Retirement changes eyed for priests.

Today’s Globe reports that the Archdiocese of Boston is planning to trim retirement benefits for diocesan clergy. Facing a $55 million shortfall in available pension funds, the Archdiocese intends to freeze clergy pensions at $1,889 a month, reduce housing and health insurance subsidies and require priests with sufficient means to pay out of pocket for pricier services like nursing care. The Archdiocese will also require all priests to seek Social Security benefits and will encourage younger clergy to take a more active role in planning for a financially secure retirement. Naturally, these proposed changes are ruffling a lot of feathers. Many will interpret these changes as a sign that the Archdiocese is hedging its commitment to care for men who have given decades of devoted service to the local Church. More than a few older priests undoubtedly feel, in the words of one priest quoted in the article, “like they’re getting the rug pulled out from under them.” In some sense, they’re right. However, the impoverished Archdiocese seems to have no choice but to make the cuts, and therein lies the tragedy.

The Globe article on this topic includes some sobering statistics on priestly demographics in the Archdiocese of Boston. I’ve seen these numbers before and am not surprised by them, but they nonetheless bear repetition:

The Boston Archdiocese, like other dioceses, faces a dwindling number of active priests and, in the short term, an increase in the number of retirees. At the end of last year, the archdiocese had 578 active priests, down from 1,002 two decades earlier, and 265 retired priests. The median age of active priests is 59, and 83 active priests are older than 70. The archdiocese expects 173 active priests to retire or die over the next decade and no more than 50 to be ordained.

In other words, in the brief span of my lifetime the number of active diocesan clergy in the Archdiocese of Boston has been almost halved. The serious disproportion between retirements and ordinations means that maintaining adequate parish staffing will become steadily more difficult in the coming years. Of course, this challenge is by no means unique to Boston; many other dioceses are in similar straits and have adopted various strategies. Dioceses in some areas have responded to this problem by appointing laypeople or women religious to run some parishes, with ‘circuit-riding’ priests coming in on weekends to offer Mass. The Archdiocese of Boston has yet to do this, seeming to prefer closed parishes to priestless ones. Lay parochial administrators are no substitute for the parish priests that American Catholics are accustomed to, but I suspect your average parishioner would rather see his or her parishes stay open with a lay administrator than close because the local diocese can’t provide a resident priest.

For me, it’s impossible to introduce statistics like those quoted above and to talk about the problem of parish staffing without also saying a few words about vocations. Clearly, the priest shortage makes the need for stronger vocation promotion all the more critical. Granted, vocations to the diocesan priesthood are a hard sell in Boston nowadays. When the Archdiocese is closing churches left and right, making sharp across-the-board cuts in services and coping with the lingering effects of the clergy sex abuse crisis, convincing young men to give their lives to service of the local church has to be incredibly difficult. The Archdiocese needs to be honest about this, and also has to expect some very lean years in terms of vocation recruitment. In a larger way, we shouldn’t expect another vocation boom of the kind the Catholic Church experienced here in the twenty-year period following World War II. However, we can and should expect a boost in numbers to come from more effective efforts to nurture vocations. As a novice in a religious order, I am perhaps badly qualified to speak about the best way to promote vocations to the diocesan priesthood. However, within the Society of Jesus in the United States we’ve seen a slight increase in the number of men entering the novitiate in recent years, and I am modestly hopeful that the trend will continue.

Returning to the primary topic of this post, the issue of clergy retirement pensions provides a good illustration of some of the differences between religious life and the diocesan priesthood. Unlike members of religious orders, diocesan priests do not take a vow of poverty – indeed, they don’t take vows at all, instead making promises of celibacy and obedience to their bishop. Diocesan priests are expected to live ‘simply’ in some sense, but unlike religious they retain the right to own property and manage their own finances. Some diocesan priests happen to be quite wealthy, while others just barely get by. In this sense, the vowed poverty of religious life fosters greater equality. In theory, all members of a religious order are equally poor, though their actual material circumstances may differ significantly depending upon the place in which they live and the apostolic work they do. When it comes to things like retirement, from a certain perspective the diocesan clergy have greater freedom: the individual diocesan priest has the power to make decisions that will ensure a more or less comfortable retirement. Lacking private property or income, religious are dependent upon their community for their retirement needs. Here again, however, the promise of equality makes up for a putative lack of choice. A Jesuit can’t invest his salary in a 401(k), but he can at least rest easy in the confidence that his province will care for him in his last years. Though I can’t know the specifics at this point in my Jesuit life, this promise of care feels a lot more durable to me than the uncertainty about retirement that many diocesan priests must live with. In this context the vow of poverty is a real comfort, and I thank God for that. AMDG.