At The Catholic Thing there is a fascinating read about the “status quaestionis” of priests in these USA.
“Stronger Families; Stronger Priests”
Here’s the opening.
In 2022, The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America – where I serve as director – conducted the largest study of American Catholic priests in more than half a century. This National Study of Catholic Priests (NSCP) looked at many aspects of how American priests are faring.
I have my own perspective on this.
Here’s the conclusion.
Before all, the formation of young Christian men is the responsibility of mothers and fathers. Fathers in a particular way. Parents, consider: Your son (or mine) may be someone’s husband someday. (I mention this as the father of three daughters.) Or he may be someone’s confessor. He may even be someone’s bishop. To paraphrase John Paul II, as the family goes, so goes the Church, the nation, and the world.
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I very much agree with the final paragraph, and the quote from St. John Paul. It illustrates the experience of a family at our sister parish.
The family is composed of faithful parents who do their best to instill their children with knowledge of our Faith and plentiful examples of how to live it, both in public and at home. They were also taught the logic of Catholicism, apologetics.
The 4th child of the 6 children is a son, who, like his siblings, was homeschooled until he entered the public high school where their father taught mathematics.
About 6 weeks before graduation, this young man was given an assignment by his American Government teacher to select an issue in American society and to write an essay defending his own view on the issue. John Paul (yes, John Paul – there is a story behind that – he was born the day St. John Paul died), decided to write on abortion, and defended the Church’s teaching on it. He asked his parents to check his spelling and grammar (no mistakes), and he submitted it on time. He was given an F because the teacher disagreed with his views. He did not attend his graduation ceremony in protest.
This incident pushed him to pursue what he had been discerning for some time – to enter the seminary of the Diocese of Cleveland to study and prepare for the priesthood. He is now in his second year of seminary and just celebrated his 20th birthday.
John Paul is not alone in his strong, faithful beliefs. Another young man from our parish entered the Benedictine monastery in Oklahoma and is in priestly formation, and two others are currently discerning entering our diocesan seminary. We are led by a young pastor, 41 years old, who became our pastor at the age of 34. He is very faithful, very pro-life, and fully lives the teaching of the Church. He, like our John Paul, has a great devotion to St. John Paul (he and his fellow seminarians had a private audience right before St. John Paul’s death), and to the Holy Mother of God.
If the future of the leadership of our Church lies with these young men and pastors and bishops like mine, we are in good and faithful hands. And I am very grateful. We in the laity must do our part and pray for their spiritual and physical health and protection every day without fail.
Peace to you, Father, and all here!
The intent to study the priests and discern their situation is a good one. Carrying that out…well, it’s a bit like bailing water out of a boat that’s already sitting on the bottom of the lake.
These young priests are also the most likely to demonstrate elevated signs of burnout in their ministry…
It used to be the case that a newly ordained priest could look forward to five, ten, or even fifteen years as an associate pastor before being made pastor…More and more young priests are being asked to serve as pastors at younger and younger ages…In this sense, that question all those bishops keep asking – “Are the young guys burned out or simply unused to hard work?” – is as much a question for parents, as it is for young men or seminary formators. Seminaries are working hard to bolster both the human formation and pastoral acumen of young priests. Like so much else, the challenges facing young priests are ultimately downstream from the crisis in the family.
Bullhonkey. The biggest challenge of the self-acknowledged highly conservative (read: orthodox) young priests is being a solid, wholly Catholic, wholly orthodox priests trying to save souls in a diocese where usually the bishop and the top-end administration are 4 to 10 levels of liberal away from anything remotely understood as orthodox, and won’t have his back when he teaches and rules the parish with Catholic teaching and rules, and when he says a reverent and holy mass. If he is not yet pastor, he has to hide 3/4 of his orthodoxy so the pastor doesn’t hate him. If he is made pastor, it’s for a parish that not only can’t stand the idea of returning to Catholic orthodoxy, they will openly attack him at the chancery if he tries. And even so, he is trying to save their souls, in spite of their efforts in the opposite direction. Is it any wonder that they feel overworked: if they don’t, they aren’t doing their jobs!.
The risk of a young orthodox priest being cancelled before (or just when) he makes any headway is serious. This having to constantly duck from “friendly fire” (though it’s anything but friendly) is, I suspect, more demoralizing than any 3 other difficult parts of the job. But also the prospect of coming “of age” (i.e. getting to your pastorship) just at a time when the diocese is closing yet another 20 parishes and doling out yet another $10 million in settlements is depressing: you have to do much, much more, with far fewer dollars AND fewer volunteers that you can trust are also orthodox, and yet you STILL have to put efforts into the bishops’ many sideline activities (like importing loads of new immigrants that need “services”).
I bet the study was funded, in part, by the bishops, and nobody allowed them to ask the real questions that needed to be asked. ‘Cause they already knew those answers, and didn’t want to hear them.
We are our rites.
When it comes to burnout I do know some good priests that are literally burning the candle at both ends between responsibilities and ministry. My old pastor would arise early to get a walk in for exercise and prayer time prior to the 6:25 am daily Mass (and he was close to sixty). I have a pastoral administrator who has a family at home (former Episcopal priest) and I see him juggling both vocations (yes, this is real since unlike others he is not an empty nester so it is more challenging). On the contrary, the pastor at the parish closest to my home (I do help out my council there) seems to be lazy and could do more than he does and I know a good late vocation priest (ordained at 50 about 5 years ago) who was made a pastor early on (i.e. experience in the real world he was a business owner and he is bilingual) of a parish in a smaller town that is growing and has a parish mission in the area as well. This pastor even helped start a Catholic Campus Ministry at a nearby college.
I do agree that priests are becoming pastors at a younger age and some are living alone in the rectory. During my own discernment process (I was in my mid-to-late thirties) several of us in discernment had held 9-to-5 jobs or came from armed forces or work in other areas (our average age was probably early 30s). Having real life experience helps with some soft skills that are helpful anywhere. Many priests ordained prior to 1970 were “lifers” particularly if they survived the 6+6 model that was normal in those days.
As for the recently ordained priest who was given six parishes I would like to get more details. If he is in a rural area (I have a buddy who works at a county hospital and drives 30 miles to attend the closest parish which has only one Mass at 8 am Sunday morning) he may have four parishes with one Mass each (including Saturday vigil). It could be a cluster in an urban area where distance isn’t a huge factor.
I would also be willing to bet that this particular priest with six parishes was a widower (probably had been a permanent deacon previously whose children are on their own – this is actually becoming more common for deacons who have been widowed, are empty nesters, are of a certain age and health and able to retire from a 9-to-5 career) who already has some valuable experience running a parish.