‘Priests from Overseas’: Some Issues

Richard Lennan

Catholic Institute of Sydney

The lack of priests sufficient to maintain the structures of diocesan life in their present form calls for considered responses by Australian Catholics. Inviting numbers of priests from overseas to serve in Australian dioceses might be one of those responses, but ought not to be adopted as a quick fix to a pressing problem.

The shortage of priests is an ecclesial issue: it says something about both the ordained priesthood and about the life of the local church in Australia. This means that the most appropriate responses will be those that are themselves genuinely ecclesial. How might we arrive at such responses? The most comprehensive, albeit most challenging, answer to that question is that we must listen to the questions that the present situation raises about the life of our local church and strive to discern what the Spirit might be saying to our local church in the present context. This paper will discuss five implications of that answer.

First, it is important to reflect together on the shape of the church’s life in contemporary Australia in order to identify what has produced the current situation. This reflection includes exploring the current perceptions of ordained priesthood in the Catholic community, as well as how might these perceptions might attract or repel possible candidates for ordination. Only then will we have a shared understanding of why there has been both a steady stream of resignations from priestly ministry and an insufficient number of candidates for ordination. Without this shared understanding, it is surely impossible to determine whether bringing priests from overseas is an appropriate response.

Even more fundamentally, we need to reflect on what it means to be ordained, and who is eligible for ordination. Although these are potentially divisive issues, they are crucial if we are to know what sort of priests can best serve the Australian church today, and what sort of formation is appropriate for those priests. Bringing a significant cohort of priests from overseas might obviate the immediate need for such considerations, but we cannot avoid indefinitely questions that orbit around our current response to the challenges of communion and mission.

Secondly, we must acknowledge honestly that today’s situation is not simply the twenty-first century version of an earlier dearth of priests, which was met by the importation of large numbers of Irish priests. The Irish clergy arrived originally to serve a growing church, which was yet to develop a coterie of local clergy. The present prospect of importing priests, on the other hand, is a response to a severe, and ongoing, downturn in the number of ‘locals’.

Thirdly, we must acknowledge also that the importing of priests is not the product of a desire from within the contemporary Australian church to support the emerging churches of other nations or to enable the Australian church to be evangelised by priests from those emerging churches. In short, we must avoid deluding ourselves by the claim that bringing priests from overseas expresses magnanimity on our part. Indeed, seen in a less idealised light, the importation of priests might look like nothing grander than consumerism: a wealthy, first-world church can afford to ‘buy in’ priests from developing countries to maintain the ‘lifestyle’ – the existing structure of parishes and access to Eucharist - of Australian Catholics. Similarly, it is difficult to find any substantial evidence to indicate that priests from overseas have been invited to contribute to the re-shaping of the Australian church, rather than to its maintenance.

The consumerist approach means not only that the priests who come from overseas are simply absorbed into providing services for Australian parishes, but also that Australian are unlikely to consider the possible needs of the churches from which these priests might come. It is important, therefore, that we question whether meeting the needs of the Australian church by importing priests might actually damage local churches in other parts of the world by depriving them of precious human resources.

Fourthly, we must not lose sight of the fact that the pragmatic response to today’s need – ‘just get more priests’ - fails to engage with the key issues already identified. Pragmatism, which often expresses the Australian myth that we are a practical people, committed to ‘getting on with it’, and unsympathetic to either anguished ponderings or lofty imaginings, can be inimical to the challenge of authentic discipleship. Specifically, pragmatism not only breeds contempt for reflection, it can also buttress a refusal to engage with a reality bigger than our desire to ‘get on with it’. In opting for the ‘obvious’ solution of bringing priests from overseas, we might be avoiding engagement with the challenging mystery of God in the present moment of the church’s history. While the reduced number of priests is a challenge that calls for a concrete response, that response is most likely to embody our faith in the Spirit if it emerges from a thoroughgoing, and communal, discernment of the situation.

Doing no more than bringing priests from overseas assumes that diocesan and parish life should continue as closely as possible to what they have been in recent times. Communal discernment in the light of our present situation might produce other possibilities. Furthermore, a communal ecclesiology would stress that the discernment needs to be the work of the local church, needs to involve reflection on the pastoral priorities of the diocese, not simply of the bishop in isolation from his presbyterate and people. While one can, of course, feel great sympathy for bishops, who are often under pressure to deliver immediate solutions to pressing questions, this issue provides an opportunity for us to grow in our appreciation of the implications of sharing a communal faith.

Fifthly, even if a diocese should decide to bring priests from overseas, there are cultural challenges that need to be addressed with sensitivity and commitment. The priests who might come to Australia will work in an environment whose language, history, and culture are not their own. While it is obvious that such circumstances can generate a sense of isolation, they might also give rise, in both the priests themselves and the people to whom they will minister, to feelings of either cultural superiority or inferiority. In addition, the priests will encounter a church that also has a ‘culture’ other than the one they will have left. Here too, the same feelings of superiority or inferiority might arise.

A non-incarnational approach to matters of faith might suggest that such issues are largely irrelevant as both ‘the locals’ and ‘the immigrants’ should be willing to work at overcoming differences, especially as they are members of the one communion of the church. Not all difficulties, however, arise from a lack of either generosity or commitment to ‘love of neighbour’. Indeed, generosity and goodwill are more likely to be engendered when there is a manifest willingness to name and negotiate the cultural issues that are inevitably influential.

Most particularly, it is important that there is a detailed programme, and sustained commitment, to appropriate language training for the arriving clergy, which is far more than ensuring that they have enough English to enable them ‘to say Mass’. Nothing increases the isolation of immigrants, and the frustration of those with whom they are to work, than the lack of adequate language skills.

Similarly, there needs to be mechanism for initiating the priests into the local ecclesial culture so that they might appreciate both its strengths and challenges. What is also important is the provision of information and support to enable the members of local churches to understand why the priests are coming to Australia and what the implications might be for local congregations. A further implication is that dioceses need to develop ways to integrate the priests into local presbyterates as without this the incoming priests are likely to remain aliens in their new situations.

There is no doubt that the shortage of priests is an urgent issue for the contemporary church, including the church in Australia. There is equally no doubt that priests from overseas who come to Australia can display great generosity, commitment, and zeal. Nonetheless, the issues raised in this paper are significant enough to suggest that more reflection is needed on the topic of bringing priests to Australia. Such reflection can be an opportunity to explore the challenges of ‘being church’ in contemporary Australia and how we might respond to those challenges in ways that are both faithful to the tradition and receptive of the present initiative of the Holy Spirit. So fundamental are these questions, that it is appropriate to claim the issue as one that is ripe for synodal discernment by the whole of the local church of Australia.