Hartford, USA - The rectory is very peaceful — a little too peaceful, if the Rev. Joseph Looney is being honest about it.
Looney has been stationed at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem since July, and lives behind the church in a small ranch house surrounded by trees and a deep backyard of grass.
When the phone rings, or a parishioner drops by to pick something up, the sound cuts through the stillness so abruptly it makes you jump. Occasionally, there's muffled bird song outside the window, or a truck rumbling by, but that's about it.
"I've never lived in the suburbs before, so it's very quiet," Looney says, looking around his sparsely furnished living room. "I'll have to find some way to deal with it or it will get very lonely."
Looney is not alone in his loneliness.
Of the 213 parishes in the Hartford archdiocese, 123 are led by a single priest, and that number is expected to increase if the clergy shortage in the Roman Catholic Church worsens over the next decade, as predicted.
It's meant dramatic changes for Looney, who began his ministry in 1967. He was assigned early on to a parish in New Britain, where he was one of four priests living and working in the rectory. A cook prepared "nice meals" every day and their two-room suites were kept clean by a housekeeper.
More important than the daily care, though, was the fellowship of other priests.
"I had lots of hopes and dreams, especially about being able to talk to other priests about their work and their relationships with God," Looney says. "Having that companionship around the table was important."
But the number of diocesan priests in the Hartford archdiocese has dropped sharply, falling to 372 in 2007, compared with 585 in 1969, according to the archdiocese. Nationally, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, there were 35,925 ordained diocesan priests in 1965. In 2007, the number was 28,462.
Not only is an entire generation of men aging out of the priesthood, but fewer young men are joining its ranks. When Looney was ordained, for example, he was one of 21 young men joining the Hartford archdiocese. In 2006, he says, the archdiocese ordained only six new priests — and that was the largest number in years.
With this drop in clergy have come changes for both parishioners and priests as Catholic churches and schools across the nation have been combined or closed.
And while the loss of a full-time priest or a reduction in the number of Masses is stressful for Catholic parishioners, it is arguably harder on the priests, who are celibate.
"Loneliness was often cited as a reason for men leaving the priesthood, particularly from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s," says Andrew Walsh, associate director of the Leonard Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College.
"But the way it presents itself is much more forceful these days."
Different Model
Walsh, who teaches a course at Trinity on the U.S. Catholic Church, says the old model of the priesthood — a young man enters seminary in his teens, is ordained and proceeds to build his entire social life around being in the priesthood — has faded.
"It was like a replacement for the family. They socialized together; they lived together," Walsh says. "In fact, if you appeared at the rectory on a certain day of the week you'd see four or five priests sitting on the porch together, hanging out, on their day off."
Nowadays, as more men take their vows later in life, the chances that those priests will feel lonely and isolated might actually be slimmer, Walsh says, because they already have established community ties and solid friendships to sustain them.
And while some priests undoubtedly prefer to live and work alone, many others, like Looney, can feel isolated in their solitary posts and crave the company and support of other priests.
The Rev. Zecharias Pushpanathan, who was ordained in India and has served four years as pastor of St. Anne-Immaculate Conception Church on Park Street in Hartford, is one of them.
Pushpanathan knows all about loneliness after spending 13 years as a missionary in a poverty-stricken area of northern Argentina. His post was so isolated, he says, that his nearest priest colleague was 30 miles away. The roads were impassable during the rainy season and all but impassable the rest of the year.
"Loneliness is very, very relative," says Pushpanathan. "In India we don't feel lonely because there is more opportunity to gather. In Argentina, I understood the word 'loneliness' perfectly."
And here, in Hartford, where he lives alone in a large house next to the church on bustling Park Street?
"Here there's a different type of loneliness," Pushpanathan says. "Here the loneliness is based on each one's work."
Meaning that each priest is so busy, now that he has sole responsibility for a parish, that it can be difficult to find the time or energy to see other priests.
The workload has increased significantly for many men of the cloth. Forty-one priests in the Hartford archdiocese have been given responsibility for two or more parishes in recent years, for example, and more parishes are scheduled to be linked.
Change In Status
Beyond the question of numbers, the problem of clergy isolation can be traced, at least in part, to the loss of status the Catholic Church has suffered in American society since the mid-1900s.
"People used to take their hats off when the priest walked down the street in the 1950s," Walsh says. "Their social role was very powerful and salient as public figures. They are still beloved and respected figures in many ways, but not in the way they were then."
Some scholars date the loss of status from changes that came out of the Second Vatican Council from 1962-65 — changes that included saying Mass in English rather than Latin, among others — and social forces outside the church in the 1970s, such as the advent of the birth control pill and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Looney, who is studying for his doctorate of ministry at Hartford Seminary, examined this issue for his doctoral project and believes all of these events diminished the church's influence.
"I think the church lost status," he says. "Public acceptance of birth control was one of those issues where we had cultural dissonance."
Walsh agrees, but says the changes actually began in the 1930s in the Northeast as Irish Catholics who had initially settled in cities became more affluent and educated, and moved to the suburbs.
Before that, he says, the church was the center of a rather segregated society for many Catholics, and the priests and nuns were the glue that held it together. Although there are still many thriving Catholic churches in the suburbs today, the influence of the church and its central role in people's lives began to wane.
"There was this sense that things were hollowing out," Walsh says. "It became harder and harder to support the structure."
Whether the church lost status, or how much it lost, might be debatable, but the number of people going to Mass on Sunday has undeniably declined. According to the count taken by the Hartford archdiocese each October, the number dropped by 46 percent from 1969 to 2005. The total number of Catholics in the archdiocese dropped 26 percent during the same period.
By the time the priest sex abuse scandal broke in the media several years ago, the ranks of priests were diminished, fewer Catholics were attending Mass regularly and priests like Looney and Pushpanathan were already feeling fairly isolated.
"I'm Catholic to the core. It hasn't hurt my relationship with the church," Looney says. "But [the sex abuse scandal] has had a negative effect. It's devastating when we read about one of our classmates or one of our fellow priests being accused and I think it hurts our relationship with the people."
Walsh agrees.
"I think it's been a tremendous blow and the priests are among the saddest about it. It's the first time I ever encountered people saying, 'I don't want to wear my collar in public,'" he says. "I think it really hurt them in the eyes of the public in a way that nothing else has."
Organized Camaraderie
Looney has spent most of his life as a priest living alone.
Shortly after he was moved from New Britain to Sacred Heart Church in Waterbury, he was coping with the changing face of his job — such as closing the parish school — on his own.
He remained that way until 1999, when he was moved to St. Margaret's in Waterbury and the archdiocese brought in several South American priests to train in his parish and help Looney with his Spanish parishioners. He was transferred again this summer, to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
Over the years, Looney has learned to fend for himself — "The microwave has been the greatest invention for priests," he jokes — but he also took matters into his own hands by joining the local chapter of an international group called the Fraternity of Priests, which has helped combat the loneliness and other struggles priests face.
Looney's group, which has met every Monday afternoon for the last 20 years, is the only Connecticut chapter. Its 12 members observe what they call the "kingdom disciplines," which are to pray for an hour a day, meet once a week with other priests, honor other priests, keep a journal, and tithe, which means to give 10 percent of your income to the church or charity.
The group meets privately so the priests can talk openly about what is happening in their lives, pray together and then eat dinner together.
"We take the arrows out of each other's backs," Looney says. "If we can have the meal and the meeting in the same place, it's wonderful because we can be more relaxed. It's good for the priest who lives alone to have a meal with someone else."
Pushpanathan, who is also a member, says the meetings might be the only time in a week he sees another priest. They have been especially helpful to him as he has been assimilated into a new culture.
"I was actually in need of the fraternity very much," Pushpanathan says.
The fraternity is planning a conference for other priests who might be interested in joining. It will take place April 6-10 at the Montfort House in Litchfield. Looney urges priests from other dioceses to attend if they need the company and support of other priests.
"There's been a sea change in the world. It's not just the priesthood," Looney says. "It's a challenge to remain relevant to others, but especially to yourself. That's what the fraternity helps us do. One of the things we talk about is holiness, being set apart for God. And we sense God working in the world."