One New Priest ordained…

As you may have heard, the Archdiocese of New York welcomed one new priest this year (another man was ordained for a religious order). The Archdiocese counts, at least on paper, 2.6 million Catholics. Now the newly ordained Fr. Luis Silva Cervantes is not even from the New York archdiocese but from Guadalajara, Mexico.

The last time this occured was 2012. In that case too, the new priest did not hail from the Archdiocese. It aroused quite a bit of comment, particularly when this priest celebrated his first public Mass in the Old Rite. At the time the Archdiocese sought to explain away the situation by reference to new educational mandates for the seminary. Obviously that was a grossly insufficient explanation. Probably the archdiocese ordains – for the archdiocese itself – around 5 priests each year on the average. That’s not enough to maintain even today’s diminished clerical ranks. But it’s the same story we have seen this year in the diocese of Bridgeport, in Ireland, Germany, France…