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Learning American, Priests Go to School
LEARNING AMERICAN, PRIESTS GO TO SCHOOL
November 12, 2005, Long Island Press
Charles Lane
With a librarian’s face and studious eyes, Sister Margaret Kelly stands in a half circle of 20 grown men who look on with the blinkless gaze of American teens. But at Kelly’s command they all sit up straight and eagerly recite the Lord’s Prayer before beginning the day’s lesson: American culture.
The men in Kelly’s classes are Catholic priests from around the world who come to the US and minister to American parishioners in place of American priests who are in increasingly short supply. Because most foreign priests come from cultures very different from the US, they often face culture shock when they first arrive.
“They need to understand what is considered appropriate,” Kelly says. As a Daughter of Charity and the executive director of the Vincentian Center at St. John’s University, Kelly sees the many cultural norms most Americans take for granted.
“For example,” she says, “using a person’s first name is quite common in the US even when there is a 20- or 30-year age difference. But that’s not true in many of their countries.”
The school, an extension of St. John’s University, focuses on acculturating foreign priests to America’s core values like individualism, multiculturalism, and egalitarianism. Because most of these priests come from more traditional counties in Africa and South America, they are often shocked at the increased role for women, the diminished respect for elders, and the general velocity of American life.
“Americans are very privacy oriented,” Kelly says explaining the notion of individual personal space, “so in our class we teach the men that there’s a bubble around you when you hold out your arms and not to come into another person’s bubble.”
The international priests who have graduated from the program are very happy to have attended. Father Gabriel Muteru, a priest from Kenya who now serves as Associate Pastor at St. Joseph Church in Garden City, says that the program gave him a much needed support network.
“Meeting other international priests is very important because we learn each other’s difficulties. We encourage each other and it shows me I’m not the only international priest.”
In addition to cultural barriers, international priests face language difficulties. Even if the priest has workable English, and that is not always the case, public speaking in large chapels through a microphone can make a sermon impenetrable to Americans unaccustomed to foreign languages. Muteru recognizes this problem and urges his parishioners to question him if they don’t understand. But he acknowledges that doesn’t always happen.
“People are very kind to priests and they don’t say they can’t understand you because they don’t want to hurt your feelings,” Muteru says.
Some experts say this is exactly the kind of sentiment that will drive alienated Catholics away.
Father Kenneth McGuire, an instructor at the Cultural Orientation Program for International Ministers, a school similar to the one at St. John’s, fears that Americans would first choose not to attend church before addressing the language barrier.
“Americans are very prejudice for accents,” McGuire says, “So when the priest reads the gospel people don’t listen so my real concern is we’re trying to bring in more priests so Americans will have the Eucharist, but they’re minus the word of God and commentary on the word of God.”
McGuire is wary of the growing trend to use international priests as a stop gap to the domestic priest shortage which has lost 25% of its priests in the last 10 years alone. Because the number of foreign priests entering the country is greater than the number of American priests joining the priesthood, McGuire predicts a point at which the Church is no longer recognizable.
With 106 international priests, Long Island already has a higher percentage than the rest of the country. Since Long Island also has sharply fewer priests per parishioner than the rest of the country, there is little to indicate that the percentage will decrease.
But versed deep in the spirit of the Daughter’s of Charity, Kelly doesn’t mind this at all.
“We’re a country of immigrants,” she says. “The Church needs to understand that we are all one family and the Church is in position to bring all the nations together.”
For Kelly, international priests might be the one thing that makes the Church truly catholic.
Posted by 1000monkeys on November 14, 2005 03:55 AM