Across the country, communities have been reeling from the rash of Catholic school closings.
These institutions, which offer a low-cost education to thousands of Catholics and non-Catholics alike, have suffered partly because of the church’s troubled finances, but also because they can no longer depend on priests and nuns to staff them.
In 1920, Catholic schools drew 92 percent of their staff from religious orders. Today, they draw less than 4 percent from that source.
The parents of Elias Moo, farm workers from Mexico, struggled to send him and his four siblings to Catholic schools. When Elias graduated from Notre Dame in 2007, he joined the Alliance for Catholic Education, which sends recent college graduates into the neediest Catholic schools.
Elias now teaches eighth grade in Denver in a primarily Hispanic community whose median family income is $18,000. Elias’ degree and training allow him to give back in a way he never imagined. His vocation, a term he does not hesitate to use as a layperson, has truly transformed his life.
Staffing Catholic schools is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the church needs right now. The Catholic population in the United States grew by more than 8 percent every decade from 1950 to 2000.
But during the same period, every 10 years, the number of diocesan priests decreased by about 13 percent and the membership in religious orders declined about 20 percent.
What do these numbers mean for the everyday life of the Catholic Church? Among other things, they explain why one in seven parishes in the United States no longer has a resident priest. More and more Catholics are waking up to find that their priests are overwhelmed by the extent of their responsibilities.
Almost half of American parishes share their pastor with another parish or mission. There are also shortages of religious leaders at 8,500 elementary schools, 1,600 high schools, 245 colleges and universities, and 750 hospitals and health clinics operated by the church.
As a counselor at Catholic Family Services in Sioux Falls, S.D., Marcie Moran spends her time helping families grieve after the death of a loved one, offering marriage classes, and working with individuals struggling with depression and anxiety.
A trained psychiatric nurse and clinical psychologist, Marcie sees “borderline depressives, people with anxiety and panic attacks” for whom “life is hard and relationships are painful.”
Falling off the track of life “can happen to all normal people,” Marcie says, “but it’s how we figure it out, how we work ourselves out of that,” that counts.
Though we most often think of schools and hospitals as the Catholic institutions that are most likely to benefit the community at large, it is also true that local parishes account for a great amount of “social capital” coming out of the church.
And to the extent that there are fewer clergy to administer them, the surrounding communities will suffer too, unless lay men and women continue to step up to the plate as thousands have done in dramatic fashion all across the country.
People like Cambria Smith are an important part of this story. Smith has been the parish life director at Holy Family Church in South Pasadena, Calif., for three years.
Acting as chief executive officer of her parish, Smith’s work encompasses pastoral counseling and leading prayer services as well as personnel decisions and strategic planning. And she is responsible not only for Catholics in her parish but for ecumenical work with other faith groups in the area as well.
Catholic school teachers have always said they teach not because their students are Catholic (often they’re not), but because they are. And the same goes for many other lay people serving their communities.
These Catholics work in homeless shelters and soup kitchens not because the people they serve are Catholic, but because their faith directs them to serve all.
The growing involvement of lay people in the church is not simply a demographic necessity. It is a theological imperative. The Council Fathers of Vatican II called for the laity to fill a broader and intensified role to include not only charitable work, but also pastoral duties such as the “teaching of Christian doctrine, certain liturgical actions and the care of souls.”
It is obvious that the Catholic Church has been in turmoil of late. We don’t deny the problems. But we think now is a time for renewal and healing, and lay persons play a foundational role in this process.
The “care of souls” is vital not only to Catholic institutions but to all the people — Catholic and non-Catholic — who depend on them.
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William E. Simon is co-author with Michael Novak of Living the Call: An Introduction to the Lay Vocation (Encounter Books 2011).
