After 14 months in office, Archbishop Gregory Aymond has begun to roll out his agenda for the Archdiocese of New Orleans
on several fronts, one of which will be a sustained push to recruit new
priests for a regional church that is steadily losing ground.
In
other areas, Aymond has said he will convene a series of grass-roots
archdiocesan meetings -- a rare synod, perhaps in 2012 -- to solicit
parishioners' views on the archdiocese's future.
And Aymond quietly has built bridges to angry Catholics whose
parishes were closed in Archbishop Alfred Hughes' post-Katrina
consolidation of parishes. Reversing earlier policy, Aymond has allowed
two churches, Our Lady of Good Counsel and St. Henry, to reopen occasionally for special events.
Perhaps furthest along is Aymond's effort to solicit new vocations to the priesthood.
As a measure of its priority, Aymond pulled a priest, the Rev. Steven
Bruno, out of parish ministry, where there is almost no one to spare,
and put him to work as the first full-time vocations director the local
church has had in several years.
Beyond that, Bruno and Aymond are laying plans to make vocations
recruitment the next few years not merely a matter of prayer, but the
focus of a visible on-the-ground campaign in Catholic schools and
parishes -- reaching even to single men in the workplace.
In Austin, Texas, where he served for nine years before coming to New
Orleans, Aymond developed a national reputation for cultivating
vocations to the priesthood.
By the time he left last year, he was
turning away priests seeking to move to Austin because he had no place
to put them, despite that diocese's rapid growth.
Homegrown priests wanted
New Orleans is in a different situation.
Despite its heavily Catholic cultural legacy, New Orleans has never
been a rich seedbed for new priests, Aymond acknowledged in a recent
interview.
In the 1970s, Archbishop Philip Hannan recruited Irish priests for
New Orleans. And the influx of Catholic Vietnamese immigrants in New
Orleans in the mid-1970s so energized the local church that the most
common surname among archdiocesan priests today is Nguyen.
After Hughes' controversial 2009 consolidation of parishes, which the
archdiocese said was partly driven by the short supply of priests, New
Orleans has diocesan or religious-order pastors for each of its 108
parishes and their missions, Aymond said.
That is better than many regional Catholic churches in the Northeast,
Midwest and Southwest, where it has become the norm to cluster two and
three parishes together under the supervision of a single pastor, with
lay assistance.
But
many local parishes are nonetheless understaffed, with one priest doing
what used to be done by two or more -- so much so that Aymond said
burnout has become a major concern.
The Rev. Pat Williams of the priest personnel office said the
archdiocese expects that 30 priests will reach the retirement age of 70
in the next five years, and that does not count unforeseeable losses by
resignation, illness or untimely death.
Against that are 27 seminarians preparing for the priesthood. Yet it
is quite common for some of those to drop out, and others may take more
than five years to reach ordination, Williams said.
The bottom line, said Williams: The net number of priests in service will continue to drop.
Unlike Hughes and his predecessor, Archbishop Francis Schulte, Aymond
said he is open to recruiting priests from overseas to fill a local
shortage, but his longer goal is fixed on home-grown priests.
Sociologists determined decades ago that the biggest influences in
nudging youths toward the priesthood were two: the example of a local
priest, particularly one who explicitly asked whether a youth had
considered the priesthood, and family life, particularly an encouraging
mother.
To that end, Aymond and Bruno are planning a campaign to redouble
local pastors' efforts to reach out to interested young men.
"About 80
percent of priests say their call was influenced by a priest who invited
them to think about it. But only about 30 percent of priests say they
recently talked to someone about becoming a priest, " Bruno said.
In addition, students and parishioners in pews can expect to see
seminarians talking about their personal stories, to make vocations less
abstract and more personal.
And next year, the archdiocese plans to
open at St. Rita Parish in New Orleans a so-called "discernment house, "
a residence where New Orleans-area men in secular jobs but considering
seminary life can live in community to help inform their decision,
Aymond said.
That rectory already houses some men in that situation, but
they are from the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux.
Getting beyond the scandal
Aymond and Bruno acknowledged an enormous challenge in the Catholic
sex-abuse scandal that tarnished the reputation of the priesthood.
But evidence that the scandal has driven off vocations is ambiguous, at best.
At one level, there has been no significant national fall-off in the
years since 2002, when the scandal broke out, said Mary Gautier, a
researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the
Apostolate.
"We expected some suppressive effect, but we're not seeing that in the numbers," she said.
And locally, Notre Dame Seminary this year accepted a class of 10 men
for their four to six years of study, an unusually large class, the
archdiocese said.
On the other hand, there is lots of anecdotal evidence that the
priesthood has fallen in stature among Catholic families with children.
Bruno -- who frequently helps out other pastors by saying Mass at
other parishes and who makes a point of asking boys, teens and others if
they have ever considered the priesthood -- said he has sometimes seen
mothers physically interpose themselves between him and their sons,
politely but firmly deflecting his question.
"We can teach with words," said Aymond, "but the greater reality is
that our actions are going to have to speak louder than words. As the
priesthood shows itself to be more healthy today than it was 10 years
ago, we are going to have the opportunity to change that image. But it will take another decade for that to happen."
SIC: NOLA/USA