11th November is also the anniversary of the General Synod's 1992 vote in favour of women priests.
A friend of mine, who shares my scepticism both about the precise need for the Ordinariate and about the value of preserving the Anglo-Catholic subculture, nevertheless points out that, at least for its first few years, it might well ordain about as many men as all the English and Welsh dioceses put together. No change there, then. A very high proportion of Catholics priests and seminarians in this country is already made up of converts, just as the illustrious line of Catholic public intellectuals is made up almost entirely of converts, with most of the rest having some connection to the Continent such as made or makes them altogether untypical of the wider Catholic community, with the other sides of their families usually Protestant or atheist.
As for talk of how many priests there used to be compared to today, leave aside for a moment the fact that England and Wales still has the world's highest ratio of priests to people. In the supposed Golden Age of, presumably, the 1950s or before the War, a good half of the priests were imported Irishmen, even if they had been ordained for dioceses over here. So there would be nothing novel about importing priests from Poland, or Africa, or wherever else more edifying liturgy (though rarely the Old Rite) and other accurate catechesis has resulted in the seventy-two per cent global increase in ordinations since the death of Paul VI.
The question, therefore, is not only why what may be called the settled Catholic community here hardly produces vocations to the Priesthood, but also why, all things considered, it never really did produce very many.
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Are there statistical sources to back up your statements, Mr Lindsay?
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying the statements are false. Yet I don't know of actual evidence for the claims made, and would be interested to learn of such evidence.
What particularly puzzles me is the implication that a priest shortage was occurring in the 1950s and before the war. If this was the case in Britain then, why was it manifestly not the case in America (surely, by any measure, at least as Hibernian-oriented in its Catholicism as Britain at the time would have been)?
Oh, there was no shortage. But many, possibly most, of them were Irish. To this day, British film and television almost, if almost, always depict Catholic priests as Irishmen with very heavy, emphatic accents.
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