The pews are packed at many Catholic churches, but a scarcity of priests is leaving even some of the biggest parishes short-staffed and scrambling for help from retired and visiting clergy.
Recent examples aren’t hard to find:
–Just one full-time priest for months at 13,000-member St. Gabriel in Cotswold, N.C.
–A pastor’s heart-bypass operation, with complications, that left 14,000-member St. Mark in Huntersville, N.C., struggling to find substitutes to celebrate Mass.
–A sanctuary so crowded on Ash Wednesday that a parishioner at St. Matthew in Charlotte, where two priests serve a flock of 28,000, called the fire marshal.
Why not just build more churches? Not enough priests to staff them.
Good problem to have. Church growing faster than priests can be developed. We have a similar problem here in Arkansas. The Catholic population has zoomed from 5% of the population to just over 10% in a decade. The number of men in seminary has already doubled, but the pipeline is 8 years long. Unlike past decades when seminarians were white europeans, most seminarians are now hispanic with southeast asians equalling white europeans.