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TAMAROA, Ill. —Cornfields still too wet to plant were on some of their minds, as they gathered for worship at Immaculate Conception Church. They could only fill a few pews at the rural parish.
Their spiritual leader, the Rev. Oliver Nwachukwu, was also raised around agriculture. It just wasn't mechanized.
He grew up in a mud house in Nigeria, helping his family subsist on cassava, yams and maize. It was a life in the Roman Catholic priesthood that led him down a much different row to hoe. He ran a seminary back home, studied religion at Harvard and arrived three years ago like a missionary on the southern Illinois plains, where on this Sunday morning he was the only black man in the room, likely the only foreigner.
"In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit," Nwachukwu said, starting the service as the 35 or so faithful automatically followed by crossing themselves from forehead, to heart, then shoulder to shoulder.
With the dearth of local men willing to become priests, Nwachukwu is part of an effort to keep even tiny congregations like this one alive. Among about 90 active parish priests in the Diocese of Belleville, which oversees most Catholic churches in Metro East and southern Illinois, at least 10 are from Africa.
In the St. Louis region, the number of priests has dropped by a third since 1985, mirroring a national trend. But what has been a slow-moving crisis is now accelerating.
Half of the nation's parish priests are expected to retire in less than 10 years across the country. New priests are making up for only a third of those leaving active ministry.
The Catholic church is taking creative steps toward making do. In the Diocese of Belleville that means importing priests and relying on the work of people who are not clergy. The Archdiocese of St. Louis, meanwhile, has pared the number of parishes and prepared new priests to focus on the sacramental roles only they can perform.
Still, none of those remedies tackle the cold mathematics of the situation: At a time when the church could use a flood of new ordinations, it is only seeing a trickle.
Few answer the call
The day before the service in Tamaroa, Ill., the former "Rome of the West," as the Archdiocese of St. Louis was once called, ordained just four new priests. They join 365 other priests, down from 568 in 1985 in the organization, which covers 10 counties and the city of St. Louis. Roughly a third of the archdiocese's current priests are either retired or inactive in ministry, with another fourth expected to retire within five to 10 years.
"There is no way these four guys are going to replicate that number," said the Rev. Michael Witt, the recent rector of Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in Shrewsbury, Mo., sitting at a conference table with the seminarians a few hours before they were ordained May 28.
One of them, the Rev. Timothy Foy, 30, a former test-flight engineer for Boeing, said he entered the seminary when he "recognized that the church was in need" and felt called to serve.
The Rev. Anthony Gerber, 30, another new face, said too few are answering that call.
"People say that there is a shortage of priests," he said. "The Lord provides all the calls to the priesthood that the world needs; however, not everyone responds."
The decline in the number of priests has been attributed to a host of factors. And it has accelerated more recently in the wake of sex abuse scandals.
"We, of course, cannot ignore the fact that for some, the Church will permanently be associated with the sexual abuse scandal," said Randy Rosenberg, a former seminarian who directs the religious studies program at Fontbonne University.
He said the shortage also "cannot be divorced from larger sociocultural trends," including young adults who are often wary of strong commitments to the "particularities of religious traditions."
Still, he sees signs of hope: "We have so many vibrant parishes and strong high schools — a somewhat unique marker for our region."
Many new seeds are sprouted at private Catholic schools, which nationally have been in decline. Three of the four new priests went to St. Louis University High School, which has consistently churned out seminarians since it was founded by Jesuits. But the school's ties to the priesthood have slowly unraveled. Today, the school has just five Jesuits out of nearly 100 faculty members.
Still, many Catholic officials are facing the crisis with a mix of faith and optimism. The Archdiocese of St. Louis, for example, recently raised $61 million in pledges from its flock to renovate its seminary.
A range of strategies
Today, making do with fewer priests means employing a range of strategies, amid the added challenges of population shifts.
As they administer the sacraments for more people, some priests say their role has increasingly become more removed from parish life, and more tied to ceremonial functions.
"I am most a priest when I am standing at the altar," said the Rev. Witt. "The seminary is not in the business of producing social workers. They do that, but that is not the primary purpose of the seminary."
The Diocese of Belleville has added non-priest positions like "Parish Life Coordinators" to help conserve day-to-day responsibilities and prevent further closings. The trend is consistent with institutional changes in the Catholic church in the 1960s that called on lay people to not only pray, pay and obey, but to get involved in ministry.
The coordinators, who are often women, visit the sick, oversee church administration, religion classes for adults and children, and even officiate funerals.
Brenda Pehle has led St. Joseph Church in Lebanon, Ill., since 1993, when the parish priest left overnight to fill a void from a different priest put on leave for sexual misconduct. Appointed by the bishop, she serves "reserved communion" already prepared by a priest. She carries the wafers in a gold ciborium to nursing homes, along with prayer books and music.
"I love my job," said Pehle, 53, who is married with children. "I didn't plan to be serving in this role, but what I find most rewarding is the amazing ways in which people in the parish community live out their faith."
Relying on lay people to fill in for absent priests can only go so far, because they cannot consecrate the Eucharist, where Catholics believe Jesus Christ is present in the transformed bread and wine.
"That's where the priest shortage becomes crucial," said Thomas Rzeznik, assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University.
Ken Parker, a former Benedictine monk who teaches theology at St. Louis University, is among those pushing the church to further expand the priesthood to married men, which, under a technicality, already includes Catholic priests first ordained in the Anglican and Lutheran churches.
"This unwillingness to adapt has tragic consequences," he wrote in an article in Commonweal magazine titled "Priestless."
A 'gift of faith'
Importing international priests to keep the Eucharist alive and parishes open has been a defining element of Bishop Edward Braxton's leadership since he arrived at the Diocese of Belleville in 2005.
Called "fidei donum," the priests are considered a "gift of faith" by bishops who recognize both the shortage in the U.S. and the opportunity for the priests to grow.
Bishop Braxton recruited the Rev. Nwachukwu (whose name is pronounced without the "N") in 2008 from the Chicago area, where he completed a Ph.D., taught and was a chaplain at a veterans hospital. Though there are fewer priests in Nigeria, the parishes are bigger, there are fewer Masses, and seminaries tend to have large graduating classes.
During the recent service in Tamaroa, Nwachukwu, 58, preached about the spirit of forgiveness and spreading the Gospel to the world.
"But do we do that?" he asked to blank stares.
Sylvester and Stanley Bejma, brothers who farm together for a living, said it reminded them of when they were kids and the service was in Latin. They couldn't understand that either.
Still, it's in their blood to come. "We were brought up to go to church," said Stanley Bejma, 48.
