What constitutes a "priest shortage"?

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HomeschoolDad

HomeschoolDad

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What per capita figure of priests to laity would there have to be, for us no longer to be able to say that we have a “priest shortage”?

I know the medieval Catholic social ideal was to have one-third of the faithful called to marriage, one-third called to the single life, and one-third called to the priestly or religious life (sorry, I don’t have a source for this, I just know I read it somewhere one time), which would obviously lead to an abundance of priests. But that is hardly our situation these days.

One priest per hundred faithful? Five hundred faithful? One thousand faithful?

Keep in mind that in an idealized Catholic society, everyone would go to confession very frequently (monthly, fortnightly, or even weekly), and several Masses would be said even in small parishes on a daily basis. On top of that, there would be ministry to the sick, taking communion to them, and administering the Anointing of the Sick/Extreme Unction, which only a priest can do.
 
When I was growing up, a parish usually had a pastor, two or three younger priests, and often an older or semi-retired priest who might have been a pastor previously but was now basically living out his retirement in a parish where he could have a light workload.

That was a nice level of clergy for a parish that probably consisted of 500 to 1000 families.

Nowadays I see parishes that have about 4 priests and they are serving more like 2000 to 3000 families. The parish with 1000 families is lucky if it manages to get 2 priests. The parish with 500 families is getting clustered into another parish.
 
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I would safely say that what constitutes a priest shortage would be one less than 12. The 12 apostles had to quickly find another apostle after Judas hung himself. These 12 apostles did quite an amazing job evangelizing without car, airplane or internet. I think they all died as martyrs except saint John. Saint Paul was amazing too.
 
The “priest shortage” means different things in different places. In two months’ time the Amazon synod opens in Rome, in response to a campaign that has been going on for ten years or longer. The prime mover was Bishop Erwin Kräutler, the then bishop (now bishop emeritus) of the prelature of Xingu, in the Brazilian Amazon area. The prelature of Xingu covers a land area of 140,000 square miles, which is bigger than Wisconsin and Illinois together, but with a population of under 600,000, which is smaller than the population of Milwaukee. The population is spread out very thinly over the area. The prelature is divided into 15 parishes. The latest official figures (link below), referring to 2016, show a total of 33 priests for a Catholic population of 382,000, giving an average of one priest for every 11,500 Catholics.

http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dxing.html
 
Tis_Bearself said:
That was a nice level of clergy for a parish that probably consisted of 500 to 1000 families.
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The RC parish up the street has 12,00 or 14,000 families.

It has two priests, although I believe that a couple of masses a weekend get handled by juggle.
 
We have priests in our diocese who are in their 70’s and 80’s who are Pastors and the sole priests for parishes that have up to 900 families. We have ordained two priests this year, but the next one will be four years from now. We have priests from other continents who have short term assignments at some of the smaller churches. We have very few parishes with more than one priest. Priests here very rarely can take more than a few days off, and sometimes finding another priest to cover even one Mass on the weekend is difficult. We have a priest shortage.
 
DoGodsBidding1 said:
We have priests in our diocese who are in their 70’s and 80’s who are Pastors and the sole priests for parishes that have up to 900 families.
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Yeah, that sounds pretty much like what I see many places. If you have under 1000 families you will get one priest or worse yet have to share a priest with another parish, and if something happens to your priest then there better be a religious order nearby loaning out priests, it’s your only hope of getting one.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Do you perhaps mean 14000 people? That would make more sense.
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Nope. And it’s only the second largest parish in town . . .

Another has 17,000, and shows only two priests and two deacons, but in the past has (I think) had three priests of its own, and two Eastern Catholic priests there part time (not any more, though). It also has a school with four classes per grade.

Apparently, normal guidelines would call for about 99 parishes in the Las Vegas area, but there are 21 (including the cathedral), plus a parish-sized Vietnamese mission, a Korean mission with which I’m unfamiliar, and the Shrine at the southern end of the strip (which caused complications when the next casino was built, and the bishop had to go to noticeable effort to waive the limitation on building a casino near a church [a more polite version of, “We built it for tourists, you morons!”].

Also seven (!) schismatic “Catholic” churches listed in warning on the diocesan web page.

I think that it also used to list our eastern parishes (maybe on another page of the website?), which would be my Pittsburgh Byzantine nee Ruthenian parish, a greco-italian parish (part of my Eparchy, and mostly uses our books, as there are only a couple in the US), a Maronite parish, and a Chaldean parish. A Romanian Catholic mission didn’t make it, and the Melkite outreach is currently inactive, but with active efforts to reinstate it (I’m on the planning committee, or whatever its called).

trivia: the Cathedral is actually on the strip, having been built ages ago by the casinos. They offered to build it if the bishop would provide, iirc, a 4:15 AM was for workers coming off shift . . .
 
Yes, I’ve been to the Cathedral. I especially like the large stained glass window to the side of the altar portraying all the temptations of the Strip like dice and fancy cars.

Perhaps you could offer visiting priests free Vegas vacations if they worked for a week as priests in the diocese. On second thought, enough priests seem to have addictions to gambling, alcohol, drugs and other things that maybe that’s not such a good idea.
 
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I must live in and around dioceses that are blessed in comparison to what I’m hearing here. Maybe I’m underestimating the parish’s sizes. But I see a lot of churches that have situations like 2 priests or more for about 4 weekend masses. That seems pretty manageable. But I’m not a priest maybe they feel swamped.
 
I grew up in a town of 60,000 and we had 6,000 families in our Catholic church. Also the Catholics had more than two children unless they could not have more children for some physical reason.
 
I grew up in Alaska where one priest would service up to five parishes that we’re a considerable distance from one another and had to be accessed by airplane or watercraft. Oftentimes Sunday Mass wasn’t offered, Confession Times were limited, and Daily Mass was unheard of. I think that is what a true priest shortage looks like.
 
I took three Dioceses

Diocese of Umuahia in Nigeria. In 1960 there were 5,737 Catholics per priest. In 2017 that was 1,410 per priest.

Diocese of Achonry in Ireland. In 1959 it was 538:1. In 2015 862:1.

Cincinnati, OH in the US. 1966 572:1 In 2016 979:1

Source Country List [Catholic-Hierarchy]

So, while there is more of a shortage in Europe or the US, in Africa the trend goes the other way.
 
dochawk said:
trivia: the Cathedral is actually on the strip, having been built ages ago by the casinos. They offered to build it if the bishop would provide, iirc, a 4:15 AM was for workers coming off shift . . .
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Been to Mass there on a couple of occasions (retreats in the desert, you know…). Spoke to a priest after Mass and he mentioned that every Monday, one of his duties was to sort out the chips that had been contributed in the Sunday collection and return them to the respective casinos to be cashed in.

Not sure if that’s a true story or he was just pulling my leg…but I got a good laugh out of it.
 
Not an answer but a priest I met once said we don’t have a priest shortage at all because God gives us exactly how many priests we need.
Definitely makes one think. He is a Carmelite.
 
I think the word “shortage” comes up because of our commercial culture. Yes, we have fewer priests per capita, but we also have internet, telecommunications, modern vehicles, roadside assistance, etc. Of course priests are tasked with far more than what most people would consider a reasonable workload. But we live in an always-changing society. Of course, our nature always wants more, whether it’s priests, money, comfort, food, whatever. At the same time, might it be that the more the faithful struggle, the more genuine our faith becomes. There might not be as many people in the pews as their used to be, but is the holiness of the average parishioner greater than it used to be, as practicing one’s faith becomes less and less popular in a secular world? Only God knows. But I’ve come to understand that trying to measure things and decide if there’s enough/not enough, good/bad, etc, can make an issue seem bigger than it is.
 
Glennon_P said:
Spoke to a priest after Mass and he mentioned that every Monday, one of his duties was to sort out the chips that had been contributed in the Sunday collection and return them to the respective casinos to be cashed in.
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I was first there when visiting, and before the shrine was built.

Mass in the co-cathedral (at the time; NV was still one diocese) on the hour, and overlapping Masses on the half hour in the hall.

The priest announced there was no need to be shy about casino chips, and that they made up about 10% of the collection each week. He was the one who made the trip on Monday to cash them in, and that he was the only one who came out of casinos with more money than he brought in :crazy_face:

Also, clergy and religious are required to wear street clothing in casinos . . . even when just passing through to a reception . . .
 
I don’t know; but a lot of priests in my diocese are from India or an African country. Which is encouraging to me, because some of those places have so many priests they are sending them to us
 
It depends really on where you are in the world on whether there is a shortage or not. Some countries are doing fine, others are not.

However, we are nowhere near the shortage crisis that occurred during and the decades following the Black Death. That was actually a crisis in shortage. Sometimes a town would be lucky to have a priest visit once a month for mass. It recovered. Though the causes behind the current one is different.
 
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