No priest at mass!

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Petertherock

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The Church has to do something to help people that want to become priests even if it means paying for their schooling. Today we had no priest at mass because our regular priest was on vacation and the fill in was unavailable at the last minute.

We had the deacon do a Communion service and before he began he told everyone that this counted for our Sunday obligation and he also said, “We all knew this day was coming but we hoped it wouldn’t be this soon.” If the Church doesn’t do something to get more priests pretty soon they won’t be able to say not going to Mass on Sunday is a mortal sin because we won’t have masses on Sunday in many places. Indeed it’s already happening.
 
There are many places in the world where Catholics can only attend Mass once a month or even only a few times a year!
 
Br. Rich is right.There are already places where the priest travels from parish to parish and the faithful have to administer the routine: teaching CCD, preparing the children for the Sacraments, managing the finances. Some see this as a warning from God for the faithful to “Get up off the couch” and volunteer to help their church in any way that they can. It was easy to let clergy and religious do everything and for the faithful to sit back and watch. Others see it as a natural outcome to the way the secular world has been heading.
 
Br. Rich SFO:
There are many places in the world where Catholics can only attend Mass once a month or even only a few times a year!
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What happens to Sunday obligation? How far/long would a person have to travel before the Sunday obligation is lifted?

50 miles one way? 1 hour one way? 2 hours one way? 100 miles one way? 200 miles one way?

What is the cut off?
 
There is no shortage of vocations. There is only a shortage of men who are responding to the call.

It requires not only the calling, but the response, such as the one Samuel gave: “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.”
 
No priest-no Mass.

But the local ordinary can dispense the Sunday obligation if he sees that the conditions warrant.

John
 
Also culpability is limited if it is not reasonably possble for a person to make it to mass through not fault of their own.

This has been this way in my Archdiocese for years. Our priests are extremely overworked and suffer serious burn out very quickly. It is only by the grace of God that they are able to do what they do. I know many priests with well over five missions that they must attend to in their parish boundries.

BTW the Church already does pay for the schooling of seminarians (for the most part). Also, the local ordinary has the right to levy a tax on his parishes to pay for the education of his seminarians per canon law.

However these are not my reasons primarily for posting. The shortage in priests is directly related to the shortage of real catholic parents who reject pop-culture. Many vocation is aborted by family members who do not support their family member in their vocation. Also, parents raise their kids with the ideal of growing up, getting married and making a lot of money. They tell their children to be doctors and lawyers - very few suggest to their sons the priesthood or their children the religious or single life. A priest I worked with was asked by a parishoner why there was a shortage of priests. This priest asked him how many sons he had. The gentleman said four grown sons. The priest then asked the man how many were in the seminary. The man got the point and went about his way. The vocation of priest struggles because the vocation to marriage is in jeopardy due to materialism and modernism.
 
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Petertherock:
The Church has to do something to help people that want to become priests even if it means paying for their schooling. Today we had no priest at mass because our regular priest was on vacation and the fill in was unavailable at the last minute. .
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the Church has to do something? who is “the Church” please, the Church is the people the body of Christ, priests come from families, they don’t self-generate from the hierarchy. When we have good Catholic families, headed by strong fathers and mothers, married sacramentally, obedient to their vows including and especially fidelity and welcoming children as God’s gifts, educating their children in the faith, then we will have all the priests and consecrated religious we need. Until Catholic families get back on track the Church will not be back on track.

Paying for seminary education is not the problem. Parents will pay for their kid to be a doctor or lawyer, why not priest? The problems is that half or 3/4 of the Catholic children that were supposed to be born in the last 40 years have been contracepted out of existence, so where is our pool of potential priests and nuns?
 
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JimG:
There is no shortage of vocations. There is only a shortage of men who are responding to the call.

It requires not only the calling, but the response, such as the one Samuel gave: “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.”
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And snowballing off of this comment, I will add that Seminaries “weeding out” good, orthodox young men contributed to the loss significantly. There is a book by Michael S. Rose written on the subject called, “Goodbye, Good Men”. In certain seminaries, any young man showing signs of orthodoxy was sent for “psychological testing”. This doesn’t include the horrible classes they forced many young men to endure, discussed as well. It was, as some would put it, a “de-priesting of the priesthood”.

I’ll let this speak for itself - something my Pastor wrote on the subject back when the book came out in 2002.

Scroll down in this link to “A Pastor’s Descant”

diocesereport.com/the_record/2002_10_06_archive.shtml

Here is an excerpt:

This problem is not a distant concern since it includes our own local seminary as well. While I am not privy to the inner workings of daily seminary life, I know that there are many men preparing for Orders who are forced to undergo “counseling” sessions by area psychologists. That these men should be deemed sufficiently maladjusted to need such counsel would already be a cause for concern since it cannot be demonstrated conclusively that any amount of talking can ever remedy a serious personality defect. But the other matter of concern is that these men should be subjected to counsel for `problems’ such as their firm adherence to papal teaching on the impossibility of women priests, or their traditional stance regarding liturgical practices. The matter is yet exacerbated when one becomes aware that some of the counselors involved are not Catholics and, all the same, are engaged in probing the mind and motives of men who are preparing for a celibate way of life-the very kind of life that appears absurd to so many who do not share our religious convictions.
 
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puzzleannie:
the Church has to do something? who is “the Church” please, the Church is the people the body of Christ, priests come from families, they don’t self-generate from the hierarchy. When we have good Catholic families, headed by strong fathers and mothers, married sacramentally, obedient to their vows including and especially fidelity and welcoming children as God’s gifts, educating their children in the faith, then we will have all the priests and consecrated religious we need. Until Catholic families get back on track the Church will not be back on track.

Paying for seminary education is not the problem. Parents will pay for their kid to be a doctor or lawyer, why not priest? The problems is that half or 3/4 of the Catholic children that were supposed to be born in the last 40 years have been contracepted out of existence, so where is our pool of potential priests and nuns?
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I agree here, as well.

I have shifted over to a traditional, orthodox parish where there are larger families and those families spend time together at the parish. It is an amazing site to see a group of young girls sitting in Holy Hour during adoration at 2:00 on a summer afternoon when they could be hanging out on the street. Instead, they choose to hang out with Jesus. Ditto for the male teens who came to serve that day up on the altar with the priest. They didn’t have to be there.

I’ve suspected these past few weeks that the vocation rate out of this parish is higher than the average parish. These are not the kind of people that the left end of the church would want to see in priestly and sisterly/brotherly roles because they are young and orthodox. But that is another area where dedication comes in. These kids are dedicated from a young age in this parish. I’ve seen 10 year old kids sit quietly and peacefully, at rest in the Lord in church on a daily basis. It is unreal and yet it is happening at this parish.

I find it odd that in all the other parishes I’ve attended in my area, except this one, all you see is a predominance of grey hair. The young are being drawn to orthodoxy there is no doubt. That itself will fuel the priesthood and other vocations.

The local seminary in my town has already made improvements from what I understand, but there is no denying it was problematic as described in that article I put above.
 
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Petertherock:
The Church has to do something to help people that want to become priests even if it means paying for their schooling. Today we had no priest at mass because our regular priest was on vacation and the fill in was unavailable at the last minute.

We had the deacon do a Communion service and before he began he told everyone that this counted for our Sunday obligation and he also said, “We all knew this day was coming but we hoped it wouldn’t be this soon.” If the Church doesn’t do something to get more priests pretty soon they won’t be able to say not going to Mass on Sunday is a mortal sin because we won’t have masses on Sunday in many places. Indeed it’s already happening.
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Even if we had more priests, which I still am not sure that we do not have enough right now, this still would have happened.

We will never have enough priests to cover last minute things like this unless we have priests that are just sitting around doing nothing waiting for a last minute thing to happen, That would be a waste of resources.

What happened is a shame but it is inevitable that at times we will have situations such as this occuring and we must do our best in these cases.

In the Byzantine rite we have something set up for just such a case, it is called a Typica Service. It is a communion service run by the deacon, it resembles the Divine Liturgy but there is no consecration.

I think the Latin Church needs to spell out the communion service in a great way so that in these cases something is in place.

I know some worry about the Sunday Obligation but I am sure that the bishop would dispense if he must in a case like this.

What are we do to if the priest falls ill moments before the start of Mass, pastorally you can not expect people who come to the Mass to leave and find another Mass to attend.
 
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JimG:
There is no shortage of vocations. There is only a shortage of men who are responding to the call.

It requires not only the calling, but the response, such as the one Samuel gave: “Here I am Lord, I come to do your will.”
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If diocesan priesthood seminaries etc, then what are these bishops and seminaries doing as well to offer great incentives as well. Not that a priest becomes a priest for money. However a diocesan priest has to live and if the diocese pays him a decent salary as well as godd prescription coverage, and other wellness/health things such as free access ro the seminary’s gymnastic/fitness areas even if they gradutaed from there long ago. Some of these diocesan men cannot even afford their medication. Also, what about retirement? Do they get a good pension??? Are they offerd a diocese wide cared living place or infirmary? Or even retirement home fit for priests with dignity and resepct? There are ceratain dioceses that pay them pennies compared to other very genorous dioceses. It seems the larger the dioceses the more stingy or cheap. A great bishop said not long ago: when a diocese grows to much, it stops being pastoral and becomes a beauracracy. POPE BENEDICT PLEASE START SHIFTING CARDINALS AND BISHOPS AND START ALSO ELEVATING GOOD HOLY PRIESTS TO THE EPISCOPACY. WE NEED TO STOP CAREERISM WITHIN THE HIEARCHY AND HAVE USA CARDINALS AND BISHOPS WHO DEFEND CHURCH DOCTRINE AND WHO WILL BE AS FATHERS TO ALL THEIR PRIESTS, BOTH DIOCESAN AND RELIGIOUS.
 
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misericordie:
If diocesan priesthood seminaries etc, then what are these bishops and seminaries doing as well to offer great incentives as well. Not that a priest becomes a priest for money. However a diocesan priest has to live and if the diocese pays him a decent salary as well as godd prescription coverage, and other wellness/health things such as free access ro the seminary’s gymnastic/fitness areas even if they gradutaed from there long ago. Some of these diocesan men cannot even afford their medication. Also, what about retirement? Do they get a good pension??? Are they offerd a diocese wide cared living place or infirmary? Or even retirement home fit for priests with dignity and resepct? There are ceratain dioceses that pay them pennies compared to other very genorous dioceses. It seems the larger the dioceses the more stingy or cheap. A great bishop said not long ago: when a diocese grows to much, it stops being pastoral and becomes a beauracracy. POPE BENEDICT PLEASE START SHIFTING CARDINALS AND BISHOPS AND START ALSO ELEVATING GOOD HOLY PRIESTS TO THE EPISCOPACY. WE NEED TO STOP CAREERISM WITHIN THE HIEARCHY AND HAVE USA CARDINALS AND BISHOPS WHO DEFEND CHURCH DOCTRINE AND WHO WILL BE AS FATHERS TO ALL THEIR PRIESTS, BOTH DIOCESAN AND RELIGIOUS.
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I am not all that sure what you are trying to say here as you seem to use no breaks in your post and the grammer is atrocious.

All I can say is that it is not the bishop who supports the priests, it is the parish. Also if money is your reason for not answering a possible call to the priesthood then you are not called to the priesthood.
 
Sir Knight:
What happens to Sunday obligation? How far/long would a person have to travel before the Sunday obligation is lifted?

50 miles one way? 1 hour one way? 2 hours one way? 100 miles one way? 200 miles one way?

What is the cut off?
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I some places people will walk for two days to get to Mass. I believe that it would not be unreasonable to travel up to 50 miles or an hour by car to attend Mass. Sunday obligation is dispensed when a person cannot reasonably get to Mass. That may mean for some who cannot travel to the next town over, say twenty minutes away. For others the obligation may still apply because they can reasonably go to the next town over.

Here where I’m at people would not even think twice about jumping in the SUV and driving Friday night to the beach four hours away. For those people driving four hours to get to a Mass would not be unreasonable. But not many would do it! The beach is different.
 
Br. Rich SFO:
There are many places in the world where Catholics can only attend Mass once a month or even only a few times a year!
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Yes, and it wasn’t so very long ago that Catholics who came here to settle the West had just that situation.

I’ve always thought that my ancestors were so blessed to have come here with their own priests (my mother’s people), and to Chicago where a substantial Catholic community already existed (my father’s family).

Priests have always been scarce in mission territories, and since that is what the US is rapidly becoming, we will just have to make the best of it.

Meanwhile, if it’s any comfort, those of us who attend the Tridentine Mass frequently have to travel a distance (in some cases, a great distance), for that opportunity.

God bless,

Anna
 
Br. Rich SFO:
I some places people will walk for two days to get to Mass. I believe that it would not be unreasonable to travel up to 50 miles or an hour by car to attend Mass. Sunday obligation is dispensed when a person cannot reasonably get to Mass. That may mean for some who cannot travel to the next town over, say twenty minutes away. For others the obligation may still apply because they can reasonably go to the next town over.

Here where I’m at people would not even think twice about jumping in the SUV and driving Friday night to the beach four hours away. For those people driving four hours to get to a Mass would not be unreasonable. But not many would do it! The beach is different.
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This is for the bishop to decide and, if the bishop allows it, for the parish priest to grant a dispensation as they see fit. It is not for us to second guess.

As for the quesiton, how far would one have to travel to a Mass to get a dispensation is not the quesiton in this case.

In this case the priest who was to celebrate Mass had something come up at the last minute, who knows what that was, we seem to be lacking that information in this case.

So in this case, people showed up to fulfill their Sunday Obligation. As this is what they planned to do, you can not assume that they could change their plans. I would see nothing wrong with a dispensation being granted to these individuals, after all, they showed up to fulfill the Obligation.
 
Typically, more orthodox parishes churn out more seminarians than looser ones do. If you want something to do, help make that atmosphere at your parish. Cultivate it. Hopefully it will bear much fruit. It may not bear fruit quickly, but it *will *bear fruit.
 
Br. Rich SFO:
I some places people will walk for two days to get to Mass. I believe that it would not be unreasonable to travel up to 50 miles or an hour by car to attend Mass. Sunday obligation is dispensed when a person cannot reasonably get to Mass. That may mean for some who cannot travel to the next town over, say twenty minutes away. For others the obligation may still apply because they can reasonably go to the next town over.

Here where I’m at people would not even think twice about jumping in the SUV and driving Friday night to the beach four hours away. For those people driving four hours to get to a Mass would not be unreasonable. But not many would do it! The beach is different.
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Thank you for your reply. I’m still a bit confused about the following …
  • … That may mean for some who cannot travel to the next town over, say twenty minutes away. For others the obligation may still apply because they can reasonably go to the next town over. … *
If I am reading this correctly, it sort of hints that it is really up to the individual and that’s where I sort of have a problem. For example, this past winter we had a really bad snowstorm on Saturday night and the tail end of it was still going on Sunday morning. I called the parish to see if mass was still being held and/or if there was a modified mass schedule due to the snow.

I heard the following recording … “Masses today will be held during regular hours. If you feel that you can not attend due to road conditions, safety comes first.” … I had no idea what that meant! What did he mean by ‘safety comes first’? Did he mean that it would not be a sin if we missed mass? I had no idea what that meant. It was very unclear to me.

I ended up driving to church. Skidded several times. Got stuck a few times. Ended up missing the mass that I was going to and attended the following mass. Then had an equally ‘fun time’ driving back home.

Question is, would I have committed a sin if I wouldn’t have gone.

PS: I’m asking this for future reference (next winter).
 
Sir Knight:
Thank you for your reply. I’m still a bit confused about the following …

*… That may mean for some who cannot travel to the next town over, say twenty minutes away. For others the obligation may still apply because they can reasonably go to the next town over. … *

If I am reading this correctly, it sort of hints that it is really up to the individual and that’s where I sort of have a problem. For example, this past winter we had a really bad snowstorm on Saturday night and the tail end of it was still going on Sunday morning. I called the parish to see if mass was still being held and/or if there was a modified mass schedule due to the snow.

I heard the following recording … “Masses today will be held during regular hours. If you feel that you can not attend due to road conditions, safety comes first.” … I had no idea what that meant! What did he mean by ‘safety comes first’? Did he mean that it would not be a sin if we missed mass? I had no idea what that meant. It was very unclear to me.

I ended up driving to church. Skidded several times. Got stuck a few times. Ended up missing the mass that I was going to and attended the following mass. Then had an equally ‘fun time’ driving back home.

Question is, would I have committed a sin if I wouldn’t have gone.

PS: I’m asking this for future reference (next winter).
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It is in the judgment of the individual is this something they can do. In your example you were capable because you did make it and returned. The question that will remain is if you didn’t make it and died on the way and left a family behind or killed someone else in an accident. Many people in other places risk their lives to attend Mass. However the Church does not require us to do this. So if it is a real risk to your safety or the safety of others stay home.
 
RobNY is right; there are way more vocations in rock solid dioceses and parishes than in “bad” ones… a fact I take great comfort in, since “bad” dioceses have very few vocations. Given time I think the problem is self correcting.

Young men will respond to inspiring priests, preaching a catholicism that is reverent and rings with the Truth. A priest who shies away from hard teaching, prefers civilian clothes and being called by his given name and not Father, and almost apologizes for talking about vocations is not going to stir young men into considering the priesthood.

A vocation director once said over half the battle is the parents…
 
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