In the next few weeks, officials of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago will present their new boss, Francis George, with a report describing a church body that is paying its bills, maintaining its ministry and keeping its people reasonably happy.
That is a luxury in Chicago, where bishops often have found controversy verging on warfare awaiting their arrival. Tranquil might be too strong a word, but church leaders downtown and out in the parishes agree there are no big fires that need to be doused.
But Archbishop George won’t exactly be able to swing his feet up onto his new desk at the Pastoral Center after he is installed May 7.
By the time George finds that desk, it probably will be stacked high with a voluminous report on Catholic education in Chicago–a study that could recommend closing or merging some schools.
Those working on the schools task force, created last fall by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, said that their immediate recommendations will contain no major surprises. But George may well find what Bernardin found out nearly a decade ago: Few things upset parishioners, alumni and parents faster than news of any church facility closing.
The new archbishop also will be briefed on racial tension that has reverberated back to two Catholic high schools, Brother Rice and De La Salle Institute, as well as the complaints that led to an Easter Day dustup, mostly among Hispanic parishioners, at St. John Bosco Church on the Northwest Side.
All that, while he is still trying to find his way around–a big enough job in a diocese with 17 different churches named St. Mary.
And that is only the beginning of the work.
As the millennium approaches, the new archbishop will find himself grappling with the same vexing issues that dogged his two predecessors.
These include an ever-shrinking priest pool, ethnic shifts and the divide between growing suburban parishes with mostly white populations and shrinking city parishes whose members increasingly tend to be brown or black.
In previous posts, George went the extra mile to relate to minorities. One of his first acts as bishop of Yakima, Wash., a diocese that is half Hispanic, was to go to Mexico to immerse himself in the language and culture.
Such sensitivities could also play well in Chicago, where racial and ethnic divides are exacerbated by a growing shortage of priests.
To be sure, the shortage is a nationwide phenomenon. Triggered by an exodus of priests in the late 1960s and exacerbated by image problems of the 1980s, the shortage surely will intensify in coming years.
Some of the largest classes of new priests, ordained in the 1950s, are now reaching retirement age. They are being replaced by seminary graduating classes of only six or seven.
Don’t count on the church making up the difference with women or married men, either, as some would-be reformers hope.
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“That won’t be a solution in our lifetime,” said Bishop Raymond Goedert, the interim administrator of the archdiocese. “In the meantime, I think the fellows are going to be worked to a frazzle.”
Goedert said the problem will be particularly delicate for the new archbishop because the priest shortage highlights the ongoing tug-of-war between city and suburban parishes.
In some suburban parishes, two priests minister to as many as 4,000 parishioners. Meanwhile, some city parishes with one or two priests have shrunk to as few as 400 parishioners.
Obvious solutions include closing city parishes, merging them or at least assigning a single priest to several smaller parishes, to balance the workload.
But as Bernardin found when he closed several parishes in the early 1990s, when city parishes are closed or reconstituted, critics often accuse the archdiocese of ignoring its mission to the needy of the inner city. Some have suggested that city closings are a form of veiled racism.
While denying racism, church leaders take the complaints seriously.
“No matter how much we want to deny it, we have two churches– the haves and the have-nots. How do we equalize it?” Goedert said.
Indeed, many priests would like the archdiocese to pay more attention to the inner city, not less. When the presbyterial council met in early February to prepare its part of the transitional report, the priests expressed “a desire that we be more on the forefront of social issues than we have been in recent years,” said Rev. Jerry Boland, chairman of the priests’ council.
But Catholic schools likely will present the first major test for the new archbishop.