130 - The Future of Catholic Leadership: Responses to the Priest Shortage

The Future of Catholic Leadership: Responses to the Priest Shortage

By Dean R. Hoge

Kansas City, Sheed and Ward, 1987. 270 Pp. $12.95.

Dean Hoge is a Protestant layman and professor of sociology at the Catholic University of America. One might expect these two characteristics to qualify him for an objective, professional, competent evaluation of the current "vocation" shortage in Catholicism, a shortage which, as he notes, is not to be found among other denominations. The book does not disappoint. While Hoge's evidence strongly suggests that either the ordination of married men or the ordination of women would provide Catholicism with more clergy than it could conveniently employ, he makes no recommendations on either of these hotly debated issues, a restraint for which one looks in vain in most Catholic social science discussions of the declining number of priests.

Hoge divides the options available to Catholic leaders under four categories: (1) "Type A Options" (reduce the need for priests); (2) "Type B Options" (get more priests with existing eligibility criteria); (3) "Type C Options" (get more priests with broadened eligibility criteria); (4) "Type D Options" (expand the diaconate and the lay ministries).

With commendable resourcefulness and determination, Hoge examines each of these groups of options, using existing data, collecting new data, evaluating the reactions of laity and clergy to the strategies, and comparing the Protestant situation for possible illumination. Table 24

132 - The Future of Catholic Leadership: Responses to the Priest Shortage

summarizes the findings of his study. Only the ordination of married men and the expansion of lay ministries have, at the present time, any promise of responding with high impact to the priest shortage. Permitting a limited term service would have medium impact. The other changes would not have much impact (ordination of women would not, he judges, have an immediate great impact).

I have two minor reservations with this excellent book. First, I think it is a mistake to cite the "Notre Dame Parish Study" along with other data used. The sampling techniques simply are not adequate for major research. Second, it seems to me that Hoge overemphasizes the assimilation of American Catholics. Robert Paul Johnson's study of intermarriages, for example, shows that the "intrinsic" intermarriage rate (the rate which considers the upward social mobility of a population) has actually declined in recent years. This disagreement is relatively minor since Hoge sees the priest shortage as institutional rather than cultural, and I completely agree.

It is improper to demand of a scholar a book he did not intend to write. But, by the way of a suggestion for further research, it might be well to address a question that this study explicitly excludes, namely, "Why have the number of Catholic vocations declined so sharply in recent years-and all over the world?" Celibacy is usually the answer one hears, but there is reason to be skeptical about the answer. Celibacy did not suddenly become difficult in 1965. I would suggest, as a hypothesis to investigate, the following: the euphoria of the years immediately after the Vatican Council was shattered by the pastorates of Paul VI and John Paul II. As a result, the Catholic Church is beset by a disenchanted (though loyal) laity, a demoralized clergy, a timorous hierarchy, and an obdurate Curia. Under such circumstances, who would expect vocations to flourish?

As far as I am aware, there is not a single diocese in the country that has devoted major resources of money and personnel to a crash program of vocation recruiting. Such a program (under Hoge's "B" options) has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried. Just as the present Catholic leadership is incapable of responding to the loss of half of its income (in real dollars) since 1965, it is similarly paralyzed in the face of the loss of vocations to the priesthood.

This "paralysis" hypothesis is not impossible to test, though it would require a notable exercise in sociological imagination. I believe that Dean Hoge is capable of such an exercise.

ANDREW M. GREELEY

University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona