History

.....working for a renewed priestly ministry.....

Catholics for Ministry (CfM) is a group of Catholics who are working for the renewal of the ministry of the Catholic church. Central to this is a reform of the priestly ministry. CfM are calling on the bishops of Australia to assume authority for ordaining a sufficient number of ministers to provide ...

* regular celebration of Mass

* easy accessibility to the celebration of the Sacraments

* adequate leadership and pastoral care for communities and parishes

This also involves a renewed commitment to evangelization, especially of young people. CfM points out that the current acute shortage of priests is completely artificial because of the requirement of celibacy.

In order to bring these issues to public notice, CfM launched a Petition asking the bishops to ordain priests for our parishes and communities. The Petition got under way began in late August - early September 2007 and it will run until mid-November 2007.

A plenary session of the Australian Catholic Bishops' Conference (ACBC) meets in Sydney in late-November and the Petition is specifically asking the bishops to consider the issues CfM has raised and it is asking the ACBC to take up the whole matter of ordination and the renewal of priestly ministry with the Vatican.

The Text of the Petition

It all started when Paul Collins and Frank Purcell and twenty-nine other Catholics, including priests and sisters, wrote to every bishop in Australia - both active and retired - setting out the terms of the Petition and asking the bishops to include these issues on the agenda of their November meeting. Fourteen bishops responded to the letter Most were positive, a few non-committal and only one negative but still friendly. CfM believes that Australian Catholics are very lucky. Fortunately we still have a big majority of bishops whose orientation is essentially pastoral and whose primary care is for people and the needs of their dioceses.

Last year in OnLine Catholics (Issue 112, 7 July 2006) Father Eric Hodgens, then Parish Priest of Melbourne's North Balwyn, analyzed the Bishops' Conference and he divided it into three loose groupings.  We could call these groups...

* the ‘boots and all brigade'

* the ‘cautious'

* the ‘pastoralists'.

Hodgens describes the first group as ‘hard right wing and fundamentalist'. However, there are very few of them, probably no more than six. The cautious ‘support the Roman line for ideological or opportunistic reasons'. There are probably between seven and nine of these, many in powerful positions. The rest fit into the pastoral category.

That's why we're lucky in Australia. There are forty-three active bishops. This means that at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight fit into the more open, pastoral category. Hodgens argued in July 2006 ‘Now is the time for them [the pastorally-oriented bishops] to caucus, get a leader and act - redeem the situation. And they must do it urgently ... Their successors will simply not have the nous. Now is our last chance.' He is right.

Taking their cue from Hodgens, Frank Purcell and Paul Collins decided the time had come to try to find a way to support the pastoral bishops, while at the same time highlight that a bishop's primary responsibility is to his diocese. Only secondarily is he responsible for the universal church through his membership of the college of bishops. At the same time Purcell and Collins were concerned about the acute shortage of priests that was becoming more and more apparent in Australia. Again Eric Hodgens had diagnosed the situation. He shows that ‘the heyday for [priestly] recruitment was the mid-1950s. For every 100,000 Catholics 5.5 to 6.3 students [entered the seminary]. This was more than a 25% increase on pre-war recruitment levels.' The retention rate of students - that is, how many went on to ordination - was between 33% and 40% at the start of the 1960s.

Since the late-fifties recruitment has steadily dropped. ‘This continued for 35 years and settled in the mid nineties. The final rate was only 10% of what it was at the peak.' Only about a third of those recruited proceed to ordination. At present the church is ordaining about 0.15 to 0.25 priests per 100,000 Catholics each year. There is no sign of an increase despite claims of slightly bigger numbers in the Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and the Neo-Catechuminate seminaries (‘An Alternative to the Priest', Online Catholics, 28, 1/12/04).

Hodgens pointed out that the age of ordination has risen and that priests will have shorter periods of service. Until the mid-nineties men were usually ordained around the age of twenty-seven giving about thirty-eight years of service to the church. The average age of ordination now is thirty-five, giving around thirty years of service. ‘At this rate, even if they all stay priests, the long term result will be one priest for every 13,000 [Catholics] in Victoria and Queensland and one for every 22,000 in NSW'. In other words about 7.5 priests per 100,000 Catholics. Hodgens says ‘That means that Melbourne with its one million plus Catholics and 220 parishes will have only 75 priests'.