DAVID Baartz (Voting with feet, CL 2/6/02) can sit smug and comfortable in Blacktown, NSW knowing that if a priest is not available to celebrate Mass in his own parish, there are any number of parishes within a 20km radius where there is a priest to celebrate Mass.
Gatton and Laidley parishes will share one priest from July 1 (CL 9/2/02). Until recently Ayr and Home Hill parishes were in a similar situation. In another parish a priest drives over 100km from his own parish church to an adjoining parish. Would you call that situation “sharing”? The same priest drives the same distances and more within his own parish to celebrate Mass at other centres. Surprise, surprise, not everyone has the opportunity of Mass on Sunday and nobody has the luxury of daily Mass.
No, we don’t have to prepare for a future Church without priests. We do have to act now in a Church that does not have enough priests.
Would David deny a dying person access to Viaticum because only a lay person was available to administer it? Then, of course, there are the questions of baptism and burial by a lay person.
Where do you draw the line David? How long will you defer a service in the absence of a priest? These are the easy questions.
Sorry David we are not over-endowed with priests and rose-tinted glasses will not provide the answer. Praying for and fostering holy vocations will eventually provide the answer, but we are living in the here and now.
Many of us outside of Blacktown choose “to be nourished by the word of God’.
‘By hearing it’ we ‘learn that the marvels it proclaims reach their climax in the paschal mystery of which the Mass is a sacramental memorial and in which they share by communion. Nourished by God’s word, they are led on to grateful and fruitful participation in the saving mysteries” (from the introductory text of Rite of Distributing Holy Communion outside Mass).
FRED DUNN
Mt Isa, Qld
