As a regular part of his ministry, Archbishop Edwin O\u2019Brien of Baltimore says Masses on behalf of Catholics who have left the church.<\/p>\n
The unique element of these rites is that he offers his prayers for anyone he has \u2014 during his 45 years as a priest, with or without knowing it \u2014 driven away from Catholic pews and altars.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t the kind of ecclesiastical issue that makes headlines.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, this is a quiet kind of crisis that priests must take seriously, said O\u2019Brien, in a Franciscan University forum that included current and potential seminarians. How many lapsed or former Catholics, he asked, slipped away because they felt \u201ctalked down to or lectured at by preachers or confessors who don\u2019t really know them or who appreciate how difficult their struggles are just to get through life?\u201d<\/p>\n
How many, he added, are haunted by a clergy comment, \u201coften at an emotional time in their lives,\u201d that wounded them so deeply they became convinced that it justified leaving the church? How many drifted away to Protestant megachurches because of \u201cour dull, lifeless and irrelevant homilies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The priesthood has faced many crises during the past generation or two and O\u2019Brien offered no easy solutions. <\/p>\n
Obviously, he couldn\u2019t ignore three decades of scandals caused by the sexual abuse of thousands of children and young people by priests and bishops. O\u2019Brien also discussed the hierarchy\u2019s problems finding new priests, yet avoided the stark statistics that are so familiar to American Catholics. In 1965 they had 58,000 priests. Now there are about 40,000 and, if trends stay the same, there will be 31,000 in a decade, with most over 65 years of age.<\/p>\n
While these crises dominate the news, O\u2019Brien stressed that Catholic leaders cannot overlook the personal challenge of helping potential seminarians struggle with this timeless question: Does God want me to be a priest? As a former seminary leader, in the New York archdiocese and in Rome, O\u2019Brien said he has added a more nuanced set of follow-up questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you living your life here and now?\u201d, he asked the audience at his late-2010 lecture on the Steubenville, Ohio, campus. \u201cWhat is your radical motivation? Are you here on this earth to give or to get?\u201d<\/p>\n
The cultural changes that rocked Catholicism after the 1960s made it even more of a challenge to answer these kinds of questions. O\u2019Brien saw this era up close, since he was ordained in 1965 and, as an Army chaplain with the rank of captain, served a tour of duty in Vietnam.<\/p>\n
In the \u201cheady years\u201d after the Second Vatican Council it seemed that Catholics \u201csaw almost everything go up for grabs\u201d in their parishes and \u201cin Western Culture in general.\u201d Priests were \u201cleaving by the droves\u201d and at times, he noted, it seemed as if \u201cfollow your conscience\u201d stood alone as the \u201conly criterion for morality, heedless of any objective moral truth.\u201d Many seminaries lowered their admissions requirements in an attempt to find more priests. <\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien offered a blunt analysis of that decision: \u201cMany of the horrendous sexual scandals, I think, can be traced to the breakdown of seminary formation from 1965 to the early 1980s.\u201d<\/p>\n