That’s why our parish will likely only have administrators from now on. Our diocese is more and more reliant on religious priests from India who could be recalled by their superiors at any time.
Of the 28 parishes in our diocese, 2 are listed with Pastors, 2 with Parish Priests which I interpret as Pastors, the rest have administrators.
I bet the two with Parish Priests don’t have a pastor on site. I have two parishes near me that share a pastor. The pastor resides in one and a parish priest resides in the other for daily mass and the like, but the pastor makes decisions for both parishes.
You’d have to see their appointment letter to know for sure. “Parish priest” is probably a colloquialism.
It may be that parish priest is the term they use to mean the priest assigned to the title of that parish. The Latin is parochus. I know in the USA people call the parochus ‘pastor’. However, that is not unique in the Anglophone world. Here, in the UK, we call the parochus ‘parish priest’.
Once upon a time way back in the 1980s, a young priest I knew said he was the “parochial vicar” at his parish, and the older priest there was the “ecclesiastical vicar”. The more common usage is “assistant pastor” and “pastor”.
Same here. In the ten years I have been attending Mass at my parish, there have been seven administrators. As one of the elderly members of the parish recently observed, “We no more that get the new priest broken-in before they move him out and we have to start all over.”
Yes. An administrator can do anything a pastor can do.
It’s difficult for priests too. We also like to have a sense of certainty when it comes to our appointments so that we can get to know the people and develop long term plans. Even where priests are staffed by religious order priests from overseas there should still be some agreement between the bishop and the order’s superior to ensure stability. Of course theory is one thing reality is another altogether.
We had one Russian priest assigned to the nearby mission who had originally been ordained as a Russian Orthodox priest, then received into the Greek Catholic Church, and was now bi-ritual. I had sincerely hoped he would be a good fit there and would, with the bishop’s permission, give us some lessons on the Eastern Churches, whose existence, I was surprised to find out, not everyone knows about. For the record, I’d never seen anyone handle a thurible with such dexterity.
. He smiled when I told him that.We have several parishes in our diocese where the administrator appointed by the bishop is a deacon. The “canonical pastor “ is a priest in another parish miles away.JS_Cortez:
Yes. An administrator can do anything a pastor can do.
It’s difficult for priests too. We also like to have a sense of certainty when it comes to our appointments so that we can get to know the people and develop long term plans. Even where priests are staffed by religious order priests from overseas there should still be some agreement between the bishop and the order’s superior to ensure stability. Of course theory is one thing reality is another altogether.
Parish Priest is the common terminology in some countries. I don’t hear the term pastor used.
