The Vocation Gap

In Rome recently a woman finished her confession and waited for her penance. "You will say six Hail Marys," said the priest, "and knit me a sweater--long sleeves, please."

The incident points up a situation that is increasingly worrying to the Roman Catholic Church in Italy--the threadbare poverty of the priesthood. Many a country priest begs for his staples, and depends on the traditional Sunday dinner with a parishioner for his one decent meal of the week. Doing the pastor's laundry is a well-established parish chore. Priests in the south have been known to sleep in their churches for lack of lodgings, and some even make ends meet by operating movie halls or cafes as a sideline. In modern Italy, the priest who is trying to keep body, soul and parish together on less than $2 a day has made a crude anachronism of the ancient anticlerical caricature of the well-upholstered padre living off the fat of the land.

The Smallest Ratio. To help remedy this situation, the Vatican is doing its best to persuade the Italian government to increase its annual subsidy to needy clergymen (currently from $500 to $2,700 annually, according to rank) and to set up hospitalization and social security benefits for all priests. The effort is not merely humanitarian. The number of new recruits to the priesthood has been falling off in Italy at an alarming rate. Milan, the richest, largest archdiocese in Europe, documents the decline. In 1860 Milan had 1,168,063 Catholics and 2,470 priests, or one priest for every 473 souls. Last year there were 2,235 priests and the population had grown to 3,513,000, or one priest for every 1,572.

In Italy as a whole, the ratio of priests to laymen is the smallest in the country's history: 1 to 1,008--compared with Ireland's 1 to 75, or even France's 1 to 850. In heavily Communist Bologna, 81 parishes are vacant; in Salerno, there are 60 vacant parishes out of a total 160. Southern Italy, excluding Sicily, had more than 80,000 priests a century ago. has fewer than 10,000 today. Italy's priests, 18% of whom are over 70, are dying faster than they can be replaced: in Florence, for instance. 135 priests died and only 85 were ordained during the past decade. In Genoa, bastion of crusading Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, seminary attendance has dropped 40% in the past 20 years, and 80% of the seminarians drop out before completing the twelve-year course. The seminaries in Turin are two-thirds empty.

How to Live. Some observers blame the decline in vocations to the priesthood on the rise in vocations to the so-called secular institutes--religious organizations such as Opus Dei, in which men and women may take vows of obedience (but rarely poverty or chastity) and go on living in the world. Since the late Pope Pius XII recognized their validity in 1947. secular institutes have mushroomed in Italy: from 1949 to 1958, more than 250 applied to the Vatican for formal recognition. "There is no doubt.'' said a Vatican prelate last week, "that these organizations have attracted many men and women who might otherwise have become priests or nuns.''

But the fiscal frustrations of the priestly life in the context of Italy's new prosperity are the main cause of the vocation gap. As Don Luigi Noli, who is in charge of vocations for the Genoa diocese, puts it: "Young people today think they know how to live. Before they're 18 they expect to earn 100,000 lire [$160] a month. How can you persuade them to become priests?"

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