Study looks at foreign-born priests serving in U.S

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 24, 2006 by Patricia Lefevere

Americans are not blessed with long historical memories. Most seniors and older baby boomers-recall a U.S. church that once produced missionaries by the thousands and had sufficient clergy to serve every parish in the nation. But Hoge said that period lasted only from 1940 to 1960, when there was one priest for every 619 of the nation's 28 million Catholics. In previous decades, the church had to look abroad--mostly to Ireland. Since the 1980s it is doing it again.

Myth and fact

The sentiment that America has always given priests to missions in poor nations is "based on myth and not fact," the study states. But such myth impedes the receptivity to foreign-born priests by many laypersons, who feel embarrassed that today America needs to receive priests from abroad to satisfy its own clergy needs.

In 1968 the U.S. church charted its greatest number of missionaries abroad--9,655, of which 4,009 were diocesan and religious order priests. The others were laypeople. The most recent U.S. Catholic Mission Handbook (2004) lists 111 American-born diocesan priests and 1,420 American-born religious priests serving abroad. Almost 800 of these men are Jesuits, Maryknollers, Oblates, Franciscans or Divine Word missionaries.

What the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) declared has become a reality: Each local church is not only a sending church, but a receiving church, said Fr. Anthony McGuire, one of four commentators on the study. "To be a missionary church is not only to send but also to receive. This is the reality that the church in the United States is facing," said McGuire, a former missionary to Hong Kong, former director of the U.S. bishops' Office for the Pastoral Care for Migrants and Refugees, and now a pastor of a multicultural parish in San Mateo, Calif.

Still, there are critics who question whether the U.S. bishops have any right to accept or to request priests from areas where the number of priests to Catholics is fewer than in America. One of the sharpest critics is Philip Jenkins, a professor of religious studies at Penn State, whose 2002 book The Next Christendom points out the disparity in the ratio of priests to faithful in the North and Western world compared with the global South.

The United States has 1,375 Catholics per priest and Europe 1,374 compared with 7,138 per priest in South America, 6,944 per priest in Central America and the Caribbean, and 4,694 per priest in Africa. Given this contrast, Jenkins asks why America's prelates are bringing priests here from developing nations rather than sharing our priests "with countries having fewer priests but more prospects for growth?"

From a global perspective Jenkins argues the policy is at best "painfully short-sighted," and at worst "suicidal for Catholic fortunes."

Hoge finds Jenkins "half right and half wrong," and thinks bishops ought to pay an overseas diocese for the use of its priests. The book suggests a fee of $10,000 per year.

According to Okure, the dioceses of Harrisburg, Pa., and Richmond, Va., paid an annual stipend to reimburse foreign dioceses that send their priests.