Posted on 05/02/2004 5:31:38 PM PDT by Investment Biker
For decades, as the number of priests dwindled, Catholics worried about the future of their church.
That future is now.
In Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, parishes that served generations are closing or merging with others. Catholic school kids are being taught by lay teachers. "Sunday celebrations" without priests are replacing traditional mass. And that's just a start.
As early as this summer, the pace of change will quicken, potentially affecting more than half a million Catholics - one in every five people in the region. The changes represent the most dramatic shifts in the church in 40 years, requiring priests and lay Catholics to rethink their roles.
"For everybody, it will be difficult," says Catherine Ampfer, a member of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Fort Thomas. "It's sad, and what's going to happen is people are going to have to get out of their comfort zone."
The changes are assured because the church no longer has enough priests to serve every parish or to preside at every wedding, funeral or baptism.
In just 30 years, the number of priests in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati has tumbled from 466 to 291, the lowest in at least a half-century. Only 205 priests are active, and the archdiocese predicts that only 100 will be left at decade's end.
In just a few months, the archdiocese will begin to:
• Move more aggressively to close or consolidate parishes that aren't big enough or rich enough to survive in the tough times ahead. The goal is to place the few remaining priests where they can best serve the most people.
• Reduce the number of daily and Sunday Masses to ease the workload on priests who must travel to two or three parishes to say Mass. Priests would be less available to teach religion classes, visit the sick and counsel parishioners.
• Replace some Masses with "Sunday celebrations" that feature a lay minister rather than an ordained priest. A priest would bless the bread and wine but would not conduct the service.
• Rely more heavily on lay ministers or deacons to preside at weddings, baptisms and other occasions where a priest is not required by church law. Some weddings may be moved to weekdays to accommodate priests' busy schedules, and funeral Masses may be replaced by graveside services that don't require a priest.
Although the changes don't tinker with Catholic doctrine or teachings, they represent the greatest challenge to tradition since the Second Vatican Council revised the rules for Catholic life in the 1960s.
"This is not the ideal, by any means," Cincinnati Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk says. He knows the changes won't be an easy sell to Catholics, especially after two years of demoralizing clergy sex-abuse scandals.
But he says the church has little choice: Priests are retiring and dying three times faster than they can be replaced. The average age of priests in the archdiocese is 61, and no priest is under age 30.
"This is like the Mom and Pop grocery store," Pilarcyzk says. "If you ran out of milk, you sent your kid over with a quarter. Well, there aren't any of those stores any more, and people learned to get their milk another way.
"You can wish you still had a Mom and Pop store, but that way doesn't work any more."
More parishes than priests
The Rev. James Shappelle, 79, doesn't need the archbishop to tell him times have changed. Although he's the oldest pastor in the archdiocese, he's in charge of two parishes, Mother of Christ and St. Bernard in Winton Place.
He expected to be retired by now instead of shuttling daily between the two churches, which are about a mile apart.
"I'm considerably busier now than when I was 24," he says.
Shappelle keeps going partly out of duty and partly out of fear that the archdiocese will close one of his parishes if he leaves. He sometimes jokes that he might stick around until 2020 - when he'd be 95.
"By then," he told parishioners during a recent Mass, "we'll have 70 priests, and I'll be running every parish in the Mill Creek Valley."
The Rev. Richard Klug, pastor of Annunciation in Clifton, shares Shappelle's concerns. He's 77 and continues to work for one reason: He fears the archdiocese will not assign a new pastor to his church if he steps down.
"I'm certainly concerned about what happens when I retire," Klug says. "We were ordained to serve the people, and I don't want to see them without a priest."
The impact of the priest shortage is increasingly obvious to anyone who attends Mass regularly or has a child in Catholic schools.
The archdiocese's 224 parishes now outnumber its 205 active priests. The problem is less severe in the much smaller Diocese of Covington, but it also has lost priests and closed or merged parishes in recent years.
Throughout the region, churches are closing at faster rates, priests are serving at more than one parish and Catholic schools have few clergy or nuns assigned to them.
"I miss how available priests were in the past," says Chris Hurlburt, a lifelong Catholic who attends St. Thomas More Church in Withamsville. "Now it's like the priest makes a cameo every Sunday at Mass, and that's pretty much all he has time for."
Priests like the Rev. Anthony Brausch, 37, do work that once would have been performed by two or three priests.
Brausch is the acting pastor at Our Lady of Visitation. He teaches five religion classes a day at Elder High School, oversees the administration of the parish and says a 5:30 a.m. Mass on weekdays and three Masses on weekends.
He also hears confessions, baptizes children, anoints the sick and presides at funerals.
He rarely gets a day off.
"I don't mind it," Brausch says. "It's not an odious chore if it's something you like."
The pace, however, could be too much for anyone to maintain.
"It's going to get worse," says Mary Gautier, a senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research on the Apostolate, a Catholic research group. "How far can we stretch these people? A priest can only do so many Masses before he conks out."
Tough years ahead
To find out how much worse things might get, Pilarczyk created the Futures Committee three years ago to study the problem and recommend change.
"We looked at the numbers and said, 'My God, by 2010 we might have 100 priests in this diocese,'" recalls the Rev. Thomas Shearer, who led the committee of 10 priests.
The worst-case scenario projected only 60 priests by 2010.
The national numbers are just as daunting. The priest population is almost unchanged from what it was in 1950 - roughly 44,000. But the Catholic population has climbed from 28.6 million to 66.4 million over the same period.
"These trends are not going to be reversed," says Dean Hoge, a professor at Catholic University of America and author of the book, Evolving Visions of the Priesthood.
Hoge's pessimism is based on the belief that the forces responsible for the priest shortage will continue. They include:
• An American society that increasingly glorifies wealth and sex, a trend that works against recruitment efforts based on vows of poverty and celibacy.
• The transformation of Catholic families from mostly poor and blue collar to some of the wealthiest and best educated in America. With more options, they now are more likely to send their boys to college than to seminary.
• A loss of prestige for a priesthood racked by years of clergy sex-abuse scandals.
Catholics disagree on how to fix the problem. Liberals say the solution is opening the priesthood to women and married men, while conservatives say a return to more orthodox teachings is the answer.
There are limits, however, to how much change can happen without approval from the Vatican. The reforms planned for the archdiocese - fewer churches, fewer Masses, weddings without priests - are practical, structural changes that do not challenge church doctrine or longstanding rules from Rome.
But ending the celibacy rule or allowing women to become priests would require an edict from the Vatican, and that kind of fundamental change is unlikely any time soon.
As the philosophical debates rage, church leaders say they must act now. The Futures Committee sent its ideas to the archbishop last year and will start making changes as early as this summer.
"There will be some things," Shearer says, "that priests will simply not have the time to do."
Change will be wrenching
Leaders of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee reached the same conclusion a few years ago and started making the same changes now under consideration here.
Once, while the church was in the process of closing 40 parishes, protesters carried placards and swarmed church leaders as they walked into a planning meeting.
"There are still some bruised feelings," says Rev. Robert Stiefvater of Milwaukee. "It's a very close connection that people have to the place of their baptism or wedding."
More parishes will close in Cincinnati, too, but that won't be the only source of controversy. Assigning deacons to preside at some weddings or baptisms, and the absence of a formal funeral Mass, would upset many Catholics.
"If a priest is not available, it doesn't sit well with Catholics," Hoge says. "People don't like it. They want a priest."
Unlike other Christian denominations, the Catholic Church is based on a hierarchy in which the priest is the undisputed leader of the parish.
But he's more than just the boss. Only a priest can consecrate the Eucharist - the celebration of the Last Supper - that is shared at every Mass and is considered the center of Catholic existence.
"For Catholics, the Mass is everything," says Sister Christine Schenk of FutureChurch, a Cleveland-based reform group. "It's who we are. It's how we connect with the deep meanings of life."
Some say a drop in Mass attendance since 1960, from about 350,000 to 195,000, suggests Catholics in Greater Cincinnati already feel less connected to their priests and their church.
"The linchpin position in baseball is the pitcher. Here, it's the priest," says Lawrence Young, co-author of the 1985 book Full Pews, Empty Altars, which predicted the priest shortage. "If you don't have a pitcher, you can still throw the ball around.
"But you're not really playing baseball any more."
'It really hurts'
The game has certainly changed in Fayetteville, where parishioners got a preview of the archdiocese's future in July when three churches merged to create St. Angela Merici.
Even before the merger, parishioners struggled to adjust to just two priests assigned to three churches. And after the merger, they were dealt another blow when the new pastor was suspended because of a sexual-abuse allegation.
"It really hurts," says Judy Iles, a lifelong member of St. Patrick Church, one of the three involved in the merger. "We had to give up what we had."
Pilarczyk says the troubles at St. Angela Merici taught church officials some valuable lessons about how to handle the changes to come.
"We have to deal with it as gently as we can," he says.
Iles isn't sure that's possible. But as she talks about what happened at her church, she becomes more hopeful. She says some parishioners who swore they'd never return have, over time, come back.
They may not like the changes, she says. But they would rather adapt to them than abandon their faith altogether.
"I don't know what it is about the Catholic religion," she says. "It's just in you and it always will be."
I also agree it is time again for a married priesthood.
I was in a seminary for seven years. Just couldn't commit to celibacy at the age of 25.
At the age of 53, I could, and have, as a deacon, if my wife goes before me.
Laymen are taking up the challenge; they'll have to, if this downward spiral continues.
My pastor told me two weeks ago that the bishop is going to spread the deacons out as pastoral administrators, in priestless parishes, for liturgical purposes.
So, I'll likely have a parish in a year or two, at which I'll conduct Sunday Celebrations in the absence of a priest a couple times a month.
In 20 years, you guys will have Mass once a month, and Communion services the other three Sundays, conducted by a deacon, or by laymen.
And what percentage of them are straight? This is not meant to be a nasty question. I am dead serious. Dead serious.
Yes... I have a lot of admiration for the men who educated me so well (and my parents who paid for it!). I loved my high school and until my son's Autism diagnosis, I was consistently the biggest donor from my year. I did the donation phone call-downs with a friend from my year who is now a teacher there.
Like many schools, it's mostly lay people that are administrators and teachers there now. The dress code is more relaxed too. No more mandatory ties and jackets. I pass by the place frequently since I have accounts in downtown Jersey City.
However, as I would learn, Marquette, way out in the midwest, was the last respite for conservative Jesuits. Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham and St. Peter's College (in Jersey City) are the typical destinations of my high school's grads and unfortunately, these places are overrun with Liberation Theology Jesuits. Thankfully I told my guidance counselor I wanted to be an engineer.
Despite the Liberal leanings of the younger priests that taught me, they still enforced logical thought upon all of us. I'm forever indebted.
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