Ocala ordination a rare event

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Bernard Kiratu will be the only man ordained this year in central Fla.

Ocala.com (Florida)

13 June 2010

Doug Engle/ Staff photographer

Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski lay his hands on Deacon Bernard Kiratu Ngugi after he was ordained a priest in Ocala at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church on Saturday morning June 12, 2010 by the Archbishop of Miami. Kiratu will join the growing ranks of foreign-born priests who are ministering to Catholics here and throughout the United States. In fact, most priests in Marion County are foreign-born, including every priest at Blessed Trinity, the area’s largest Catholic Church.

                                                
By Tom McNiff
Managing editor

Published: Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 6:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Saturday, June 12, 2010 at 11:37 p.m.

The ordination of the Rev. Bernard Kiratu on Saturday at Blessed Trinity Catholic Church in Ocala was remarkable for its location: New priests from central Florida are almost always ordained at St. James Cathedral in Orlando, not in the priest’s home church where the members of his congregation can come and watch en masse.

But the event was remarkable for another reason as well: Kiratu will be the only man ordained this year in central Florida.

He is a class of one, joining a priesthood that has seen a staggering drop in priestly vocations in the United States since the 1970s.

In a sense, Kiratu, 32, symbolizes the crisis in the American Catholic Church.

So desperate is the need for priests in the United States that a native Kenyan – from a continent that for centuries was a magnet for missionary priests from developed Western nations – became a missionary himself to a nation rich in wealth but poor in religious vocations.

And he is not alone.

Africa is producing new priests at a higher rate than anyplace on Earth and is sending those priests to places like the United States and western Europe to tend flocks that have so few shepherds.

In fact, every priest at Blessed Trinity, one of the area’s largest Catholic churches, hails from abroad.

They come from Ireland, the Philippines, Colombia and now Kenya – although Kiratu will soon depart for a parish in Lakeland.

The good news, according to Church leaders, is that vocations in the U.S. are on the rise again in just the past five years.

Seminaries around the United States are full, and the number of young men participating in programs to consider the priesthood is climbing.

Still, it will be years before this crop of seminarians is ready to take their place on the altars of the nation’s Catholic churches, experts say.

But the event was remarkable for another reason as well: Kiratu will be the only man ordained this year in central Florida.

He is a class of one, joining a priesthood that has seen a staggering drop in priestly vocations in the United States since the 1970s.

In a sense, Kiratu, 32, symbolizes the crisis in the American Catholic Church.

So desperate is the need for priests in the United States that a native Kenyan – from a continent that for centuries was a magnet for missionary priests from developed Western nations – became a missionary himself to a nation rich in wealth but poor in religious vocations.

And he is not alone.

Africa is producing new priests at a higher rate than anyplace on Earth and is sending those priests to places like the United States and western Europe to tend flocks that have so few shepherds.

In fact, every priest at Blessed Trinity, one of the area’s largest Catholic churches, hails from abroad.

They come from Ireland, the Philippines, Colombia and now Kenya – although Kiratu will soon depart for a parish in Lakeland.

The good news, according to Church leaders, is that vocations in the U.S. are on the rise again in just the past five years.

Seminaries around the United States are full, and the number of young men participating in programs to consider the priesthood is climbing.

Still, it will be years before this crop of seminarians is ready to take their place on the altars of the nation’s Catholic churches, experts say.

– – –

The decline in priest vocations in the United States can be traced to between 1965 and 1970.

In 1965, Catholic priests numbered 58,632, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University.

Their ranks remained flat – an alarming trend at the time – until the 1970s, when they began to dwindle.

By 1985, the number of U.S. priests was down to 57,317, and then the drop accelerated: 49,000 in 1995; 45,699 in 2000; 42,839 in 2005 and 39,993 in January of this year.

Those statistics are in stark contrast to other parts of the world.

In a five-year period from 2000 to 2005, the number of African priests climbed 19 percent; the number of Asian priests increased 15 percent; South American and Central American priests went up 7 percent.

The reason for the drop in the U.S., however, was simple.Older priests were dying or retiring at a far greater rate than young men were entering the priesthood.

The effect on American Catholics has been significant.

There is now one priest for every 3,500 American Catholics, according to researchers at CARA, down from about 1 in 1,500 in the middle of the 20th Century.

And the number of parishes without a resident pastor jumped from 549 in 1965 to 3,400 in 2009, according to CARA.

Many of those parishes share priests, and some have been entrusted to the care of deacons.

In fact, the number of Catholic deacons nationwide has increased dramatically, from 898 in 1975 to more than 16,000 in 2009.

But while deacons can perform some critical functions like a priest, including presiding over baptisms, they cannot do some of the most important work of a priest.

They cannot, for example, consecrate the Eucharist at mass.

That is the moment, Catholics believe, when bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ, and it is an essential Catholic sacrament that only a priest can administer.

– – –

Mary Gautier, a senior research associate at Georgetown University and editor of the CARA report, said that while some people theorize a crisis of faith is responsible for the drop in American religious vocations, the reasons are less sinister.

One key reason, Gautier said, is historical.

Like many immigrants to the United States, Catholics from abroad settled in communities with other Catholics.

There were heavy concentrations of Catholics in the Northeast and upper Midwest throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In these robust Catholic enclaves, faith was shared vigorously and the priest was the venerable center of the community, Gautier said.

Young men aspired to be priests, and religious vocations flourished.

But as later generations of Catholics grew to maturity, they did what immigrant offspring do: They set out to make lives for themselves, often settling in predominantly Protestant communities where the Catholic faith wasn’t as celebrated and the priest wasn’t the center of community life.

“So there was less of an inclination to see a vocation to the Catholic priesthood as … a thing you aspired to,” Gautier said. “What happened gradually was that men had opportunities to succeed and were less likely to consider vocations.”

By the mid- to late 20th Century, becoming a priest was no longer a universal measure of success.

Values were changing, and in place of vocations American Catholics began to prize careers, wealth, status and the ability to pass along the family name through marriage and children, Gautier said.

The Rev. Edward Burns, the former point man for vocations for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington, D.C., authored a paper about the decrease in vocations.

The paper was based on a survey of seminarians who were asked what sociological or cultural factors help or hinder vocations.

The seminarians listed “materialism” as the main obstacle, which tracks Gautier’s findings.

“When the first values in society are money and pleasure, young people naturally resist a life where serving others, living simply, and practicing obedience and celibacy carry the highest value,” Burns wrote. “In light of this, many seminarians have said that vocations to the priesthood emerge as counter-cultural …”

– – –

In Limuru, just outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, young Bernard Kiratu didn’t have to wrestle with many materialistic diversions.

Life was, and still is, pretty simple in Kenya, Kiratu said during an interview last week.

Kenya has many of the amenities that Americans enjoy, but not in such abundance.

Young Kenyans walk or take the bus to school and shopping.

They are not tethered to the Internet, and the tick, tick, tick of text messages is largely absent from the lives of Kenyan teens.

In an environment free of such distractions, Kiratu had time to observe the world and people around him.

One of those people was an old missionary priest who had a profound impact on young Bernard, beginning at the age of about nine.

The priest, who traveled from town to town serving a population of nearly 40,000 Catholics, helped build new churches and tirelessly gave of his time, Kiratu said.

“In him, I saw Christ,” he said.

“I wanted to see what was driving this man,” Kiratu said. “Many times, I’d talk to him and he’d say, ‘Bernard, this is God’s service.’ So I said, ‘OK, pray for me because when I get old enough I’d like to enter the seminary.’ ”

Kiratu did enter the seminary after high school. But when it came time to be ordained with the rest of his class, he told the bishop he wanted instead to become a missionary priest.

The bishop agreed, and Kiratu traveled to the United States to assist a country where priest vocations were in decline.

Here, he sees the materialism that experts speak about and agrees that it distracts people in a powerful way from hearing religious callings.

He believes it also distracts the average person from having a deeper relationship with God.

“In Africa, economic-wise, it is inferior to the United States,” he said. “But if you don’t have things, and your faith tells you that God provides, you tend to look upon God as a provider.

“In Africa,” he said, “they rely on God in so many ways, and so their relationship to God is as a father and provider. In America … you are born and brought into this life of everything. I think it has a tendency of people relying on themselves, they are masters of themselves.”

The Rev. Pat Sheedy, pastor of Blessed Trinity and a mentor to Kiratu after the young deacon arrived in central Florida in September, agrees.

“It’s harder for people to hear a calling in an affluent society because your mind is so filled with affluence and status,” he said. “So the hard part here is to get their attention.”

– – –

Ironically, it was the sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and early part of this century that many experts credit with creating a flood of new vocations in recent years.

Young Catholic men, stung by the revelation that priests had molested children during the late 20th Century, ran toward the Church rather than away from it.

“It’s kind of like after 9/11, how young men felt called to join the armed forces,” said Gautier, of Georgetown University.

Others say the Catholic Church has also put more emphasis on cultivating priest vocations through programs at both the diocesan and parish levels.

In the Diocese of Orlando, one such program is called Focus 11, which provides an opportunity for 11-year-olds and 11th graders to consider religious vocations

“Because 11-year-olds are beginning to fantasize about the possibilities for their future, and we want to put one more thing in their hearts to think about,” said the Rev. Miguel Gonzalez, the vocation director for the diocese. “And 11th graders are beginning to think about college, so we want them to consider the seminary.”

Many critics of the Catholic Church say the Church’s failure to modernize, to update its views on contraception, priest celibacy and women priests, is responsible for the drop in vocations in the past 40 years.

Sheedy disagrees vehemently.

“Our calling is not to be in step with society,” he said. “Our calling is to be faithful to the Gospel. And sometimes our calling is to be diametrically opposed to society.”

“I wanted to see what was driving this man,” Kiratu said. “Many times, I’d talk to him and he’d say, ‘Bernard, this is God’s service.’ So I said, ‘OK, pray for me because when I get old enough I’d like to enter the seminary.’ ”

Kiratu did enter the seminary after high school. But when it came time to be ordained with the rest of his class, he told the bishop he wanted instead to become a missionary priest.

The bishop agreed, and Kiratu traveled to the United States to assist a country where priest vocations were in decline.

Here, he sees the materialism that experts speak about and agrees that it distracts people in a powerful way from hearing religious callings.

He believes it also distracts the average person from having a deeper relationship with God.

“In Africa, economic-wise, it is inferior to the United States,” he said. “But if you don’t have things, and your faith tells you that God provides, you tend to look upon God as a provider.

“In Africa,” he said, “they rely on God in so many ways, and so their relationship to God is as a father and provider. In America … you are born and brought into this life of everything. I think it has a tendency of people relying on themselves, they are masters of themselves.”

The Rev. Pat Sheedy, pastor of Blessed Trinity and a mentor to Kiratu after the young deacon arrived in central Florida in September, agrees.

“It’s harder for people to hear a calling in an affluent society because your mind is so filled with affluence and status,” he said. “So the hard part here is to get their attention.”

– – –

Ironically, it was the sex abuse scandal in the 1990s and early part of this century that many experts credit with creating a flood of new vocations in recent years.

Young Catholic men, stung by the revelation that priests had molested children during the late 20th Century, ran toward the Church rather than away from it.

“It’s kind of like after 9/11, how young men felt called to join the armed forces,” said Gautier, of Georgetown University.

Others say the Catholic Church has also put more emphasis on cultivating priest vocations through programs at both the diocesan and parish levels.

In the Diocese of Orlando, one such program is called Focus 11, which provides an opportunity for 11-year-olds and 11th graders to consider religious vocations

“Because 11-year-olds are beginning to fantasize about the possibilities for their future, and we want to put one more thing in their hearts to think about,” said the Rev. Miguel Gonzalez, the vocation director for the diocese. “And 11th graders are beginning to think about college, so we want them to consider the seminary.”

Many critics of the Catholic Church say the Church’s failure to modernize, to update its views on contraception, priest celibacy and women priests, is responsible for the drop in vocations in the past 40 years.

Sheedy disagrees vehemently.

“Our calling is not to be in step with society,” he said. “Our calling is to be faithful to the Gospel. And sometimes our calling is to be diametrically opposed to society.”

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