Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Archdiocese of New Orleans begins push for priests

After 14 months in office, Archbishop Gregory Aymond has begun to roll out his agenda for the Archdiocese of New Orleans on several fronts, one of which will be a sustained push to recruit new priests for a regional church that is steadily losing ground.
In other areas, Aymond has said he will convene a series of grass-roots archdiocesan meetings -- a rare synod, perhaps in 2012 -- to solicit parishioners' views on the archdiocese's future. 

And Aymond quietly has built bridges to angry Catholics whose parishes were closed in Archbishop Alfred Hughes' post-Katrina consolidation of parishes. Reversing earlier policy, Aymond has allowed two churches, Our Lady of Good Counsel and St. Henry, to reopen occasionally for special events.

Perhaps furthest along is Aymond's effort to solicit new vocations to the priesthood.
As a measure of its priority, Aymond pulled a priest, the Rev. Steven Bruno, out of parish ministry, where there is almost no one to spare, and put him to work as the first full-time vocations director the local church has had in several years.

Beyond that, Bruno and Aymond are laying plans to make vocations recruitment the next few years not merely a matter of prayer, but the focus of a visible on-the-ground campaign in Catholic schools and parishes -- reaching even to single men in the workplace.

In Austin, Texas, where he served for nine years before coming to New Orleans, Aymond developed a national reputation for cultivating vocations to the priesthood. 

By the time he left last year, he was turning away priests seeking to move to Austin because he had no place to put them, despite that diocese's rapid growth.

Homegrown priests wanted

New Orleans is in a different situation.

Despite its heavily Catholic cultural legacy, New Orleans has never been a rich seedbed for new priests, Aymond acknowledged in a recent interview.
 
In the 1970s, Archbishop Philip Hannan recruited Irish priests for New Orleans. And the influx of Catholic Vietnamese immigrants in New Orleans in the mid-1970s so energized the local church that the most common surname among archdiocesan priests today is Nguyen.

After Hughes' controversial 2009 consolidation of parishes, which the archdiocese said was partly driven by the short supply of priests, New Orleans has diocesan or religious-order pastors for each of its 108 parishes and their missions, Aymond said.

That is better than many regional Catholic churches in the Northeast, Midwest and Southwest, where it has become the norm to cluster two and three parishes together under the supervision of a single pastor, with lay assistance.

But many local parishes are nonetheless understaffed, with one priest doing what used to be done by two or more -- so much so that Aymond said burnout has become a major concern.

The Rev. Pat Williams of the priest personnel office said the archdiocese expects that 30 priests will reach the retirement age of 70 in the next five years, and that does not count unforeseeable losses by resignation, illness or untimely death.

Against that are 27 seminarians preparing for the priesthood. Yet it is quite common for some of those to drop out, and others may take more than five years to reach ordination, Williams said.

The bottom line, said Williams: The net number of priests in service will continue to drop.

Unlike Hughes and his predecessor, Archbishop Francis Schulte, Aymond said he is open to recruiting priests from overseas to fill a local shortage, but his longer goal is fixed on home-grown priests.

Sociologists determined decades ago that the biggest influences in nudging youths toward the priesthood were two: the example of a local priest, particularly one who explicitly asked whether a youth had considered the priesthood, and family life, particularly an encouraging mother.

To that end, Aymond and Bruno are planning a campaign to redouble local pastors' efforts to reach out to interested young men.

"About 80 percent of priests say their call was influenced by a priest who invited them to think about it. But only about 30 percent of priests say they recently talked to someone about becoming a priest, " Bruno said.

In addition, students and parishioners in pews can expect to see seminarians talking about their personal stories, to make vocations less abstract and more personal. 

And next year, the archdiocese plans to open at St. Rita Parish in New Orleans a so-called "discernment house, " a residence where New Orleans-area men in secular jobs but considering seminary life can live in community to help inform their decision, Aymond said. 

That rectory already houses some men in that situation, but they are from the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux.

Getting beyond the scandal

Aymond and Bruno acknowledged an enormous challenge in the Catholic sex-abuse scandal that tarnished the reputation of the priesthood.

But evidence that the scandal has driven off vocations is ambiguous, at best.

At one level, there has been no significant national fall-off in the years since 2002, when the scandal broke out, said Mary Gautier, a researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

"We expected some suppressive effect, but we're not seeing that in the numbers," she said.

And locally, Notre Dame Seminary this year accepted a class of 10 men for their four to six years of study, an unusually large class, the archdiocese said.

On the other hand, there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the priesthood has fallen in stature among Catholic families with children.

Bruno -- who frequently helps out other pastors by saying Mass at other parishes and who makes a point of asking boys, teens and others if they have ever considered the priesthood -- said he has sometimes seen mothers physically interpose themselves between him and their sons, politely but firmly deflecting his question.

"We can teach with words," said Aymond, "but the greater reality is that our actions are going to have to speak louder than words. As the priesthood shows itself to be more healthy today than it was 10 years ago, we are going to have the opportunity to change that image. But it will take another decade for that to happen."

SIC:  NOLA/USA