The retirement age for priest is going to be determined by whether the priest is secular or religoius. Secular priests are allowed to retire when they reach retirement age, usually 65. At that point they may choose to live anywhere they want. They often help out at local parishes on Sundays. Priests who are religious do not retire. They remain active until they can no longer serve as priests. Then the religious community takes care of them. Often they end up doing other things such as formation work, clerical duties at the motherhouse of the community, or manual labor.
One of the many reasons that there is a shortage of priests in certain dioceses is the fact that religious are no longer taking on new parishes. Most of the younger religious want to return to their roots. Most religious communities were not founded to serve as parish priests. They ordain some or all of their members, but for a different ministry.
For example, if you notice the Franciscans on EWTN, they have many ordained friars. But none of them serve in parishes. It’s contrary to the rule of St. Francis. If you look at the Franciscans of the Reform (Fr. Benedict G’s community), they have over 100 ordained friars. Not a single one serves in a parish, even though there are parishes without priests. My own community, Franciscan Friars of Penance, we have 30 ordained friars. Only one serves in a parish. All of these friars were ordained for the purpose of serving their confreres, not parishes. They also work in soup kitchens, communication ministry, retreat ministry, respect life, homeless shelters, street ministry, youth ministry, urban poor, rural poor, missions and teaching. This is part of the trend to return to the foundations of religious life.
As time passes, many religious men who are ordained will end up in other ministries. If you look at Fr. Corapi’s communtiy, the Mother of the Trinity, they do not do parish ministry either. They are dedicated to living the religious life and being itinerant preachers.
The Jesuits are also not replacing their men in parishes. They are returning to education and mission work. The same seems to be true with the Dominicans. The Fathers of Mercy do home missions. The Franciscans of the Atonement only work with the ecumenical movement. The Franciscan Friars of Peace no longer ordain any friar. The Franciscans of the Eucharist do not ordain any friars either.
The focus among religious is to live the religious life with their brothers and among the poor. The religious who are ordained are often sent to parishes that are very poor, such as inner city or rural. I can’t speak for other religious families, but among Franciscans the tendency now is to leave a parish as soon as the laity reaches the middle class status. They move on to parishes in very poor neighborhoods that cannot afford to pay for a parish priest. What happens in this case is that they parish may pay for one priest and the community may assign five or six friars (ordained or not) to serve for the ame salary.
There are still some religious who serve in middle class parishes, but they are becoming less common. It is the responsibility of the laity to promote secular vocations to the priesthood to meet their needs. The idea is that a parish is part of a diocese and it is the reponsibility of those who make up the diocese to cultivate secular priests to serve them. Legally, religious priests do not belong to any dicoese and have no pastoral obligation to those dioceses that have a shortage. The pastoral obligation of religious is to their community first and to the target population that their founders identified when they founded the community. Usually, founders targetted the poor, missions, youth, sick, elderly, and the marginalized members of society.
When you take several thousand religious priests out of the equation, then you are going to have a shortage, especially today. Today the population is booming and spreading. It’s not like the early days of Catholic immigration where most Catholics lived in ghettos where a parish coverd thousands of people. More and more Catholics are more comfortable and moving into the suburbs. This creates a big stress for dioceses, because the population is spread over a greater area. It’s easier to keep a parish where the population is stacked in apartment buildings than when it is spread out over a large suburban area that may be several miles big. That usually requires more than one parish.
In cities like NY, Chicago and Boston, you can have one parish with three priests serving 10,000 families, because they all live in apartment buildings within walking distance. In a suburb, 10,000 families can be spread out over several miles.
We have the decrease in religious presence in parishes, the lower number of men entering the diocesan seminary and the spreading of the population, which all together create a shortage.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
