Saturday, November 15, 1997

With fewer priests, nuns step in to fill many gaps

By YONAT SHIMRON

Raleigh News & Observer

Sunday mass at Holy Family Catholic Church in Hillsborough, N.C., looks much like any other. A priest in a long white vestment stands behind the altar offering the bread and the wine in the name of Jesus.

But as soon as the mass is over, the priest will drive off, leaving the parish in the hands of a middle-aged woman in a brown tweed skirt and jacket.

Until next Sunday when the priest returns, she will teach religion classes, visit the sick, supervise the church committees and sign off on all financial statements.

"The priests who serve Holy Family come just to celebrate the mass," said Sister Marie Therese Bugg. "I'm here seven days a week, 24 hours a day, serving the people in all their needs as they arrive each day."

She may not have a clerical collar. She may not wear priestly vestments. But she and a few hundred other sisters are running churches across the country. At a time when the Roman Catholic Church is experiencing a severe shortage of priests, they are helping the church grow.

In the past 30 years, the number of priests in the United States has dropped from 59,193 to 48,097 as men have found other, less demanding avenues of serving society. During that time, the Roman Catholic Church - the nation's largest denomination - has grown by about 15 million members.

To make up for the shortage, sisters run 60 percent of the country's 2,000 priestless churches, mostly in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest and the South. Roman Catholic law forbids women from becoming priests, but a 1983 provision allows sisters and trained lay people to assume the title of "pastoral administrator."

As they grow into their new roles, these women are altering the way Catholics view church hierarchy - and possibly hastening the day when the church will allow women to be ordained, say those who have studied the issue.

"A generation of Catholics is growing up seeing women represent authority in the church," said Sister Margaret Carney, a professor at St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., who has written on the subject. "That's an enormous change. We can't calculate the impact of that in the future."

Although some parishioners might prefer a full-time priest, many say it's refreshing to see women in charge.

"We came from a big parish in New York with several priests," said Ann Quinlan-Colwell, a member of Holy Family. "There was nowhere near the cohesiveness and love we have here. Sister Marie is the mother of this parish, and she fosters Christian love and caring. It's one of the reasons we decided to settle in this town."

In North Carolina, eight sisters are running churches. All have graduate degrees and years of experience teaching in Catholic schools. Many of these women are building churches from the ground up, while others are managing growth, overseeing construction projects and welcoming dozens of members each week.

"If it were not for these women, these churches would close," said the Rev. Paul Brant, a priest who assists one of the sisters.

But while many Catholics say the sisters are literally a godsend, the church strictly limits the scope of their jobs. Pastoral administrators cannot perform the sacraments that lie at the heart of the Catholic Church, among them the hearing and absolving of sins, the anointing of the sick and dying, and the celebration of the Eucharist, in which the bread and the wine is transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

For such sacraments, a priest's presence is required. To many sisters who routinely sit with congregants, holding their hands and helping them work out their daily struggles, the inability to perform these central rituals can be frustrating.

Sister Carol Loughney, who often visits nursing homes on her daily rounds, said it's hard to feel useful when a parishioner is dying and a priest is nowhere to be found. Once, when she confided her frustration to a priest, he recommended she continue praying at the parishioner's bedside.

"You don't mean to tell me your prayers are less effective than the prayers of the priest?" he said. "It lowered my level of frustration," said Loughney, the pastoral administrator at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Catholic Church in Raeford, a town of 3,500 in Hoke County.

"We just have to trust in the grace of God working through us in the role we're called to."

Sister Betty Bullen arrived at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, a tiny sanctuary in Williamston, N.C.,10 years ago. A native of Pittsburgh who had spent 30 years teaching and assisting priests in North Carolina, she found herself running a two-room country church with two dozen families. Soon after settling in, she found there were many Catholic Hispanic immigrants picking cotton, driving tractors and processing chicken parts in local plants.

She invited them to church, encouraged them to get a driver's license, took them to the doctor's office and helped their children with homework. "I was providing them with an opportunity to get in touch with a God they knew here in Martin County," she said. "I wanted them to see this was their church, too." Her efforts soon were rewarded.

The Catholic diocese sent her to Texas and Mexico to learn Spanish and bought her a Mercury Villager van so she could bring more people to church. Later, a school donated 17 old Macintosh computers so she could start an after-school homework program for the immigrant children.

Today, the congregation at Holy Trinity consists of 70 Spanish-speaking and 45 English-speaking members. "Sister Betty is the only one concerned with the Latinos in this town," said Jeanette Griggs, a native of Peru and a member of the congregation. "She feels, and I feel, that you don't want people to go through hardship. She understands that it's hard for foreigners to feel comfortable here."

The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, which oversees the work of six of the eight women - the other two are affiliated with the Charlotte diocese - said the sisters often have exceeded his expectations. "We provided an opportunity for women to demonstrate their pastoral skills, and they've done that," said F. Joseph Gossman, the Raleigh bishop. "Women bring things to the ministry that men never bring. They're more compassionate. They're empathetic. The female dimension is very much what the church should represent to its people."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)