Easter always brings with it the joyous celebration of  ordination season here in the
Archdiocese, along with the immense scramble to remember who I have to text/call/write to wish them a happy anniversary. This year I won’t be able to wish my friend
Fr. Earl Fernandes a happy twentieth anniversary because he will be on his canonical     retreat before his  ordination as a bishop. I guess that’s another anniversary to remember. At any rate, because of all these ordinations, I found myself looking at numbers for vocational health in different dioceses around   the country. There is an organization that categorizes dioceses as healthy, borderline healthy, maintaining, and unhealthy when it comes  to vocations. They run numbers based on number of ordinations per capita, parishes without a resident priest, percentage of priests that are temporarily serving in the diocese, etc. I imagined that I would see Cincinnati in the “healthy” or at least “borderline healthy” category, but I was surprised to see that    we were listed as simply “maintaining.” It is a bit    disheartening to think about the fact that one of our strengths over the last fifteen years is still not enough to earn us the rank of “borderline healthy.”

Beacons of Light has thrown into sharp relief the fact that we simply don’t have as many priests as we would like to care for each of the individual communities in the Archdiocese. It has not, however, brought to the forefront a related fact: we have about the right number of priests for the people we actually have. The ratio of active priests
to active Catholics does not change nearly as much  as the ratio of active priests to parishes does.

Yes, every parish used to have at least one resident priest. But those parishes also had substantially more people to care for, and the priests were we to live in community and take on a more  manageable and fulfilling workload that didn’t involve the administration of multiple communities. The increase of lay oversight and participation in
leadership in the Church has been indispensable, but also not enough to offset the shifting sandsin the Archdiocese.
 
I say all of this to encourage two different prayers here in our region as we celebrate Easter and ordinations. First, pray in thanksgiving to God for the vocations He has already raised up, and for the continued sending of workers into the harvest.
We would be in an even worse bind if we hadn’t seen a big uptick in new vocations here in the  Archdiocese over the last decade. But we must also pray for wisdom to see clearly the path that lies before us, and how our expectations must adapt. This doesn’t mean that we have to accept a weaker church, but it does mean that we have to embrace sacrifice and change in order to follow the path that God sets before us. We are not going to be able to turn the clock back to the 50’s, or the 70’s, or any other preferred golden age, nor is that what God wants for His Church. He has placed us here and now because this is where we were meant to be participating in the Church on earth. There is immense comfort in knowing that God foresaw all of this and trusted us to take part in this mission. Know of my prayers for all of you, and please continue to pray for me and my brother priests in the Archdiocese as we seek to help the Church to flourish and thrive in holiness.