As he sat in Church last Sunday afternoon, Guillaume Humblot found himself troubled by the declining number of Catholic priests in France, and asked himself if he was ready to join the cloth.
“There are almost none left,” the 31-year-old Humblot said.
On Facebook, Humblot discovered a forum dedicated to people who, like him, are considering the priesthood. The page was part of a campaign, launched by the Catholic Church this month, to attract young people to the priesthood following decades of dwindling ordainments ”” and amid waves of sexual abuse allegations that have darkened the reputation of the Catholic priest.
Short-term, impersonal gimmicks like the Facebook campaign and handing out 70K postcards obviously won’t fix long-term, systemic problems with recruiting clergy, although they help create a more positive general climate in which personal appeals may have more traction. Radical, lifetime commitments aren’t made on the basis of such shallow enticements, but such advertising can be useful in planting the seed of new ideas, like “Well, why not me?”
This AP story run by USA Today doesn’t give stats on the average age of RC priests in France or the US, but I was actually pleasantly surprised that in Italy the national average was just 60 (although that was back in 2003). And I feared that attendance at mass might be even lower than it apparently is. With some 64% of the French population claiming to be Catholic, roughly 41.6 million of the approximately 65 million inhabitants of France, only a little more than 2 million bother to go to an RC church each Sunday/weekend. But hey, that beats the number of Anglicans who attend the CoE each Sunday, which is only about 1 million (although England also has signficantly less people than France, only about 50 million), still the miniscule percentage of worshippers is even worse among English Anglicans than French Catholics.
David Handy+
#1: but the total church attendance is higher in the UK when you add Catholics, Anglicans and other Christians – maybe 4.5 millions in toto. Still not good, and too many of them too old to have children.
It is in the “mainstream” French Church that there a crisis of vocations. Traditionalist seminaries are having to turn men away because demand is far outstripping capacity. If I recall correctly a quarter of the seminarians in France are now from traditionalist groups (including the SSPX). Their influence hasn’t yet been felt simply because the French hierarchy is almost completely dominated by modernists, though this has started to change. It is no coincidence that the second largest seminary in France is in the small diocese of Fréjus-Toulon under Bishop Dominique Marie Jean Rey who has opened it to adherents of both forms of the Roman Rite, and ordains & incardinates traditionalists into the diocese.
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2009/08/of-note-from-frejus-toulon.html