MilNewsBuzz: Is Milwaukee’s priest shortage slowing?

Church officials are hoping an increase in the number of priests graduating from the Milwaukee Archdiocese’s St. Francis de Sales Seminary will help slow Milwaukee’s growing priest shortage. But it might not be enough as priests ordained during the 1960s and 1970s, when the church experienced tremendous growth, begin to retire.

The Archdiocese, which spans 210 parishes in ten counties in Southeastern Wisconsin, greeted the ordination of six seminary graduates last year as the sudden reversal of a long drought. It was the largest class to graduate in 17 years. Previous classes produced just one or even no new priests. [Want to know why?  Read Good Bye, Good Men]

This year, the seminary ordained almost as many new clergy for the Archdiocese. Five graduates were ordained. Father Don Hying, seminary rector, says he expects six ordinations next year, then five and potentially a record seven in 2013. They would be arriving just in time, as retirements continue to drive down the ranks of clergy in Milwaukee and around the country.  [Lets do some math.  Arch Dolan arrived in Milwaukee in 2002.  It takes about 8 years of schooling.  Yes that's about right] 

“We’re still going to decline in numbers, especially when those ordained in the 1960s and 1970s retire or die,” he says. “We’re going to go down from where we are, but if we can continue to ordain six to 10 men a year, it will stabilize.”

For the past two years, for each priest who has retired or died, another has come in to take his place. But about five percent of the Archdiocese’s parishes lack a priest, according to Hying. Elsewhere in the country, particularly in rural areas, the figure is several times higher. [A tribute to the faith of the Milwaukee area Catholic community]

The national priest shortage was first studied in detail in the 1990s by a UW-Madison sociologist and former priest, Richard Schoenherr, who predicted, with the help of a team of researchers at a collaborator at Brigham Young University, that priests assigned to a diocese would drop 40 percent between 1966 and 2005. The estimate has largely proven accurate and was later extended to predict a 46 percent drop by 2015. [No really, read Good Bye, Good Men.  Liberals purposefully withheld non-liberal men from seminary and hoped a "shortage" of priests would bring about ordination of women and the Christ-like discipline of priestly celibacy.]

The reasons fewer are entering the priesthood are varied. High recruitment that began in the Great Depression and continued through World War II, the 1960 and the 1970s has proven impossible to sustain. (In 1956, the St. Francis seminary graduated 48 priests.) Some have blamed the clergy abuse scandals of more recent years. [No, no, really.  If you want the answers read it.]

“We’re going through a paradigm shift in many ways, not just in religion but in politics, economics; everything is fundamentally shifting in many ways,” Hying says. “Men becoming priests today is much more a radical choice because it’s not something necessarily supported by the culture.” [... Umm, I'm pretty sure Catholics have never been embraced with open arms in this country.  Ever heard of the Know-Nothings?]

In Milwaukee and around the country, mass attendance and the church’s reputation took major hits following the abuse scandals. In 2006, Milwaukee Magazine reported that parishioner attendance at weekend mass in the Archdiocese had dropped from 40 percent in the early 1990s to just 29 percent. Donations declined as well.  [If I was a parishioner of St John's Cathedral, I'm not sure I could still go to Mass either]

Is marriage the answer?

Some argue that relaxing rules on celibacy within the Roman Catholic Church and allowing priests to marry would alleviate the clergy shortage. [How are priestly numbers for Eastern Catholics whom have always had the option of marriage?]

Generally, a man cannot enter the priesthood if he intends to marry. But there’s an exception. Since the 1980s, if a married man has been previously ordained within another Christian religion, he can apply to become a Catholic priest. The applications are considered on a case-by-case basis. Some say[who?] the exception was created in response to a decline in priests entering seminaries.

Father Martin Barnum of Mundelein Seminary in Chicago estimates there are only about 250 married Catholic priests in the nation. There are none in the Milwaukee Archdiocese, he says, and none in the Chicago Archdiocese either. [And Milwaukee's numbers are better than the national average... so go figure]

But Milwaukee had one in 2008. Father Michael Scheip, a former Lutheran minister who became a priest in 1992, came to the Milwaukee Archdiocese in 2008 from Florida with a wife and five boys. Scheip served in the Archdiocese for about a year then returned to Florida, reportedly because he didn’t like the winters here. [A witch hunt for married clergy?  I wonder if that works for liberal clergy as well....]

David Backes, a UW-Milwaukee journalism professor and a deacon within the Archdiocese, says the issue is larger than the question of celibacy. “We’d get more (priests) if they could marry[I sincerely doubt it], but if you look at some of the main line Protestants that have married clergy and women pastors, their numbers have been shrinking too. It’s a larger problem of commitment,” he says. [Great point]

 MilNewsBuzz