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Crisis in Catholic Church Ministry not abating

In the most detailed report ever issued on the state of Australian’s 1300 Catholic parishes, researcher Dr Peter Wilkinson predicts that Catholic parish ministry in Australia is facing a real disaster.

Issued earlier this year, Wilkinson’s research paper Catholic Parish Ministry in Australia: Facing Disaster? was sponsored by two groups of lay Catholics, Women and the Australian Church (WATAC) and Catholics for Ministry (CfM). He has just issued an update drawing on the latest statistics from the Official Catholic Directory 2011-2012. Wilkinson says that the latest official data showed that “there was little progress in dealing with the huge crisis confronting the Catholic Church in Australia”.

Symptomatic of the situation is that in the last year alone sixty-seven more parishes lost their  full-time resident priest and an extra seventy-two parishes now have had to share their priest with at least one other parish. In fact now less than 70% of all Catholic parishes in Australia have a full time resident priest.

Increasing numbers of overseas-born and trained priests are being brought into Australia on temporary contracts. Approximately fifty more entered the country in 2010-2011. Overseas-born priests – most from Vietnam, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, India and Poland – now make-up a quarter of all priests in parish ministry and Wilkinson predicts that half of all priests in parish ministry will be overseas-sourced before 2020, nine years from now. Most of these priests are brought in on short-term visas under a Labor Agreement negotiated between the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference and the federal Department of Immigration.

He also points out that because many bishops are reaching the mandatory retirement age of 75, and some have retired early,  within a 15 month period (May 2011 to August 2012) eleven new bishops will need to be appointed to Australian dioceses, a 30% turn-over.

As a result of his research Wilkinson concludes that the Australian bishops have still not really faced-up to the crisis the church faces and that the short-term, stop-gap strategies that they propose simply don’t work. He says that Australian Catholicism is increasingly focused on internal issues.

Wilkinson says the denial of natural justice to Bishop William Morris of Toowoomba after his forced removal earlier this year shows that the church is “out of touch with contemporary Western jurisprudence and at odds with the best of Australian values. Until the underlying injustice of this affair is addressed and rectified, it is likely to be a running sore every bit as disastrous as the way sexual abuse crimes were handled”. It is these kinds of issues, he says, that test “the credibility and leadership qualities of the Australian hierarchy”.