Editor's Note: This story is expanded coverage of the Third International Convocation of the Confraternities of Catholic Clergy. The first part included comments from Cardinals Robert Sarah, Gerhard Müller and Raymond Burke. 

ROME — Priests in the West today are facing a raft of challenges, from declining church attendance to critical financial conditions in many parishes, which they say are being compounded by confusing messaging and little encouragement coming from the Vatican and bishops. 

But they are also seeing signs of hope — especially among the young — as people are drawn to the beauty, truth and goodness of the faith and are beginning to demand from the Church reverent liturgies, sound doctrine, and a sense of stability and transcendence in a disordered world.

These were just some of the observations made by clergy from Australia, the U.S., the U.K. and Spain who spoke with the Register on the sidelines of the Third International Convocation of the Confraternities of Catholic Clergy that took place Jan. 13-17 in Rome. 

Founded by American Father Robert Levis in 1975, the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy is a grassroots association of more than 500 Catholic priests worldwide that grew out of the post-conciliar turmoil of the 1970s.

“Many priests were leaving at the time, and so the confraternity was founded to encourage them to remain,” said Thomas McKenna, the confraternity’s executive director. “Since then, many clergy have said they owed their decision to remain a priest to the confraternity.” 

About 75 priests attended the event that included talks from Cardinals Robert Sarah, Gerhard Müller and Raymond Burke. 

Father Paul Chandler, parish priest of Inverell in the Archdiocese of Brisbane, Australia, said “one of the greatest challenges is the decline in faith,” leading to Mass attendance in some churches in his diocese dwindling to almost zero as “the older people die off and they’re not being replaced.” 

The same challenge was echoed by other priests. Father Carlo Santa Teresa, a young priest from Camden, New Jersey, noted both “low Mass attendance and a lack of catechesis.” Father Philip De Freitas, a parish priest in Tonbridge, England, also highlighted the decline and tied it to a “loss of faith in the Eucharist, the Real Presence of Christ.”

“People just disregard it, really,” he said. “There seems to be a loss of reverence due to Communion in the hand and in the liturgy generally, and from this everything else will follow.” 

The considerable fall in Mass attendance is naturally affecting parish finances, with another Australian priest, who asked not to be named, remarking that financial conditions were “shocking” in many parishes in his country. 

Lay Encouragement

Other priests at the conference spoke generally of low morale, saying that although often they received welcome encouragement from the lay faithful, frequently they received “discouragement” from the hierarchy and particularly from Rome. 

Father Chandler lamented that the focus in the Vatican is on such issues as “LGBTQ things and climate change” rather than listening to the concerns of clergy. He said that it was also “demoralizing because we’re trying, day by day, to teach people the faith, to bring them to holiness,” but added that that is not what Rome “seems to be concerned about.” 

Msgr. Charles Portelli of the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia, criticized the “mixed signals all the time” coming from Rome, and he gave as examples ambiguities following the publications of Pope Francis’ 2016 apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the 2023 Vatican declaration Fiducia Supplicans that allowed the blessings of same-sex couples. “They keep moving the goal posts, and it’s making bishops uncertain; they don’t know quite what to do,” he said. “And it’s actually eroding relationships, particularly the relationship between priests and their bishops, which should be like a father and son, or at least brother to brother.” 

Father Nicholas Leviseur, a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham that allows former Anglicans to become Catholic while retaining their Anglican liturgy and patrimony, said the “greatest challenge facing us is the devil. That’s not to sound platitudinous because that’s what any priest ought to say, but they don’t say that. And it’s compounded by a problem in society where people are simply not prepared to take personal responsibility for anything.” 

He also criticized bishops who “refuse to accept that they are nothing more nor less than servants of Christ and their task is the salvation of souls,” an understanding that he feels has been lost, despite the salvation of souls being the “main purpose of the priest and the only purpose of canon law.” As a result, he said many orthodox-thinking bishops who do preach these central truths are “petrified of Rome,” fearing that they will be disciplined or removed, as has happened to some bishops and priests who have spoken out on these issues. 

Despite these substantial grievances, the priests were hopeful and took solace in various signs of a revival of the faith in their countries. Many of them said that what young people and others are looking for in the Church is authenticity, conviction, beauty, truth and goodness, and a sense of transcendence and the supernatural.

“It can be very challenging sometimes trying to respond to the crisis at hand,” said Father Santa Teresa, “but at the same time, in spite of everything, people still want to know the Word; they have that longing to know him, to love him. They still seek the truth as much as they might say that they don’t.”

The priests spoke enthusiastically about this year’s Jubilee of Hope, and several are leading pilgrimages to Rome later in the year. 

Hopeful Signs

And, significantly, many of the priests saw hope in the traditional Latin Mass, even though only relatively few of them celebrated it. Father Chandler said his largest congregations, and the youngest parishioners in age, attend his weekday old-rite Mass. “The older form of the Mass is bringing people to pray,” he said. “It is a sign of hope.” 

Father Santa Teresa said he “certainly” saw similar hopeful signs in the traditional Mass. “In a world that’s very chaotic, in a world that seems to have lost any sense order, seeing the preciseness of the traditional liturgy, seeing the beauty, the sounds, every aspect of our senses being engaged, helps our young people,” he said. “Catholics who are my age desire to reach something higher than what the world seeks to be.” 

“Young people are attracted by transcendence, but they also want historical continuity,” said a priest who asked not to be named. “They know they’ve been sold a lemon, having read history, and they want to find authenticity.” 

Another priest, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said that just as in politics, in these uncertain times, where people are looking for a “much more robust society,” so, too, people are looking for “a much more robust set of demands” from the Church. And part of that, he said, requires “much greater clarity in terms of teaching and a much safer liturgical environment in which they can pray and come to God.” 

“They don’t want us to give stuff about the environment, they can get that from The Guardian,” he said, referring to the British socialist newspaper. “They’re looking for priests to be priests.”  

As a response to the crisis in the Church and these signs of hope, Father Miguel Silvestre Bengoa, a Spanish priest of The Work of the Church, an ecclesial institute of pontifical right approved by St. John Paul II in 1997, stressed the importance of focusing on “the divine” in the Church, on the “richness of the Church is God himself dwelling inside of her” rather than the “human part: our sins, the scandals and corruption.” 

“We need to always look at the Church from the supernatural point of view,” he said, and to “really try to show with our lives the sanctity and the holiness of the Church.” If every Christian tried to present the beauty of the Church, he added, “that would change a lot of things.” 

He especially urged all priests to “draw closer to the Eucharist, to adoration,” and to make a Holy Hour every day in front of the Blessed Sacrament, because “this is the center of our life. 

“We are called to be holy, and to be holy means to be with the Holy One, and then to preach,” he said. If priests did this and avoided “falling into activism,” said Father Silvestre, “they will bring people to the Eucharist, and so many problems will end.”