On June 3, the Rev. Patric F. D’Arcy’s first Sunday officiating at his new parish as a newly ordained Roman Catholic priest in the Bronx, he offered Mass in crystal-clear Spanish in a packed sanctuary. Later, at a lunch celebration, his new parishioners welcomed him with trays of rice, beans and roasted chicken, and a white cake adorned with golden icing.
It was a festive event — a thanksgiving for the blessing of a new priest — that would normally take place in early June in at least several of the 370 parishes in the Archdiocese of New York.
But this year the New York Archdiocese has ordained only one new priest, Father D’Arcy. It is the first year that has happened since the archdiocese opened its seminary more than 110 years ago.
Being the archdiocese’s sole member of the Class of 2012 is a slightly uncomfortable distinction for Father D’Arcy, 33, a soft-spoken man who prefers to stay out of the spotlight.
He is not a native New Yorker, nor even an American citizen.
Father D’Arcy comes from a small suburb of Toronto, about 80 miles northwest of Niagara Falls, and transferred to the seminary here three years ago, he said, because he had a special interest in working with Latin American immigrants, and had heard that New York needed such priests.
Normally, young priests turn to their classmates for support as they navigate the transition from seminary to parish. Father D’Arcy, who lives with two more-senior priests in the rectory of Our Lady of Angels Parish in Kingsbridge, hopes that the years ahead will bring him such friends.
“That is a very real problem, that I don’t have brother priests my age: for me, it’s a little sensitive,” he said, sitting in the rectory’s quiet living room on his first day in residence there.
Parishes, he added, are busy places, and to cultivate friendships with other priests, “you need time and leisure, and priests don’t have so much time to do that.”
“That’s why you really have to get that done in the seminary,” he said.
Although at St. Joseph’s Seminary, the archdiocese’s priestly training school, he was the only student preparing to be a priest of the Archdiocese of New York this year, he did have three classmates who have become clergy members for other orders or dioceses: John Paul Ouellette, 43, a Franciscan friar who was ordained with him on May 19 and is living in a friary in Harlem; and two men from the Diocese of St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, who have returned there to become priests.
The number of seminarians has been declining, in New York and nationally, since the 1960s. St. Joseph’s, the New York Archdiocese’s stately limestone seminary in Yonkers, opened in 1896 with room for 180 students.
It graduated 25 or 30 men annually through the mid-1970s, but since the mid-1990s, most graduating classes have had fewer than 10 priests.
Before this year, the archdiocese’s smallest graduating class was in 1998, with two priests.
The archdiocese estimates that it would need 20 new priests a year to fill all open positions and allow priests to retire as they age.
But church officials say they see some signs of hope: nationally, as well as in New York, the number of seminarians has begun to inch up in the last several years, in part because of an increase in foreign-born priests.
Next year, eight men are expected to graduate from St. Joseph’s to become new priests of the archdiocese, and in 2014, six are expected. “I think the pendulum is beginning to swing back up,” said Bishop Gerald T. Walsh, the rector of the seminary.
This year’s small class was in some ways an anomaly: several men who would have been in the class were delayed from entering the seminary because of additional philosophy and theology study required by the Vatican beginning in 2006, archdiocesan officials said.
But the numbers are consistently low enough that the archdiocese has decided to make a change.
Starting next year, all seminarians from the Brooklyn and Rockville Centre Dioceses, who currently study in Huntington, N.Y., will study at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, along with the seminarians from the New York Archdiocese, which does not include Brooklyn or Queens, but extends northward nearly to Albany.
Last year, there were a total of about 50 seminarians at St. Joseph’s, including foreign priests doing advanced studies. Next year, about 90 are expected.
Father D’Arcy is the first priest in his large extended Irish-Canadian family, and he said none of his classmates in Catholic school joined him in pursuing the priesthood. Though he had thought about becoming a priest from the age of 6, after high school he went to a local university and got his bachelor’s degree in history. He spent six years, he said, as a history and religion teacher in a local Catholic school.
But his desire to become a priest did not go away, and shortly after Pope John Paul II died in 2005, he decided it was time to enroll in an undergraduate seminary in Canada.
John Paul II, he said, “was a good example of someone who gave their life to others, for the love of God, and I also wanted to do that.”
Father D’Arcy said that most people he had met while wearing his white collar had treated him with kindness, or at least indifference.
But four times as a seminarian, he said, he was cursed at or spit at on the street — twice in Canada and twice in New York — which he attributes in part to the “dark cloud” left by the sexual abuse crisis among the clergy.
He has already signaled to his fellow priests that he intends to take a conservative approach to his calling.
Father D’Arcy chose to celebrate the Mass the day after his ordination in Latin, in an unusual move for New York, and asked Msgr. Javier Garcia, vicar secretary for Opus Dei in the United States, to give the homily.
Two weeks later, Father D’Arcy celebrated Mass at his new parish in Spanish, as is typical there.
Father D’Arcy has spent summers teaching in Latin America, and in the days before his ordination, he said he found himself turning for inspiration to the Catholics killed in a 1920s Mexican rebellion sparked when the government tried to remove the church from public life.
In particular, he was meditating on the fate of a 14-year-old rebel, José Sánchez del Río, who was killed after refusing to renounce Christ, and was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
In our current culture, “there is an air of anti-Catholicism, anti-Christianity, anti-religion, maybe,” Father D’Arcy said. What happened in Mexico in the 1920s was an extreme, he added, “but it started somewhere.”