts of men that vocation directors want. Leave aside for the moment the question whether some such people should be ordained. What ought to be obvious, and in "progressive" circles is obvious, is that the sheer number of such people seriously undermines the usual explanations for the priest shortage. The problem is not that too few Catholics today respect or aspire to the priesthood: most respect it and, for weal or woe, many aspire to it. Despite what some of their statements suggest, the bishops know perfectly well that the problem they face is not how few but rather the sorts of people who want to be priests. They also know better than anyone that it has gotten harder to function as a priest since the Second Vatican Council. So for fairness' sake, let's be a bit more precise about what the priest shortage comes down to: there aren't enough people of the sort Church authorities want who are both able and willing to become priests as that role is currently defined.
As always when something is amiss in the Church, the world, the flesh, and the devil can be found nearby. But most of the precipitating causes of the shortage can be found in the bosom of the Church herself as she has tried to implement the needed reforms of Vatican II. And even without reference to the Holy Spirit's unfailing solicitude, it is profoundly misleading to call the problem a "shortage of vocations."
Confusions about Catholic doctrine and identity that spread in the Council's wake succeeded, among other things, in obscuring the value of the ministerial priesthood in the eyes of some Catholics. But Vatican II, and the problems generated by how it was presented, were not initiated by the laity. In fact, a disproportionate number of Catholics who lost interest in the priesthood and religious life during that time were priests and/or religious themselves: their ranks suffered massive defections during the years following the Council. That had less to do with American society than with problems of formation among Catholic clergy. Recent books such as Paul Hendrickson's Seminary and Raymond Hedin's Married to the Church abundantly illustrate that many Catholic seminarians, both before and during the Council, were ill-prepared to sustain a sound priestly spirituality in the world that the Council Fathers summoned them to serve. The reasons for that are complex and beyond our scope. But among its results are that a troubling percentage of ordained men are not functioning as priests today and too many active priests are unclear about the value of what they are. By the standards of the not-so-distant past, the priesthood is aging, depleted and demoralized; it lacks the afflatus, and the ésprit de corps, that were once so noticeable in it. And so the sort of young Catholic man who once might have entered the priesthood often becomes, say, a lawyer or a psychotherapist instead. But that is less a societal problem than a natural reaction to the disarray and polarization the Church has suffered for at least a generation now.
And it does not of itself pose a vocations shortage. For one thing, the present Pope has been permitting laicizations of priests rather rarely, so that the tide of defections has slowed to a trickle; for another, most bishops now accommodate ineligible aspirants to the priesthood by inviting them to lay ministry or the permanent diaconate. To everybody's net benefit, more and more Catholic women and men are coming forward to work full-time in important Church ministries. Such people should not be regarded just as employees: most of them have vocations too. It is insulting to them to refer to the shortage of priests as a shortage of "vocations." Although there aren't enough priests to do everything we used to expect from priests, it doesn't follow that too few laborers hear the call to the harvest.
Nonetheless we do face a real shortage of priests in North America. The current numbers are well-documented and ominous. For a generation now, ordinations have not kept pace with the combined rates of death, retirement, and defection. If that continues, then without mass consolidations more than half of U.S. parishes could lack resident priests a generation from now. Even with consolidation, the ratio of priests to laity will have plummeted. That could pose a crisis because priests could end up being too scarce to afford every Catholic a realistic opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist and other sacraments fully. One would think that the tens of millions who want such things could manage to produce the tens of thousands necessary to provide them; but that has apparently ceased to be so.
As I've already implied, the roots of this situation can be found in the ecclesiastical history of the mid-1950s through the late 1970's. And clergy formation is by no means the whole story. During the Council, the Church leadership started encouraging the laity to embrace Church ministries even as many priests and religious saw fit to abandon their vocations or modify them radically. Perhaps much of that was necessary: some priests and religious had had putative but not real vocations to their state, and some laity had had real but unacknowledged vocations to ecclesial ministry while remaining lay people. In the aftermath of the corresponding shifts, it was only natural that fewer Catholic men found reason to enter to the priesthood. But the persistence of the priest shortage that has developed since warns of a future crisis that few American Catholics are ready to contemplate. If and when it comes, the laity will have contributed to it to some extent, and to a greater extent it will be up to the laity to resolve it. Since I have minimized explanations of the current priest shortage that cite the usual secular factors, I shall take some care to explain why I still assign part of the problem to the laity.
St. Paul taught long ago, and Vatican II explained for our time, that Christians are called to become little "Christs" in virtue of their baptism. Every Christian thus has some vocation to build up the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ that is the sacrament of unity and salvation for the world. More so than at any time since the pre-Constantinian Church, some local faith communities have absorbed that message. But in many pews on Sundays, and among the masses of nominal and "holiday" Catholics, both the concept and the reality of vocation remain largely obscure. For well-known historical reasons, most Catholics still think of a vocation as something that a select few have and that they lack. For related reasons, people in general understand the Church primarily as the hierarchy or the institution—not the "People of God," or "God's covenant family," or the "priestly nation" to which the baptized-and-confirmed fully belong. Whatever they may explicitly profess, therefore, too many Catholics still believe instinctively that the Church consists primarily in the corps of celibates who have full-time "vocations" to the religion business and secondarily in the institutional apparatus facilitating the work of that corps. The rest of us fit in as the more-or-less captive clientele—offered what we are told we need and exhorted to do what we must.
That kind of passivity, which involves a nearly complete failure to understand the baptismal vocation, is the stubborn residuum of Church history between the Emperor Constantine and Vatican II. Lay passivity did not then usually cause shortages of priests and religious because people assumed that those who thirsted for holiness should become one of "the holy," i.e., those in holy orders or "religious" orders. But as a result of Vatican II's teaching, Catholics today are less disposed to equate the path of sanctity with that of a priest or religious. On the whole, that is a positive development. So is the fact that, when Catholics took their place in the American mainstream during the baby-boom years, professional alternatives to the priesthood opened to many more young Catholic men. Along with lingering lay passivity, such developments help to explain why fewer people of the sort bishops want aspire to the priesthood than before.
But positive developments do not really explain why the priest shortage is worsening. Lay Catholics who understand that all the baptized are called to the fullness of Christian perfection are more ecclesially aware and active than most laity used to be. Such people are quite interested in meeting the needs of the Church; that includes wanting to meet the need for priests as much as it includes lay ministry and charitable works. And the fact that more alternatives to the priesthood are open than in prior generations entails that far more young Catholic men receive higher education today than before. Accordingly, more young men than before are getting the extent of liberal education that is requisite for the seminary. So, what's the problem?
Mainly, I think, it is that we stand today at the dangerous intersection of the old passivity with the new consumerism. Many American Catholics have come to regard the Church as the spiritual equivalent of Sears, Roebuck & Company: a venerable, lumbering multinational corporation that offers, through its ubiquitous local branches, a wide variety of goods and services from which the customers can pick and choose to suit their needs. What has always sold—such as lavish weddings, inexpensive counseling, and good schools—keeps right on selling. The most distinctive offerings—Mass and the sacraments—lose sales when done badly and gain them when done well. Items carrying steep and long-term maintenance costs—mostly, the teachings about social justice and birth control—get left on the shelves more often than not. Yet despite some losses to the competition, many keep coming—partly because they still find things they want, partly because the stores are all over the place, and partly because it's the family tradition to go there. That is why there are so many "cafeteria Catholics" who believe that they can reject key Church teachings and live just like other Americans while remaining good Catholics. Whatever their beliefs or lifestyles, they can still bask in the solidarity of a brand loyalty that shapes one's inmost self by force of memory and habit and that helps to reassure one of being "good."
Such spiritual consumerism is not just the counterpart of material consumerism. It is the Catholic node for other social trends we have seen since my generation, the baby boom, started coming of age: the breakdown of real community, skepticism of authority, and the sexual revolution. As long as spiritual consumerism pervades the Church in America, the notion that every Christian has a vocation to establish God's kingdom in themselves and bring it to the world won't receive more than lip service from the majority, who seem to believe that being saved requires only that one die without having become a child molester or mass murderer. By the same token, the idea of spending one's life in sacrificial service to God's people will occur to most only as an eccentric "career option" for those unable or unwilling to live fully as independent adults. So even as they still expect be served by priests, American Catholics have grown less willing to supply them.
As I said at the beginning, that has not yet brought on another crisis of vocations. The demographics of the previous generation were such that what we have now is merely a chronic problem we still have time to temporize about. But if and when the current shortage gets bad enough, American Catholics will confront another, true vocations crisis when their leaders will be forced to decide not whether but how the basic shape of ministry is to change for the sake of Catholicism's survival in this country. It might not be a bad thing to be forced into such a choice, and the choice then made might not be a bad one. But those are very big "mights." Catholicism in America could just as easily cease to be authentically Catholic.
Apparently, progressives don't seem fazed by that possibility: they actually welcome the "starve the beast" approach. Like the Reagan Administration, which welcomed a ballooning budget deficit as a way to force Congress to curtail spending, many people on the Catholic left shrug cynically when the priest shortage is mentioned. Their stock reaction is: "Why don't they just wake up and ordain women and the married?"; one might then hear expressed a fervent desire to see a single mom elected to the Papacy. The hope is that, when things get bad enough, "they" will finally get desperate enough to do what they should be doing now. That reminds me not only of the Reagan years' chronic deficits but also of what many progressives used to say about birth control in the 1970s: "Humanae Vitae was a disaster; let's wait for a new Pope who will wake up and change the teaching." Well, here we are in the mid-1990s, and we have a Pope who was not only a prime architect of Humanae Vitae but has developed better arguments for its teaching than Paul VI did. Chances are that John Paul II will reign past the turn of the millennium, and my belief is that we will have to wait infinitely longer than a millennium for the ban on contraception to be lifted. Willy-nilly, that ban has become just as integral a part of the Church's ordinary and universal teaching as the more widely praised, but just as widely flouted, principles of papal social teaching. Similarly, given the Pope's doctrinal legacy and the College of Cardinals he has built, his successors will almost certainly refuse regard themselves as authorized to ordain women. We could see more married men ordained; but for reasons I shall shortly give, the number of married priests will probably be too small to forestall a crisis. It is no more possible than desirable for demographic brinkmanship to solve the problem.
All the same, the Catholic population is growing and remains unwilling to dispense with the Mass. I say so although, as a full-time pastoral associate, I have felt privileged to preside at communion services on weekdays when none of the priests who ordinarily celebrated Mass at the parish church were available. Even the more conservative among the congregation have liked the way I conducted the service, but both they and most of the more progressive congregants would prefer the Mass. I can well understand why. Although daily (as opposed to Sunday) Mass is unnecessary for the Eucharist, the Mass makes the Paschal Mystery present and dynamic in a way that no communion service can do, and thus constitutes the tangible focus of Church life. The devout have always appreciated that; yet now they have begun to notice that they cannot take the availability of Mass for granted anymore. What is one to tell them?
First, let's reiterate the good news. Although far fewer eligible men aspire to the priesthood today than a generation ago, it does not thereby follow that too few of them want to be priests. The revival of the permanent diaconate and the growth of lay ministry have afforded priests many more colleagues in parish ministry than they had at the Council's end in 1965. That relieves priests of many burdens they used to carry by themselves, so that the ratio of priests to laity can now safely be lower than it once was. Couple that fact with the current rate of applications to some seminaries and male novitiates, and it seems unduly alarmist to say that eligible aspirants to the priesthood are too few to meet the basic needs of the Church. But the bad news is that the men who are too few are not the aspirants to but the graduates of seminaries and novitiates. The explanation for that can be found less in young Catholic men than in many seminaries themselves.
This is a problem we should lay squarely at the doorstep of the higher clergy. Consider a phenomenon hardly noted outside conservative Catholic circles: many single men who, by traditional criteria, fittingly aspire to the celibate priesthood, have been unable to make it into or through a seminary or novitiate. During the 1980's I taught several dozen such men as an adjunct lecturer at three different centers of priestly formation in the Northeast. I could not help becoming involved in their experiences. Going by what I have since heard from seminarians and read about, those experiences remain depressingly common.
For one thing, what had attracted many of those students to the priesthood was the opportunity to do things that only priests are empowered to do—chiefly, confecting the Eucharist and absolving penitents. Accordingly, they were not quite as interested in social work, avant-garde theology, and certain other things that those in charge of their formation thought important. So to the mind of such faculty, such seminarians' motives were too narrow. And that set of ordinands overlapped with another who breathed poorly in the sexually ambiguous atmosphere of two of the institutions where I taught. Now I shall not make charges of illicit activity that I cannot prove and that in the majority of cases would not be true. But I will say that anyone who is familiar with such places today, and yet retains enough distance to be objective, will know precisely what I mean by 'sexually ambiguous'. I have heard dozens of remarks from both visitors and insiders that report the same impression.
Even more troubling, the theological orthodoxy of many seminarians I knew made them suspect in the eyes of progressive faculty. The suspicion was not always misplaced: the orthodoxy of some seminarians was a defensive, almost fanatical way of coping with personal and social challenges that they would have to meet better if they were to become pastorally effective priests. As any vocation director could confirm, the same goes for seminary applicants, who come disproportionately from the self-styled "traditionalist" movement that hankers for the authoritarianism of the pre-Vatican-II Church and retains a strongly priest-centered form of piety. But I have known many other aspirants whose orthodoxy shaped a more mature and solid faith than that of some of the faculty members sitting in judgment over them. Neither during my teaching days nor now could I dismiss the spirituality of such aspirants as a reaction formation. Yet some formation directors tarred all the "orthodox" with the same brush. At one place where I taught, the formation director told me point-blank that he had to "break the faith of the young fogies" in order to make it "authentic." And so I watched in dismay as the prejudices of people who saw themselves as broad-minded ran my best students right out of the program. In retrospect, I can only say that the failures of those young men were to their credit. Given similar firsthand accounts I've heard about other places, it seems truer today than ever that nobody has a vocation to be a seminarian.
To be fair, I must acknowledge that not all seminaries suffer such problems and that and I have seen strengths in ones that do. But the problems remain widespread enough to account, in large measure, for the fact that today's seminary graduates are pitifully small in number and sometimes dubiously trained. Given what many seminaries are like, it would be truly miraculous if the number of priests were waxing instead of waning.
To be sure, lay spiritual consumerism is a more general phenomenon. But the laity do not control the selection and formation of ordinands; and it is the laity who suffer from deficient seminaries inasmuch as the graduates of those seminaries serve the laity. Yet the official explanations for the priest shortage, which adduce secular causes as primary, imply that it is the laity who are chiefly to blame. So it's the main victims of the problem who are getting most of the blame. As any psychologist would point out, blaming the victim both exacerbates the problem and prevents one from dealing with it effectively. Mind you, I have already blamed the laity to some degree. But no matter what they may preach to the laity, and no matter what the laity's response might be, the bishops will make little progress on priestly vocations unless and until they get their own houses of formation in order.
Another major cause of the shortage, albeit an indirect one, is that too much is expected of parish priests. Very few professionals could possibly be good at everything that parish priests are normally called upon to learn and do these days. Not only must all such priests perform the duties that are limited to the priesthood, but those who expect and are expected to become pastors in due course (i.e., the majority) will have to act as administrators, counselors, and fund-raisers. Some of the more ambitious and/or talented priests also hold responsible posts at the diocesan level. Demands of that scope may have been in order during a simpler time when priests were among the few college-educated members of a largely immigrant Church. But in the developed countries—which is where the priest shortage is most widely marked and lamented—we no longer live in such a time. In Europe and America today, it is only the poorest inner-city or rural parishes where the priests are likely to be those with the best education; in affluent parishes and college towns, it is not uncommon to find parishoners more theologically knowledgeable than their pastor. Inevitably, priests carry less authority and must serve a less cohesive and supportive flock than they did before Vatican II. For that reason as well as the others I've cited so far, the considerable rejection rate for seminary applicants, as well as the equally considerable attrition rate for seminarians, is attributable as much to unrealistic expectations as to any other single factor. For that matter, the burdens placed on the already ordained make it surprising that the day-to-day work of the institutional Church gets done to the extent it does. The glaring limitations of many priests, though understandable, reduce the credibility of the priesthood in the eyes of an increasingly educated laity and thus also contributes in some measure to the priest shortage.
Once again, we run up against an obvious but curiously overlooked truth: there would be no shortage if priests were expected to concentrate mostly on things that pertain to the priesthood as such. At any rate, the recruitment of candidates for the priesthood and their work subsequent to ordination would be easier than they now are. Maybe priests could then tackle more effectively the biggest challenges within their purview: improving liturgy and preaching, praying more, and reconciling people with God and the Church through the sacraments intended for that purpose.
In sum, I have found bad personnel policy to be the most egregious and destructive cause of the priest shortage's worsening in America. Given how the role of priest is defined by Roman canonical norms, warped formation, and prevailing expectations, there simply aren't enough people who both can be and are considered suitable. But such a state of affairs is within the hierarchy's power to correct over time. So whenever I hear the Pope or a bishop decrying the priest shortage by citing secular ills it is largely beyond his power to cure, I feel the urge to mail the hierarch in question a quotation from the Serenity Prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous: "Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
If change is to come anytime soon, the hierarchy will need a lot of courage. For by and large, the laity retain the prevailing expectations I just mentioned. People still expect priests not only to celebrate Mass, hear confessions, and anoint the sick, but also to preach, perform their weddings, baptize their children, and conduct funerals—things that permanent deacons have long been authorized to do. Moreover, many of the non-liturgical, non-sacramental things priests do—such as counseling, administration, and fund-raising—could be done at least as well by trained lay professionals. But people often feel deprived when they don't get priests for things non-priests could do because they have been led for centuries to expect priests to do them. And so, as the status quo ante gets harder and harder to sustain, the hierarchy responds less by redirecting expectations than with fatuous recruitment efforts, glorified hand-wringing, and open blame-shifting. Some bishops also order their parishes to establish the devotion of Perpetual Adoration of the Eucharist. That could make a difference in the long run, but it doesn't seem to have so far. Perhaps the Spirit has other aims.
Indeed, bishops who accept Vatican II need not flinch from the two most feasible solutions: draw candidates for the priesthood from a wider pool and assign a greater percentage of the work currently done by priests to non-priests. By way of implementing those solutions in the short term, the American bishops could not only recruit more and better married deacons, but normalize the option of making them priests if they become widowers or get their wives to agree to sexual abstinence. The Latin-Rite episcopate could also allow the Uniate rites in America to ordain married men as priests—just as the bishops of those rites do in their home territories abroad—while making it easier for Latin-Rite Catholics to transfer to those rites. The resentment and embarrassment caused among the Uniates by the current policy are wholly natural and constitute part of the price we pay for an outmoded pastoral vision.
It has become well-known that, in the English-speaking countries, married Anglican or Lutheran priests who convert to Catholicism and want to be Latin-Rite priests are ordained without being required to give up a normal married life. Such conversions are usually quite genuine and present the Church with an unusual opportunity to evangelize both Protestants and alienated Catholics. But such men are rarely assigned to parish ministry for fear of creating confusion among the laity and envy among the celibate clergy. That is a tragically short-sighted blunder which there is little time to correct. And although the policy barring married, cradle-Catholic laymen remains in effect for many reasons, it could be modified without jeopardizing celibacy as the norm for Latin-Rite clergy. For example, in areas of Latin America where priests are particularly sparse, married Catholic laymen can be ordained if they and their wives agree to sexual abstinence. Such a pool of course consists, and would consist, mostly of older men. But so what? Given the priestless Sunday Eucharists that more and more American parishes are facing, it won't be that long before a similar situation, calling for a similar response, arises in North America.
Unlike the ordination of women, such changes would not constitute an unprecedented break in the practice of the Church and hence would be unlikely to precipitate a greater crisis of authority than already exists. To be sure, there are good and well-rehearsed arguments for celibacy—a valuable form of life to which some servants of the Church are mysteriously called. But even this Pope has freely admitted that celibacy is not of the essence of the priesthood. The question whether married men should be ordained is essentially a pastoral rather than a doctrinal question, and one may well argue that the practical considerations favor change. But there is every indication that the Pope wants not only to retain celibacy as the norm for priests of the Latin Rite, but also to retain the priesthood, as opposed to the diaconate, as the most common degree of holy orders. In view of that, some have observed that North America and Europe will be forced to rely more and more on priests imported from countries or ethnic groups where "vocations" are more plentiful, such as among the Nigerians or Vietnamese. But the experience of countries traditionally short of native clergy suggests that such an expedient is unlikely to galvanize already indifferent laity; and my own experience suggests that active young laymen feel no great desire to emulate priests whose culture is alien to them and whose very accents they can hardly understand. Hence, for the time being there is only one realistic way to address the difficulties posed by the priest shortage: delegate even more of the tasks currently performed by priests to lay people.
As we've seen, the lay ministry movement has become indispensable. But whatever they may say for public consumption, it seems clear to me that a lot of bishops don't have their hearts in it. That is because, despite the inexorable devolution of ministry, bishops pine for priests in roughly the numbers once produced. And that in turn, I think, is because most of the men who are now bishops were trained as priests on an essentially Counter-Reformation model during the halcyon days of plentiful priestly vocations. By that I mean that, at quite a young age, they entered seminaries where they were set apart from the people and formed by methods derived from the discliplinary decrees of the Council of Trent. In effect, they were initiated as adolescents into a distinctive clerical subculture that grew out of a certain historical period and that formed their social and psychological horizons. That model served well for a long time; but for reasons I cannot spell out here, it is now hopelessly out-of-date and should be scrapped. In some places it is being scrapped, albeit with little fanfare. But the mentality it produced in the current generation of bishops makes them more resistant to the devolution of ministry than is generally realized or admitted.
Despite the false treatment of the Church-as-department-store that spiritual consumerism produces, it is helpful to compare the American bishops to corporate executives who are accustomed to a certain way of recruiting and managing employees and who have not quite adjusted to the changed composition of their labor pool. In their heart of hearts, they would prefer that the Church's work be done mainly by people like themselves. Their personal achievements would not have been possible unless they were comfortable with a quasi-military culture: an hierarchical, top-down style of management by a male-only élite whose members are guaranteed full employment and social status in exchange for total loyalty and self-sacrifice. But the trends of American society, especially among bright young people, are running in the opposite direction toward a less centralized and more flexible model of labor relations. That the bulk of work currently performed by priests should devolve to people who are not nearly so subject to the discipline of the Church as priests normally are is quite discomfiting to your average bishop.
That, I suspect, is why scandalously little effort is made in many dioceses to recruit more married men to the permanent diaconate. Since most permanent deacons have secular careers and many have grown children, they are usually unpaid part-timers whose futures do not depend on the favor of ecclesiastical superiors. That is why, no matter how many worthy women present themselves for full-time, professional jobs in chanceries or the larger parishes, many bishops and priests would rather try to placate them with essentially peripheral tasks than delegate genuine authority to them. And that is also the main reason why we won't see many more married men ordained as priests, at least for the time being. If necessary in his eyes, a married man could and would devote his better energies to his family or seek supplementary employment; and there is always the possibility of the breakup of a priest's marriage, which would no doubt be realized on occasion if there were many married priests. A married clergy would be less reliable servants of the Church if one thinks of reliability, as do most bishops, primarily as the worker's commitment to the Gesellschaft. Accordingly, the bishops as a whole want to continue maintaining the celibate priesthood as the backbone of the Church. They would rather not have married priests or non-priests doing most of the things that celibate priests still do.
But that is going to change. If and when we arrive at the next crisis in priestly vocations, the active episcopate will consist entirely of men who entered the seminary after Vatican II. They will be less ambivalent about the permanent diaconate, lay ministry, married priests, and even female religious. They will have to be, because most of those sharing genuine pastoral responsibility with them will be non-priests. And that will have several other positive effects.
First, bishops will finally be motivated enough to increase the quantity and quality of permanent deacons. Despite what many older priests say about deacons, that can be done if the will to do so exists. Second, bishops will be forced to restrict the shrunken corps of priests largely to duties that only priests may perform. As pastors, priests will come to regard themselves less as quasi-autonomous administrators and more as episcopal delegates whose job is to maintain the liturgical and sacramental focus of their parishes. With the role of priest more narrowly and thus more realistically understood, it will become easier both to locate a qualified pool of potential priests and to standardize the formation of ordinands on a healthy model. And a new Pope might even allow a lot more married priests.
But if I read the trends correctly, that might not be necessary. For the most important shift will be that a greater proportion of the active laity will, naturally and correctly, share with the clergy a sense of genuine responsibility for the welfare of the Church. I do not refer simply to paid lay ministers who already count as junior colleagues of the clergy. I mean that Catholics in general, who will be more thoroughly post-Vatican-II in outlook, will realize that things everybody still wants and expects—such as liturgy in the local church building, sacramental catechesis, support for the sick, dying, and bereaved, etc.—won't happen unless regular lay volunteers do most of the actual work. The clergy would perform strictly clerical functions and set general guidelines; paid lay ministers would do much of the coordinating. That is now the case in many parishes. In the future it will be so just about everywhere.
The devolution of both ecclesiastical and ecclesial responsibility will bring with it another devolution: that of the vocations crisis itself. When the pre-Vatican-II era departs from living memory, people will no longer assume that a diminished priesthood spells the twilight of the Church. So long as there remain enough priests to allow most Catholics to worship at a Sunday Mass or seek reconciliation if they really want to, there will be fewer complaints about a shortage of priests. But if it turns out that there aren't enough priests for those purposes, then the question whether there will be again will have been posed to a Church rather different from what those of us born before Vatican II remember. As the foot soldiers of the Church, an apostolically vigorous core of laity will be the main source of candidates for the priesthood. Though far from certain, it is distinctly possible that that will result in more and better ordinands even as the range of what is expected of them narrows. The key will be the extent to which such laity are faithful to, and thus willing to work with, the hierarchy.
On that matter I am cautiously optimistic. For if, as I expect, the next generation of Catholics comes of age without any far-reaching change in Church doctrine or discipline, then probably the only active laity left will be those disposed to cooperate with the hierarchy. That, at any rate, is the most likely alternative to near-total devastation. But whatever its outcome, the crisis itself will have been effectively taken out of the hands of the clergy. We will have a "bottom-up" rather than a "top-down" Church in this country—or we will have, for most practical purposes, no Church at all.
© Michael Liccione 1999. Permission is granted only for private, non-commercial use of this article. Reproduction or use in any other form without the express written consent of the author is prohibited.
posted by Mike L at 3:35 PM
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