My latest column: “Synod Preoccupations and Vocations Dearth Killing Parishes”

August 31, 2023

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK

The victims of the Maui fire jumped into the water to flee the hellish conflagration all around them. Souls are abandoning the Barque of Peter as heresy and lack of priests threaten parish viability. The synods welcome a priest shortage so that they “fix” it by further multiplying the already ubiquitous lay “ministers.” The Church teaches officially that there are only three ministries in the Church: bishop, priest, and deacon.

Lay attendance at Mass is commonly acknowledged to be in freefall. Join lack of priestly vocations to that and you have a looming disaster.
“The Episcopal Conference of France has published their figures for priestly Ordinations: There are 88 new priests in 2023, as compared with 130 in 2021. The press release from the French bishops easily recognizes a fall which is part of a continuous trend of falling vocations within the Church, which we have been observing for 20 years, and which many sociologists of religions have documented” (Bishops’ Conference of France).

The context: “There were about a hundred diocesan priests per year between 2000 and 2010. There are only 52 this year, to which are added 36 religious. But despite this contribution, the total figure of 88 new priests is indeed an unprecedented drop.

“For the record, in 1961, the quarterly review of the National Vocations Center had already titled one of its issues: ‘The most serious crisis in 150 years!’ Indeed, from 1951 to 1960, the number of ordinations of diocesan priests had dropped dramatically. The Church in France had gone from 1,028 to 595 ordinations per year.

“In Le Figaro of June 22, Jean-Marie Guénois comments on the particularly worrying figures for this year: ‘If this trend is confirmed, the number of ordinations of diocesan priests would have fallen by 50 percent in two decades. Unheard of, even if we have to wait for confirmation of the sustainability of such a projection. However, it is probable, the entries being more and more rare’.”

“Important seminaries were recently closed in Lille and Bordeaux. It takes seven years of training to mature a vocation, with a loss rate of one out of two candidates. The [Archdiocese] of Paris is even beginning to tremble: In September 2022, only four candidates presented themselves for the first year of seminary. And only five priests will be ordained this June 24 in the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris. There were 10 in 2022, 12 in 2021.”

And to specify: ‘This crisis of vocations is not only French, but European. It is also very notable in Poland but also in Italy, which is beginning to worry the Vatican. North America is not being spared, nor is South America.’

“In Switzerland, the Institute of Pastoral Sociology (IPS), relayed by cath.ch on June 24, also notes: ‘Since 1950, the number of diocesan priests domiciled in Switzerland has been reduced by half, it has decreased by one quarter since the turn of the century alone, but the differences between dioceses are notable.’

“The decline was particularly marked in the Dioceses of St. Gall, Basel, Sion, and Lausanne-Geneva-Fribourg, while it was less marked in the Dioceses of Chur and Lugano, especially during the last two decades. In 1950, the Swiss dioceses had 2,986 priests. They had 1,294 in 2022.

“According to an estimate by the IPS, ‘the number of diocesan priests will decline further in all dioceses, but with significant disparities. In 2029, barely more than 900 priests should still belong to a Swiss diocese, i.e., one-third less than today. The two Dioceses of Basel and St. Gall will suffer a greater than average decline, as has already been the case over the past decades, due to the significant aging of priests and the scarcity of priestly ordinations.”

For years, dioceses hired radical lay-garbed women religious to sit on vocations admissions boards and to interview and accuse candidates of “rigidity” and other false charges in order to eliminate them and artificially reduce the numbers of seminary candidates. It looks now as though they did their job so well they are no longer needed.

“This vertiginous drop in the number of ecclesiastics leads to abuses that the next synod on synodality is very likely not to sanction, and perhaps even to condone. To compensate for the lack of priests in Switzerland, they will not hesitate to call on lay people. In La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana on June 16, 2023, Luisella Scrosati notes that in the canton of Basel, it is now usual for lay people to exercise priestly functions: they preach; they preside over a liturgy of the Word which completely replaces the Mass; and they baptize and celebrate marriages.”

Read the rest: https://thewandererpress.com/catholic/news/our-catholic-faith/vocations-dearth-killing-parishes/