By Susan Gallagher

Parishioners are meeting throughout the Diocese of Helena to discuss how priests should be distributed in its 52,000 square miles, where parishes outnumber priests, active clergy stand to decrease with retirements and only a modest inflow from seminaries is projected.

Under the diocesan Living Stones initiative, parishes hold meetings to consider how access to sacramental ministry can be ensured amid the clergy crunch. The Diocese of Helena has 59 parishes and 38 mission sites but just 52 priests in active ministry, and of those, 62 percent top 60 years of age. A number of priests are working past the usual retirement age of 70, but even with that degree of commitment, there are parishes without resident pastors.

Living Stones is intended to help find pastoral staffing solutions that are in communion with the mind of the Church and will not compromise priests’ health or safety through unreasonable requirements, such as excessive travel when serving multiple parishes. The guiding principles call for great sensitivity in considering how priest redistribution will affect rural and American Indian parishes.

The situation in the Diocese of Helena is not unique.

At the start of 2009, dioceses represented in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had 40,666 priests, compared to 58,632 in 1965, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. The center found that 3,400 parishes lacked resident pastors, and that the number of graduate-level Catholic seminarians in the United States dropped by about 40 percent between 1965 and 2009. The Diocese of Helena has a total of nine seminarians studying in Oregon and Colorado, but they cannot pastor a parish without first serving in parish ministry for a number of years after ordination.

In the Living Stones process, parishes hold two meetings. The first is for people to consider information about their parishes and to reflect on parish programs. The second meeting encourages comment about needs in the diocese and how those needs will be met with fewer priests in the future.

In some parishes, these meetings began in September. Some already have held the second session, as well. Meetings include the viewing of an 8-minute DVD with a message from Bishop George Leo Thomas, who encourages parishioners to bring their “best thinking” to the planning table and says that “we cannot continue to staff parishes as they are currently configured.”

“Every parish is going to be impacted in some way” through priest allocation, Sister Rita McGinnis, diocesan director of pastoral planning, told The Montana Catholic. “How each is going to respond is the question.”

Living Stones is part of the diocesan pastoral plan Come to the Light, which states that addressing pastoral staffing issues “may mean a realignment of parishes and missions, commissioning of Pastoral Administrators, merging congregations, and considering priest assignment models that accommodate the challenges of travel and distance.”

Bishop Thomas has emphasized the importance of providing “quality pastoral care” throughout the diocese. Sister Rita said she expects the Living Stones process to help in identifying what is necessary to assure quality care–meeting the needs of parishes–even as staffing poses challenges.

SS. Cyril and Methodius Parish in East Helena has completed both Living Stones sessions, as did its Clancy mission, St. John the Baptist. SS. Cyril and Methodius’ other mission, Our Lady of the Lake three miles east of Canyon Ferry Dam, held one meeting and planned the second for mid-November.

“In the small communities, they’ll do anything to keep the (church) doors open because they fear that once they close, they will never get it back,” meeting facilitator Jackie Jandt said. Ideas raised at the mission meetings included a reduced Mass schedule, she said, but people are concerned their sense of community would dwindle along with the schedule.

At Blessed Trinity Parish in Missoula, participants in Living Stones include people who experienced the 2006 merger of the Pope John XXIII and Holy Family parishes , resulting in a single community under the name Blessed Trinity. “They have a track record” on which to draw as they consider the parish of the future, said Sister Mary Jo Quinn, Blessed Trinity pastoral assistant. “It’s interesting to hear people’s real openness to other models of ministry.”

Sister Mary Jo said the Living Stones meetings have generated discussion about some core questions.

“Who is the Church?” she said. “There’s no way you can’t talk about those issues.”

Living Stones’ two-meeting cycle was preceded by an inventory process that collected information about individual parishes and their areas’ demographics, a process Sister Rita describes as the opportunity to consider “what is it we do well here, what are the challenges, what do we wish?”

She anticipates that during the Lenten season, the diocese will have a preliminary plan that includes consideration of parish comment, and will distribute that plan for parish review. Subsequent steps in the pastoral staffing review include work at the deanery, Presybteral Council and College of Consultors levels, with final action by Bishop Thomas.

“We want to create healthy solutions for everybody,” Sister Rita said. “They have to be healthy for the parish, and also for the priest.”


Published in The Montana Catholic Online, Volume 25, No. 11, November 20, 2009.