How is your diocese handling the priest shortage?

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Beaver:
There is not a shortage of priest, only people who want you to think there is and will go to any extreme to motivate the situation to promote there agenda.
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I know the priest shortage isn’t worldwide (or even nationwide), but it is statewide in my state (VT). I can see it with my own eyes. I can’t even think of any priest here that only serves 1 parish. We have some priests serving as many as 4 parishes. And so many of them are old! I haven’t seen a priest much under age 50 in years!

I a student (on and off) at the local “catholic” college, and after my first year the diocese stopped sending priests over to say mass on campus, because they just couldn’t spare a priest to say mass when only 2 or 3 students would show up (if that).

It’s getting to be a bit depressing! 😦

Tif =8-)
 
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Beaver:
There is not a shortage of priest, only people who want you to think there is and will go to any extreme to motivate the situation to promote there agenda.
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I think there is definitely a shortage of priests in certain regions, and plenty of priests in others. I think this is directly proportional to the commitment of the local faithful. In places where people are actually trying to faithfully live out all the teachings of the Church, vocations probably are plentiful. In places where people are largely ignoring or disobeying the teachings of the church, vocations are scarce.

One thing to remember–Christ promissed that the church would survive no matter what, but He did not promiss that it would survive in any particular region. Look at Ephesus in the New Testament. It was a city considered to be one of the most committed to the church in the early days, yet the church did not survive there. The same could happen here in certain parts of the U.S. where Catholics have become lazy and even hostile to the teachings of the church. We cannot take anything for granted, and we can lose everything if we do.
 
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TraderTif:
I know the priest shortage isn’t worldwide (or even nationwide), but it is statewide in my state (VT). I haven’t seen a priest much under age 50 in years!
It’s getting to be a bit depressing! 😦 )
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Code: 
 Do you think it has anything to do with VT
 being the land of liberals?;)
 
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decn2b:
Bishop EDIT likely destroyed many a vocations with his heterodoxy.To be honest with you I think it will take several generations IF the diocee ever recovers from his legacy.
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Code: 
 Speaking as one who worked in parish ministry
 there for about 7 months, i totally agree. The bulk
 of the people have all been Protestantized.
 
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puzzleannie:
Our small diocese recently started our own seminary, we have 26 in the pipeline, and our parish is doing its share, one of our own will be ordained in May.
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Is this the Priests for Life seminary?
 
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chnchris:
Do you think it has anything to do with VT
being the land of liberals?😉
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giggle It’s very possible 😛

The thing is the native Vermonters actually aren’t all that liberal (as far as I can tell, considering that I’m not native myself).

In fact, when they were debating the whole gay marriage/civil union thing here, the slogan of a lot of people was “Take Back Vermont”. The general feeling is that all these “liberal” people have moved here and taken over the state.

shrug I dunno

Tif =8-)
 
**In the interests of charity, could posters who wish to take to task a specific bishop refrain from doing so in this thread, keeping instead to the topic of :

How is your diocese handling the priest shortage?

and addressing the problem and/or solutions overall?

As always your cooperation is appreciated.**
 
We share our pastor with another smaller, older parish in town. As I’ve said before, it’s a bit like joint custody. We have him every other weekend, and alternating Christmases. He says Daily Mass at our parish on Monday and Wednesdays. You should see the schedule for the Triduum. Holy Thursday at St. Pat’s, Good Friday at both parishes - one at 3, and one at 5, Easter Vigil at St. Leo’s.

Fortunately, we have another priest (aka our “sacramental minister”) who fills in when our pastor is at the other parish, and we have not had to do away with any Masses, confessions, etc. Trying to track down our pastor, though, is not an easy thing to do. He’s busier than busy.

Our diocese has 32 seminarians, I think, and an overall Catholic population of 322,000 - give or take a few. Sure, the situation could be better, but it could be much worse, too.
 
😛 But I have heard of Bishop Untener form Saginaw Gee I wonder if they are somehow related to each other. 😛 😉 😛
 
Our old Bishop, AKA “Bishop Edit” above, solved the Priest shortage by eliminating the Deacon program, ordaining a record low number of Seminarians, closing Parishes he had promised not to close (and angering a sizeable African-American Catholic population in the process), and installing as many female Pastoral Administrators as possible.

He blamed the shortage on the Vatican’s refusal to ordain women and married men (that’s why he torpedoed the Deacon program-no women).

The Bishop before him got quite a few ordinations. However, he is the one who forced hundreds of parishes to remodel and modernize the buildings. There are TONS of old church buildings that look horrible on the inside (Don’t get me started about the Cathedral), save for a single-digit number of parishes that resisted in the 1970’s.

The new (to us) Bishop has made ordinations a near-obsession. He has promised to institute a Permanent Deacon program and all rumors are that he will very aggressively pursue current (public) high school and college students for the Priesthood and the Deaconate over the next few years.

However, I do agree with the opinion that it will be decades before the legacy of Bishop “Edit” is eliminated.
 
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SMHW:
In the Los Angeles area some of the small, older churches have been closed and parishes have been combined.
I know of at least one rural parish that has a sister for an administrator. A retired priest drives some 60 miles every Sunday to say Mass.
All the parishes are being told that they can’t expect to have a resident priest in the years to come and are supposed to be planning for that eventuality. Quite a few parishes already have a lay person or deacon as a business manager even if there IS a pastor priest.

While there definitely are not many men lining up to be priests we do have a thriving permenant diaconate program.
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EDIT If you want to know WHAT to DO about the priest shortage - call the chancery office in Lincoln, Nebraska. YEP! Bishop Bruskewitz has MORE SEMINARIANS THAN ANY OTHER DIOCESE IN THE WORLD!!
He welcomes the Tridentine and ALL orders who celebrate it EXCLUSIVELY! and encourages tabernacles in the center of the altar in the churches and latin Gregorian chant in ALL masses (as specified in the GIRM!), and(this part I’m not 100%sure of but I believe I read it recently somewhere) and no female altar servers. And he is an outspoken, PUBLIC FIGURE in support of true Catholicism!
THAT"S HOW YOU GET PRIESTS!! .
** - It looks like the entire U.S. will be getting its priests from Nebraska, and they’ll be GREAT!! God’s got a great plan!!**
**** EDIT
**Pray that all bishops return to the teachings of the church, that they do NOT ordain men who are obviously suffering from same sex attraction, and that they encourage the TLM. **
That’s how you get priests.
God bless,
Angel
 
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