Roles of Priests and Parishes

A parish priest celebrates Mass, hears confessions, offers marriage counseling, provides prenuptial counseling and spiritual direction, visits the sick, teaches catechism (a book that contains the Church doctrines) to both children and adults, baptizes, witnesses marriages, performs funerals, attends numerous councils and meetings, prays privately, does spiritual reading, and somehow finds time to relax with family and friends. Added to this is an annual five-day retreat that all priests are required to attend in order to receive regular spiritual direction. In other words, a priest is a really busy guy.

The Catholic Church (especially in the United States) is currently experiencing a shortage of men entering the priesthood. With over a billion Catholics worldwide and only a little over 404,600 priests to administer to them, that leaves an average of one priest for every 2,500 Catholics. Some parishes are exceptionally large, especially in urban New England, where there may be one priest administering a diocese of 6,000 people.

The parish church is where the priest works and where most Catholics will celebrate Mass every weekend. A Catholic parish will usually be named either after Jesus (Good Shepherd, Sacred Heart, and Corpus Christi are just some examples), the Virgin Mary (Our Lady of the Lake, Our Lady of Seven Sorrows, etc.), or one of the saints (St. Joseph, St. Thomas More, St. Peter, etc.). The parish is where local Catholics will get baptized, go to confession, receive Holy Communion, get married, attend Mass, and are sometimes buried.

A few parishes have a school attached to them (mine does), and even fewer have a staff of nuns who teach there, but you can still find them. Catholic grade schools were once feeder schools into Catholic high schools and universities where students were heavily encouraged to take a vocational life. In other words, they were encouraged to become priests and nuns, or at least get a degree from a Catholic university. However, changing demographics and a decline in the number of religous brothers and sisters resulted in the closing of many parish schools. Usually, such schools are now run by the diocese.