VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — The vocations director at the official seminary for the Diocese of Rome has issued a stark warning of future priest shortages, stating that the recent ordination of 11 priests for the diocese was “little to rejoice about.”
Speaking to Agensir on April 29, Father Fabio Rosini stated that the Diocese of Rome would soon run out of priests for the nearly 340 parishes across the city. His comments came in light of the recent ordination of 11 new priests for the Diocese of Rome, who came from the diocesan seminary – the Pontifical Major Seminary of Rome – and the Rome-based seminary for the Neocatechumenal Way.
Rosini stated that the problem was not a lack of vocations per se, but a wider lack of practicing Catholics: “it is not vocations that are lacking, it is not seminarians who are in short supply, but the great absentees are precisely Christians in general.”
Having now served as vocations director of the Diocese of Rome for 12 years, Rosini warned that the current trend of low numbers of new ordinands, coupled with growing numbers of retiring priests, “means that in a few years we will no longer have enough priests for the parishes.”
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The Pontifical Major Seminary – which is home to artwork by the now infamous Father Marko Rupnik – currently counts 35 seminarians for the diocese, with an additional 13 seminarians training there for other dioceses around Italy. The Diocese of Rome is home to over 330 parishes, which serve around 3 million Catholics.
Rosini argued that Rome had been experiencing low numbers of seminarians for some time and was attempting to hide the issue by practicing “the endemic error” of accepting, or drawing in, priests from outside the diocese.
However, while such outside vocations serve to “keep the diocese on its feet,” the vocations director stated that “the lack of Roman vocations manifests the state of a sterile Church.”
Recent years have seen a lack of understanding of the priesthood, Rosini suggested, with priests “continuing to do a vocations ministry that sought to specialize a nonexistent material and was not concerned with growing the people of God.”
“We have continued to take faith for granted and the consequence is that there are no vocations. We need to proclaim the Gospel, to form Christians,” he added.
Rosini further stated that numbers of Christians “have not grown because the family as a Christian educational instance has collapsed.”
He highlighted the manner in which Catholic families are largely no longer practicing the fullness of Catholic life, particularly with regard to the Church’s feasts:
The liturgical year, which is the true path shared by all ecclesial realities, has collapsed in the homes where fasting in Lent is no longer done and where Christmas has become a pagan event divorced from an experience of prayer.
“Truly Christian families in which we pray, train in service and forgiveness” would lead to “good priests,” said Rosini. “But if we do not start from a personal encounter with Christ, we will not have Christians and therefore we will have fewer and fewer priests. We need to train Christian families. We are in a cultural flood and it is time to build an ark, which then was a boat of couples.”
READ: Vatican data shows ‘uninterrupted decline’ in vocations since Francis became pope in 2013
The drop in number of priests in the Diocese of Rome is by no means an isolated issue, but one being mirrored in countries across the world.
In March, the Vatican’s daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano published the latest statistics on the state of the Catholic Church across the world. The data, from December 2021, documented that that the number of clerics dropped by 0.39 percent from the previous year. This is due largely to deaths, retirement, and any laicizations.
However, most notable and representative of the future of the Church was the fact that the number of seminarians continued a decline that began in 2013 and has remained uninterrupted since then. Seminarians are decreasing at a rate of 1.8 percent compared to the previous year – thus over four times faster than the number of priests.
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Such a trend is seen also in vocations to the priesthood – not just seminarians: now there are only 26.84 vocations for every 100 priests already ordained.
Some weeks prior to this data being released, Pope Francis acknowledged the crisis of vocations, calling it a “mystery.” “It is a mystery: and in less than 100 years. How do we explain this to each other? I see no explanation,” he said, while at the same time condemning the “most serious sin” of “proselytism.”
However, when questioned, Francis expressed no concern for drop in vocations, stating that it was merely a crisis which “must be experienced and overcome.”
No, I am not concerned in the sense that we are merging, it is a sign of the times that indicates worldliness, that indicates a level of development that puts values elsewhere. This signals crises. There are crises, and crises must be experienced and overcome.