Roman Catholic Archbishop Joseph Harris says the shortage of priests in T&T has been compounded by the local church’s inability to recruit young men for the seminary.
“I look at our Catholic schools and it’s a long time since our Catholic schools have produced vocations for the priesthood. Quite a while! We are getting dribbles, one every ten years.
“I am in the position of having to look after the Catholic church here in T&T and I’ve had to go overseas—India, Africa—looking for priest and it always seems to me unjust that I must go and ask parents in India and Africa to send us their sons when our parents here don’t want to give us their sons,” he said.
“Everybody wants to have a priest when they getting married. When there is a funeral, when there is a baptism, everybody wants a priest. As I told somebody recently, give me some plasticine and I would make one for them. If our schools do not produce priests for our archdiocese, I don’t know if we are fulfilling our mandate and if we are truly a Catholic school.”
The archbishop, who spoke about the problem at the Fatima College Annual Distribution of Prizes and Certificates in St James, expressed frustration at the situation but said he did not expect every single boy to become a priest because nature needed fathers to create sons for other things.
However, he called on Catholic schools to give the seminary at least two seminarians annually. “I have a seminary to fill. I don’t have people to fill it. We closed it because there weren’t enough students.”
He also appealed on parents and guardians to change their attitude towards the priesthood. Harris recalled a recent conversation with a young man who said his family was shocked when he told them he was interested in becoming a priest. Family members asked the young man why someone as intelligent as he was wanted to waste his life pursuing the priesthood, when he could have a thriving career in law, medicine or another attractive fields of endeavour.
“Parents, you want to have a school with priests in it. People ask me where are the priests and nuns. They are not in the school anymore! After Father Gregory goes, I don’t think we are getting another priest as a principal here. Where we getting them from? It s a problem! It is a serious problem and I think that we have to take very seriously,” Archbishop Harris said.