Article: Sad Decline in Priestly Vocations

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Saxum said:
The priest is alter Christus, ipse Christus. He acts in the person of Christ and offers the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass. He must take up his cross and follow Christ; he must crucify his flesh with all of its desires.
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I do not disagree about Priests making a full and dedicated commitment to the personage of Christ. They my be a conduit for Christ, but they are and remain humans. They still require and deserve grace. I believe that to function in the most Christ like role a human needs to be a little imperfect.
 
PJH_74 said:
I believe that to function in the most Christ like role a human needs to be a little imperfect.
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Be ye therefore perfect, even as your
Father which is in heaven is perfect. Matthew 5:48.
 
Saxum said:
Matthew 5:48
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You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. -Matthew 5:43-48

I think the proceeding verses are important to the meaning, which are all about loving even those who are you enemies as God would. The perfection I see is about love, not about transcending all human weakness. If Matthew 5:48 is to be literally possible, what’s the point of Jesus?
 
Wow, 8 children by early 30’s …why is his wife not canonized a Saint? God bless her!
 
Isn’t it kind of expensive to run a parish?
 
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OsculeturMeOsculo said:
Isn’t it kind of expensive to run a parish.
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It can be.

Especially maintaining old school church buildings. An old neogothic church in Pittsburgh, 1st Baptist, had its steeple taken down for repairs and put back on. Cost like a million bucks, only was able to afford it with help of historical preservationists.
 
jack63 said:
Widowers can be good priests. In fact historically it was likely common.
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I once knew a fantastic priest who was a widower and a grandfather. His wife died when his children were independent adults, which meant that he was completely free to devote his life to God. In circumstances such as this, I have no problem with widowers becoming priests. However, I would have a slight reservation if the widower still had dependents because I believe a priest ought to give his entire life to God and the Church.
 
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And if you check, it’s not any better than some of the dioceses on the East Coast.

Yeah, there are dioceses in various parts of the US which are worse.

Lincoln NB is doing well, but not better than everyone else.

Jim
 
How many widowers are there? We need tens of thousands. And, selecting a status in life rather than an innate vocation would have a higher failure rate than expected. Europe and (following them) America have rejected Christianity and are now mission territory for African and Asian Priests.

“When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” Luke 18,8
Our Lord was not joking.
 
Saxum said:
However, I would have a slight reservation if the widower still had dependents because I believe a priest ought to give his entire life to God and the Church.
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I agree with this on some levels. In the case of St. Francis Borgia, he did have the resources and he did financially provide for his 8 children before becoming a Jesuit. In the context of today, it is questionable whether it makes sense or is fair to have a parish paying for a large priest’s family.

However, I’m sure St. Francis still acted as a father to his eight children. Continuing to play the role of a father to eight children is not incompatiable with giving your entire life to the church and God…in my opinion.
 
po18guy said:
How many widowers are there? We need tens of thousands. And, selecting a status in life rather than an innate vocation would have a higher failure rate than expected.
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I agree widowers aren’t the entire or even the majority of the solution.

The concept of selecting a status of life rather than an innate vocation is an interesting argument. I don’t think I agree. I don’t think it is that simple. People go though different stages in life. Do people really have an innate vocation, or does this vocation change over time. I think it could change.

This is why I like the idea of Viri Probati to the decline of vocations. An older married man is not that different than a widower in all reality.
 
But most of the dioceses on the east coast have significantly more Catholics than Lincoln, which has fewer than 100,000 Catholics.
 
But most of the dioceses on the east coast have significantly more Catholics than Lincoln, which has fewer than 100,000 Catholics.
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Not necessarily true, as it depends on the dioceses and the state they’re in.

My dioceses has about the same and this year we had more ordinations that Lincoln.

Archdioceses will have a lot more, but also have Archbishops or Cardinals.

Also, when counting seminarians and ordinations from that seminary, many are now regional seminaries serving a wider range of people than just the dioceses it’s located in…

Jim
 
It seems to me that an agreed upon metric would settle this debate. For example, ordinations per 1,000 Catholics or something along those lines.

If anyone has those numbers they’d be great to see.
 
You’d also have to show that the ordinations were of that dioceses and not including other’s.

Jim
 
Most dioceses count “their own” seminarians, wherever they happen to be in seminary. They also list the census of the diocesan seminary if they have one, but indicate how many seminarians from other places.
A bigger issue is seminarians in religious orders. They are not easily tracked in terms of home diocese. A diocese may be fruitful in terms of fostering vocations but if they are going into fssp or Jesuits they May not be counted.
 
Seminaries count the seminarians attending.

Most dioceses don’t even have their own seminaries anymore.

It’s why I went to the Lincoln NB website to see who they ordained this year. They had just two

Then I went to my dioceses website, they ordained three.

Jim
 
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Dioceses only ordain men who will serve their Diocese (with rare exceptions). I’m not talking seminarians here, talking actual ordinations.
 
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