A bit of Roman seasoning can be good for priests
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1John5918
Math problems aside, a bit of Roman seasoning can be good for priests (Crux)
A thoughtful article. It acknowledges the massive imbalance in the ratio of priests to people in Rome (the so-called "math problem"):
while the ratio of priests to lay faithful in the US and Europe overall is about 1-1,300, at the station churches {in Rome} it’s usually more like 1-2 or 1-3. It’s a reminder of an inescapable truth about Rome: There may be a priest shortage in the rest of the world, but definitely not here. Bishops who come to Rome from, say, the Amazon, or the Pacific Islands, or sub-Saharan Africa, or from other points of the compass where the priest-to-person ratio can soar as high as 1-10,000 or more, often can’t help fuming over the surfeit of clergy here... Overall, almost three-quarters of the Catholics in the world are in the global south, yet more than two-thirds of the Church’s priests are in the global north. Purely in terms of understanding one’s market, that can’t help but seem a dubious allocation of personnel...
On the other hand, it points out the benefits of exposing priests, particularly from the insular USA, to the broader universal catholic-with-a-small-c Catholic Church:
an average day might involve spending time with a talented lay academic from Slovakia, a visiting priest from Nigeria and a lay professional from Bolivia, all of whom have stories to tell about how the faith plays out back home.
It’s a rolling education in the realities of a global Church, which is especially valuable for Americans, for whom the lack of a strong sense of the universal church tends to be our Achille’s heel. Americans tend to assume our experiences are those of the world, our priorities are everyone else’s, and our solutions should work everywhere.
The demographic situation of the Church in the early 21st century is this: There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and roughly 70 million in the U.S. That means American Catholics are just six percent of the global Church, and hence the price of a seat at the table is learning to think in a global key.
Second, spending some time in Rome is also an education in Italian flexibility. The late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was fond of saying that Americans may be ecclesiastically Catholic, but they remain culturally Protestant. He meant that the cultural foundations in America include a strong dose of Calvinist rigor, which can translate into American Catholics, including our clergy, coming off as fusspots, insisting on exacting obedience to even minor rules and protocols. Legendarily, Italians are masters of adaptation...
A thoughtful article. It acknowledges the massive imbalance in the ratio of priests to people in Rome (the so-called "math problem"):
while the ratio of priests to lay faithful in the US and Europe overall is about 1-1,300, at the station churches {in Rome} it’s usually more like 1-2 or 1-3. It’s a reminder of an inescapable truth about Rome: There may be a priest shortage in the rest of the world, but definitely not here. Bishops who come to Rome from, say, the Amazon, or the Pacific Islands, or sub-Saharan Africa, or from other points of the compass where the priest-to-person ratio can soar as high as 1-10,000 or more, often can’t help fuming over the surfeit of clergy here... Overall, almost three-quarters of the Catholics in the world are in the global south, yet more than two-thirds of the Church’s priests are in the global north. Purely in terms of understanding one’s market, that can’t help but seem a dubious allocation of personnel...
On the other hand, it points out the benefits of exposing priests, particularly from the insular USA, to the broader universal catholic-with-a-small-c Catholic Church:
an average day might involve spending time with a talented lay academic from Slovakia, a visiting priest from Nigeria and a lay professional from Bolivia, all of whom have stories to tell about how the faith plays out back home.
It’s a rolling education in the realities of a global Church, which is especially valuable for Americans, for whom the lack of a strong sense of the universal church tends to be our Achille’s heel. Americans tend to assume our experiences are those of the world, our priorities are everyone else’s, and our solutions should work everywhere.
The demographic situation of the Church in the early 21st century is this: There are 1.3 billion Catholics in the world, and roughly 70 million in the U.S. That means American Catholics are just six percent of the global Church, and hence the price of a seat at the table is learning to think in a global key.
Second, spending some time in Rome is also an education in Italian flexibility. The late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago was fond of saying that Americans may be ecclesiastically Catholic, but they remain culturally Protestant. He meant that the cultural foundations in America include a strong dose of Calvinist rigor, which can translate into American Catholics, including our clergy, coming off as fusspots, insisting on exacting obedience to even minor rules and protocols. Legendarily, Italians are masters of adaptation...
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