Word: priestly
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Born. To Philip F. Berrigan, 50, peace activist and former Josephite priest, and his wife and onetime fellow federal-prison inmate Elizabeth McAlister, 34, former Sacred Heart nun and also a peace activist: their first child, a girl; in Baltimore. The baby was born at Jonah House, the pacifist commune where her parents now live...
...meaning of Lent, likening the penitential season to an automobile overhaul. After more songs and the reading of the Gospel, Pierre, 66, a sturdy, gray-haired retired farmer, leaves his pew and walks to the tabernacle. There he removes a ciborium of communion hosts consecrated by the parish priest the week before and distributes them to his fellow congregants. Later, as the worshipers rise to leave, Jean-Paul makes a hasty announcement. "We forgot to take up the first collection, so please be extra generous as you leave...
Scenes like the one at Rodlinghem are becoming more and more common in rural France these days, as parish after parish takes its turn at a "priestless Sunday." The country that anticlericals once thought priest-ridden is now facing a severe shortage of Roman Catholic priests (as are most European nations). In 1965 there were 40,000 French priests; by 1975 there may be as few as 30,000. As one result of the shortage, French bishops, meeting last year in Lourdes, tacitly authorized laymen to hold "prayer assemblies" in churches that cannot offer Sunday Mass...
...church. But the town's young people, distressed at seeing the parishioners splinter off to other towns for church, asked to hold the new prayer assembly in place of Mass. Soon the district's other three towns-Licques, Rodlinghem and Ecottes-were offering to share their priest by taking one priestless Sunday each month...
...their own communities. "If they have to go some other place to Mass, they do not feel at home," says Derouet, "and eventually they stop going." There are critics, of course. While lay-led Catholic services are commonplace in mission countries like Africa, and have become popular in priest-short areas such as East Germany, some of the French clergy still see them as dangerously close to Protestantism. Some parishioners object too, but they are, says one Rodlinghem layman, "the same ones who haven't approved of the Mass since it stopped being said in Latin...