It’s been a good and a bad month for Catholics. On the good side, we have a pope: Leon XIV took over and, thus far, he is moving at the speed of light to move the Catholic Church in the right direction. That’s the good news.
The bad news? We have a severe shortage of priests around the world. But since I’m based in Albany, New York, I’d like to focus on not just my diocese as a whole but write more specifically about the part of the diocese that serves Albany proper. We have a shortage as well and it’s causing stress for our area priests.
The two priests assigned to my parish are running at least three parishes each. Since they’re so busy, we’ve had a wave of priests who have been called out of retirement. The same is true for other parishes in Albany.
Running just one parish is stressful enough. I volunteer to perform data entry tasks in my home parish. I’ve seen first-hand how busy and stressed the head priest is. I’m not sure that he gets even one day off and if that’s true, then he’s got to be really stressed out.
I feel bad for the priests who have been dragged out of retirement, maybe even kicking and screaming. Our what I call guest priests each have their own personalities, just as working priests do. One of my favorite priests says, “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
This shortage of priests cannot be easily resolved. After all, you can’t just post a listing for a priest job on, say, Indeed. It takes many years for a man to be ordained a priest. Because of that, we need those guest priests and we need them yesterday.
Hopefully, more priests will be ordained in our diocese. This problem won’t be resolved over night, but it can and will be resolved at one point. That’s the beautiful thing about the Catholic Church. This is God’s church, founded in 33 AD by Jesus Christ. God won’t let it get worse than it is right now. God will take care of His church and as a result, we will soon have the priests who we need.