Foreign priests are keeping the churches in Wales open, according to the Bishop of Wrexham.
“The diocese is becoming increasingly dependent on overseas priests,” Bishop Peter Brignall told the BBC.
“We have fewer of our own priests and those are ageing significantly. And, therefore, if we are to continue anything like the present model of the Church in north Wales, then we are going to need men from overseas,” he said.
The majority of Wrexham’s active priests are from overseas. The diocese has 45 priests in all, but 10 of those are retired. Of the remaining 35, 16 are diocesan priests but 19 are from different orders.
The Apostles of Jesus, Missionaries of Africa and Missionaries of St Paul are from Africa, mainly from Nigeria; the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate are Indian; the Vocationist Fathers are mainly Italian. In addition there are priests from the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Society of Christ, Capuchin Franciscans and Jesuits.
“Twenty years ago most of our priests were Irish,” a spokesman for the diocese told the Catholic Herald. “Ten years ago the missionary priests started to come in.”
Bishop Brignall accepted that there had been a role reversal: in the past British priests went out to far-flung countries as missionaries; now their priests are coming here.
“I see them as being missionary priests – they are coming here because our own communities have not produced the vocations, our own communities are not fully taking their place within the Church on the Lord’s Day, on a Sunday,” he said.
Female vicar who converted to Catholicism dies aged 91
A vicar who gave up her ministry to become a Catholic has died aged 91.
Una Kroll, once a prominent campaigner for women’s ordination in the Church of England, converted in her 80s after a powerful experience at a Cistercian monastery where she “encountered a vibrant energy that overwhelmed me”.
She first studied medicine at Girton College, Cambridge, before joining an Anglican religious order, the Community of the Holy Name, in 1954. She was sent to Liberia but fell ill and returned to Britain accompanied by a monk from her order, Leo Kroll and they married and left their order. She then became a GP in London.
A campaigner for woman priests, she shouted from the gallery: “We asked for bread and you have given us a stone,” when the Church of England synod voted against women priests in 1978. When the Church of England changed its mind in 1992, followed by the Church in Wales in 1997, she became a priest in the latter. Her conversion to Catholicism, she wrote in her autobiography Bread Not Stones, seemed “perverse” to her friends.
She spent her last years in a solitary life of prayer.
Vatican approves Romero Mass
The Vatican’s liturgy congregation has approved a “liturgical commemoration” or Mass, to be held every year on the anniversary of Blessed Oscar Romero’s martyrdom, at Southwark Cathedral.
The Mass, on March 24, was approved as an “indult”, or exception to Church law, as it did not meet formal criteria for a calendar change. The cathedral contains several relics and artworks related to the Blessed.
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