Hope blooms at CTU despite vocations drop

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 20, 1998 by Tim Unsworth

"Don't equate numbers with family," Brink cautioned. "It's not about numbers. It's about what makes me want to get up an hour and a half early to pray."

It's witness that counts

David Donnay will be ordained in 2000 as a priest of the Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, best known as Crosier Fathers, an order with 503 members worldwide, 330 of whom are ordained. Donnay is 28 and a former chef and youth minister from Wadena, Minn.

"I have a hard time understanding how it was," he said. "And I would have an even harder time doing what I'm doing if I weren't optimistic. But I'm more concerned with the attractiveness of our witness than about numbers."

At 38, Joyalito Tajoners, a native of the Philippines, who has lived in the U.S. since 1982, hopes to be ordained as a Maryknoll Father in 2002. Maryknoll ordained only two this past year but, according to Tajoners, some 16 to 20 lay missionaries enter each year to join other lay people, some of whom had joined for a year and have remained for 20 or 25 years. Maryknoll's associates program has been in existence for some 40 years and is now being adopted by many congregations.

"We are learning to realize the gifts of the non-ordained," said Joyalito, who grew up in the Philippines where huge parishes often had only one priest and the laity did the bulk of the work.

More than half of the Maryknollers in training are non-Caucasian. The Society of the Divine Word and the Viatorians also maintain their strength by welcoming candidates from the countries in which they serve. "We must be realistic," Tajoners said. "[The United States] has more priests than it needs. It only has to increase participation by deacons and laity. Chicago, with only 2.4 million Catholics, alone has more priests than Manila, which has 7.5 million Catholics."

Jozef Timmers, a Dutch-American seminarian and attorney from Kaukauna, Wis., agrees. He cited a Chicago parish with three priests that baptized three children last year. Timmers, who spent six years in Panama as a Capuchin brother, now finds his theologate education more challenging than law school.

"We're now more of a community than an institution," he said. "And there will be new forms of community, and life will grow."

The Capuchins are attempting to find trace marks of their original charism by emphasizing their role as brothers. Timmers will be a Capuchin priest, but his community life will bear the benchmark of brotherhood.

`I was seeking God'

Benedictine Sr. Molly Blackwell entered Mount St. Scholastica's, a Benedictine monastery in 1985. "I was seeking God in the context of a community," she said. "It was a good fit."

Blackwell's monastery is big. There are 230 in the community with an average age of 67 and only 10 sisters in their 30s.

"But I see hope in the fact that we're getting smaller even as we get into different ministries," Blackwell said. "We're trying to stick together, even as we move toward God.

"Frankly," she added with a smile. "I don't know any other way to live."