No Catholic priests, no Catholic Church?

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 20, 1995 by Tim Unsworth

Leo now supplements his income presiding at burials of souls that are unattached to a church, including many Catholics whose families stopped practicing after confirmation.

Leo wears something appropriate, does a decent service and shares a piece of the $150 add-on that the funeral director collects for the use of the room, including the rented crucifix and statue of the Blessed Mother. In a good month, Leo can add about $200 to his pension. It enables him to eat Chinese once a week.

Weddings may cause priests to stretch the most. "If they come to my parish," one pastor said, "I have to assume that they're people of good faith. I'm not a cop. Sometimes, their backgrounds are so confusing all I can do is wipe the slate clean and start them all over again."

All this comes at a time when the institutional church acts increasingly like the U.S. Post Office administration with autocratic managers engaging in tactics that only engender more frustration and anger. "I just got a long letter from my bishop," one pastor wrote. It was two pages on the use of the word host vs. bread. I tossed it in the kitchen basket."

It comes, too, when seminaries can't recruit the best. It comes when dioceses like Altoona-Johnstown, Pa., announce that they'll close 38 of their 138 parishes by 2000; Providence, R.I., announces that it may close or merge 30; Pittsburgh has gone from 323 parishes to 220; Dayton, Ohio, projects only nine priests for 17 parishes in the inner city. The list simply grows.

Meanwhile, face-to-face reconciliation can take up to nine minutes per soul and U.S. bishops forbid group reconciliation.

Indeed, perhaps the one thing permitting the church to keep its head above water is the fact that fewer Catholics are practicing. Thus, one parish, so large that a priest-friend likens it to an aircraft carrier, has an attendance rate of only 30 percent among its 17,000 parishioners. At Christmas, it takes 17 Masses to handle the backsliders who appear only on those feasts ranked in the ordo as doubles of the first class. But on Sundays, they manage with five Masses only because a lot of their parishioners are off to the links.

In the tiny diocese of Victoria, British Columbia, Bishop Remi J. DeRoo takes a philosophical view of declining practice. He has been living with that evolving diocese since he was installed in 1962. In 33 years, the percentage of Catholics in Canada's most western province has increased from 10 percent to 18 percent, but the number attending Mass has remained at 10 percent.

DeRoo is unruffled. "Jesus was never a parishioner," he said. "He never intended to found a church."

DeRoo believes that Catholics may be evolving into a community that doesn't need new churches. The most promising Catholics, he finds, don't see themselves as related to a specific parish. He is witnessing the establishment of ecumenical communities not related to parishes or leashed to a chancery desk. In fact, he finds that small Christian communities controlled by priests have a lower survival rate than the freestanding ones.