My parents go to a moderate-sized Catholic Church in New Jersey. Not long ago, some parishioners noticed that the pastor, who had come to the church several years before, seemed tired. In a conversation, he admitted that he had not had a vacation of any significant length for more than a decade.
Like many priests in this country, the man had been spreading himself thin for years. As the sole priest in a parish of more than 2,000 families, his administrative and pastoral duties combined to create an extremely heavy workload.
The death of Pope John Paul II over the weekend comes at a time when the Catholic population of the United States is continuing to grow, and the number of priests in the country is continuing to decline.
According to data compiled by Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the Catholic population of the United States has grown by about 41 percent over the past 40 years, to approximately 64.3 million. Over that same period, the total number of priests has declined by about 26 percent.
In 1965, there was about one priest in the United States to every 778 Catholics. In 2004, the ratio had nearly doubled, to one priest for every 1,485 American Catholics. In 1965, about 3 percent of the country's 17,637 Catholic parishes were without a resident priest. Today, about 17 percent of parishes have no resident priest.
The shortage of priests in the United States is nothing compared with the problems in other countries. Worldwide, there are nearly 2,600 Catholics for every ordained priest, and more than one in four Catholic parishes have no pastor.
As Catholics around the world celebrate the memory of John Paul II this week, they must also face a part of his legacy that arguably endangers the church that he worked tirelessly to strengthen: his adamant opposition to the ordination of women and the lifting of the requirement that priests remain celibate.
Shortly after becoming pope in 1978, John Paul II quashed any hopes the faithful might have held that he would consider removal of the celibacy requirement. In a letter to all Catholic priests in 1979, he called celibacy a “gift of the spirit” and characterized it as an essential element of the vocation of a Roman Catholic priest.
With a revision of Canon Law in 1983, the Vatican under John Paul II reinforced the requirement that only men can be priests; in 1995, the Vatican released a statement asserting that the ban on the ordination of women is an “infallible” statement of Catholic doctrine.
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I attended at different times two long-established churches. Both had a stable of priests who served together, lived together, and could share the burdens of their ministry with each other. It is now increasingly common for priests in the United States to serve with little or no assistance or companionship from other priests and to go home at night to empty houses -- not a recipe for emotional health or job satisfaction.
(As a corollary, it is not unreasonable to ask whether the clergy sexual abuse scandals of recent years are tied, in part, to the priests' increasing isolation in society.)
To be sure, the church's unwillingness to ordain women and married men is not the cause of the shortage of priests, as the same limitations were in place 30 years ago, when the number of priests in the United States was greater in both real and percentage terms.
However, lifting the celibacy requirement and allowing women to serve as priests might be the solution to the problem. Right now, half of the Catholics in the world are barred from the priesthood because of their gender, and an unknowable number of Catholic men are disqualified from the priesthood because they are married or might wish to be married someday.
A CNN poll conducted over the weekend found more than half of American Catholics in favor of allowing priests to marry and in favor of allowing women to be ordained. Similar sentiments have been found among Catholic populations in Europe.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which maintains job descriptions and seven-year employment outlooks for practically every imaginable profession, finds that the Roman Catholic priesthood is going to be strapped for recruits for the foreseeable future, noting, “The shortage of Roman Catholic priests is expected to continue, resulting in a very favorable job outlook through the year 2012.”
That seems unlikely to change any time soon, unless the as-yet-unknown successor to John Paul II can see his way to broadening the recruitment base for the priesthood.
Sadly, this seems improbable as well. The voting members of the College of Cardinals, which will elect the next pope, were overwhelmingly appointed by John Paul II and are believed to largely share his conservative views on the composition of the priesthood -- a dwindling fraternity that seems institutionally incapable of increasing its own numbers.
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Va., and is currently studying at Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
