Shortstaffed Catholic Church Imports Priests

It turns out that administering mass is one of those jobs that Americans just won't do.

The Catholic Church in the U.S. has been changing in interesting ways in recent years.  The church itself is growing due to the fast-growing Latin@ population, but its seminaries are empty and its priests are overburdened.  So the church has done what other shortstaffed global organizations have done: recruited aggressively abroad.  From the Times today:

OWENSBORO, Ky. — Sixteen of the Rev. Darrell Venters’s fellow priests are running themselves ragged here, each serving three parishes simultaneously. One priest admits he stood at an altar once and forgot exactly which church he was in.

. . .

“If we didn’t get international priests,” [Venters] said, “some of our guys would have had five parishes. If one of our guys were to leave, or God forbid have a heart attack and die, we didn’t have anyone to fill in.”

In the last six years, he has brought 12 priests from Africa, Asia and Latin America who are serving in this diocese covering the western third of Kentucky, where a vast majority of residents are white. His experiences offer a close look at the church’s drive to import foreign priests to compensate for a dearth of Americans, and the ways in which this trend is reshaping the Roman Catholic experience in America.

One of six diocesan priests now serving in the United States came from abroad, according to “International Priests in America,” a large study published in 2006. About 300 international priests arrive to work here each year. Even in American seminaries, about a third of those studying for the priesthood are foreign-born.

But priests, nuns, and members of religious orders can't just waltz into the U.S. in the post-9/11 world.  Conservatives raised alarms that the "R" religious worker visa program was being used by terrorist organizations to import radical clerics to bring down American democracy from within . . . or something like that, I have a hard time following Michelle Malkin's train of thought, if you can call it that.  As a result, the government conducted an investigation of the program and found a high level of fraud, and proceeded to make the path to the visa longer and more convoluted.

Someone should tell Bill O'Reilly.

To succeed, Father Venters has also had to learn to navigate the immigration system, which has become so restrictive since the Sept. 11 attacks that even priests with invitations to work have trouble getting into the country.

At one point, he sent so many FedEx letters to Nigeria that the Department of Homeland Security suspended his account until he proved he worked for a legitimate church.

At some point with all the security scares, the government seems to have forgotten that the Catholic Church has by a good margin the largest membership of any church in the U.S.  I'm not Catholic, but I worked for the church in Brooklyn for two years, so I'm familiar with some of the issues discussed in this article.  I know, for instance, that USCIS officials routinely request baptismal certificates from Catholic priests to prove their membership in the church.  It never made much sense to me, but there must have been some reason for it . . .

In 2002, when Father Venters began his recruitment drive, he was looking at a diocese that, like many in the United States, had growing needs and fewer priests to serve them.

Hispanic Catholic immigrants were pouring into Kentucky, drawn by jobs in poultry plants and construction. The diocese estimates that its Catholic population of 60,000 includes 10,000 Spanish-speaking parishioners who arrived in the last 10 years.

But the pool of priests was shrinking, from retirements, deaths and a handful who were removed from ministry after accusations of sexual abuse of young people. They were also growing elderly: eight were over age 70.

Venters remembered how it was when he joined the priesthood.

Back then, he phoned the Diocese of Owensboro and asked to sign up for seminary. His class at St. Meinrad School of Theology had 48 students, and in 1989, he was one of seven new priests ordained by Bishop McRaith.

But within 10 years, the vocations dried up. It has been five years since a new priest was ordained in Owensboro. The next ordination, of two priests, is expected next year.

But just as the abuse scandal was not limited to the U.S., the shortage of priests is a global trend.

Most of the priests serving in Owensboro support Father Venters’s recruiting drive, but some voice doubts. The Rev. Dennis Holly, with the Glenmary Home Missioners, an American order dedicated to serving regions that are not predominantly Catholic, like Western Kentucky, believes America is essentially taking more than its share of resources, behaving like a mere consumer by spending money to attract priests from countries that have even greater shortages. He thinks the Catholic church should place priests where they are needed most around the globe.

“We experience the priest shortage, and rather than ask the question, ‘Why do we have a priest shortage?’ we just import some and act like we don’t have a priest shortage,” Father Holly said. “Until we face the issue of mandatory celibacy and the ordination of women, we can’t deal with the lack of response to the invitation to priesthood.”

. . .

After the Kenyan priest arrived, Father Venters went on a recruiting spree, collecting priests from Nigeria, Uganda and India.

The bishops in Africa were far more willing than those in Latin America to allow their priests to leave because some African dioceses were ordaining so many they could not afford to keep them on the payroll. But Father Venters really needed priests who spoke Spanish. He cast a wide net, sending letters to every bishop in Mexico describing the diocese’s dire situation.

He got few responses. It turned out that the bishops in Mexico were receiving similar pleas from bishops all over the United States. And the Mexican bishops have a priest shortage of their own. (Mexico and Central and South America have one priest for about every 7,000 Catholics; the United States has one for every 1,500.)

With Bush's enforcement-only immigration policies, priests have become social workers and advocates for immigrant families who have essentially become fugitives in their adopted land.

In Kentucky, Father Jimenez was given a car, on which he logged 2,500 miles each month driving to his four parishes.

His cellphone rings constantly, with parishioners who need rides, who are scared in immigration raids, who need money to stave off an eviction or bail a relative out of jail. He accompanies them to the jail and the hospital, often to translate, even though he barely speaks English. By the time he returns to the rectory, often after 11, he is exhausted.

For all that Bush claimed to be a proponent of religious life in America, in my time working in Catholic immigrant communities, I never saw it.  Instead, the church has found itself devoting resources to damage control from raids and a campaign of intimidation directed at immigrant populations.

The global Catholic Church, like other international religions, has a different set of stakeholders than U.S. politicians and bureaucrats, and therefore has become a powerful advocate for migrants.  But the tension between the needs of U.S. parishes and those of its sister parishes abroad demonstrate that, as ever, underlying social problems will not be resolved by migration alone.