One Every Eight

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - June 9, 2006

Normally editorials are dedicated to commenting on some recent or upcoming news event. This week it is regrettably devoted to the lack of one.

The first or second Saturday in June is traditionally a day of great joy in our diocese, as the customary occasion for new ordinations to the priesthood. Throughout the fifty-year history of this newspaper, there has always been at least one story each year on newly ordained diocesan priests, their first assignments and the hope-filled spiritual infusion they bring to the entire local Church. This year there will be no story because there will be no ordination.

The absence of any new priests is accentuated by the retirement this year of four pastors and the recent death of a fifth. While highly capable priests have been named to fill their big shoes, the inescapable fact is that, come July, there will be five fewer priests laboring in this vineyard.

This reduction is part of an ongoing trend. Within the next fifteen years, the number of priests in the Fall River diocese is projected to be halved, as retirements continue far to outpace expected ordinations. By present forecasts, there will be only be about 60 priests in 2020, called to serve the needs of what are presently 350,000 Catholics in 95 parishes.

As discouraging as this present course is, there is with God always hope. Jesus foresaw that there would be such shortages and taught us ahead of time how to respond. "The harvest is plentiful," he said, "but the laborers are few. Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest" (Mt 9:38). The first response of a Christian to any crisis is always prayer. Acting on Jesus' imperative, vocation teams have formed in a handful of diocesan parishes to beseech the harvest master for these new laborers. These need to become staples of every parish.

But while prayer is the most important response, direct recruitment and encouragement of vocations at the parish level are also indispensable. There is a helpful general rule promoted by vocations directors that there would never be a shortage of priests in any diocese if each parish were to have one young man enter the seminary every eight years. With typical attrition rates in seminaries — some who enter the seminary eventually discern that their vocation is elsewhere — this would mean that every parish would have at least one native son ordained a priest every twelve years. Here in the Diocese of Fall River, if every parish were able to achieve this frequency, there would be, on average, eight priestly ordinations a year. Since most priests, if they remain healthy and faithful, will labor at least 30-40 years in the trenches, that would mean there would be about 240-320 priests at any given time divided among the parishes, hospitals, high schools and other ministries of the diocese.

This one-in-eight goal is achievable for parishes. In practical terms it means that in a Catholic elementary school with 200 students, approximately 100 of whom are boys, at least one boy presently in the school would enter the seminary down the road. One out of a hundred. For a parish without a school but with a CCD program of 400 kids, the goal would be to plant the seed of a priestly vocation in all of them hoping that it would flower later in at least one of the roughly two-hundred boys. Among all the teenagers in a parish, the target would be that one of them would be willing to enter the seminary to test whether the Lord is calling him. While there is obviously no way in most circumstances for parishioners to know for certain that a particular young boy has a priestly vocation, there is no way, on the other hand, to know that a young boy does not. It would be hard to imagine that the Harvest Master would not be calling any of the young boys in a particular parish to the priesthood. If each young boy is treated as one whom the Lord might be calling to be a priest in the future, then the odds will surely increase that one whom the Harvest Master is calling will hear that call and respond.

This one-in-eight year rule is not only a practical goal for parishes to strive for in the future but an excellent tool by which to assess the parish's vocational vitality in the past. For a parish celebrating a 100th anniversary, if the parishioners and families have done their fair share in fostering priestly vocations, they should be able to look back and see at least eight or nine diocesan priests among their native sons. Some of the parishes in the diocese are well known to have far exceeded this number. Others, when celebrating recent centennials, were only able to point to a couple. There are some parishes in our diocese that have not a priestly vocation in more than fifty years.

If we look just at the last twelve years, the span of time in which every parish would hopefully have produced by this metric at least one priestly ordination, there have been 37 men ordained in the diocese, but only 14 have come from diocesan parishes. The others have come from Poland (6), the Archdiocese of Boston (7) and other dioceses across the country and globe (10). If we look to the future, presently only nine parishes have seminarians stretched out over eight upcoming classes. These numbers point to an uncomfortable conclusion that cannot be ignored: the vast majority of parishes in the diocese have been, with respect to priestly vocations in recent years, sterile.

That can change and it must. Vocations are everyone's business, as Cardinal O'Malley is accustomed to say, but they are particularly the business of the priests and faithful of a parish. So much of the Church's mission depends on a sufficient number of priests. As we mark a year in which none of the parishes of the diocese produced a priestly ordination, we hope that it will become a wake-up call to the faithful of every parish to make it their business, through prayer and recruitment, to try to ensure that such a lack of news will never happen again.

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.