REUTERS
Priests line up before a mass with Popae Benedict XVI outside the Jasna Gora shrine, with its revered Black Madonna icon in Czestochowa, southern Poland in this May 26, 2006 photo. At Krakow's Franscician Missionary Centre, a display case a display case full of African masks and Asian costumes recalls the adventures that awaited priests who went to spread the Roman Catholic faith in far-off lands.
KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters):
At Krakow's Franciscan Missionary Centre, a display case full of African masks and Asian costumes recalls the adventures that awaited priests who went to spread the Roman Catholic faith in far-off lands.
Nowadays, however, half of the missionaries who leave this southern Polish city for abroad head no further than nearby European countries or just over the Atlantic to North America.
Across town at the archdiocesan seminary, students can add English, German, French or Italian to their theology and Latin courses to be ready to move west as soon as they are ordained.
Top export product
Priests have become a top "export product" as Poland, where the Catholic Church retains a vibrant strength lost in the rest of Europe, helps fill the dwindling ranks of clergy in the West.
"The Church is universal, not just Polish," said Father Marek Lesniak at the Krakow seminary, whose alumni man parishes of this large archdiocese and also work in Austria, Britain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States as well as Russia, Ukraine, Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil.
"We are not a seminary for missionaries, but if someone has a calling for the missions, he can go," said the deputy director of the 600-year-old seminary where the late Pope John Paul - an inspiration for many of the young students here - once studied.
"We Franciscans want to join in the rechristianisation of Europe," said Father Jan-Marie Szewek of Krakow's Franciscan province, which has missionaries in Germany, Austria, Italy and the United States.
With vocations to the priesthood rising here and falling elsewhere, foreign bishops now buttonhole their Polish counterparts at Vatican meetings or write directly to Polish seminaries to ask if they can provide some extra manpower.
"I was in Cologne at the World Youth Day last year and we got lots of requests from bishops there from Greece, the Netherlands, Germany and France," said Lesniak, who celebrates Mass at the seminary in his fluent English, German and Italian in order to teach students to pray in a foreign language.
DEEP POOL OF PRIESTS
It is hard to put a figure on Polish priests working abroad because they are sent by their dioceses and religious orders. Vatican statistics show over 1,500 Polish diocesan priests work abroad and dioceses and orders here say the numbers are rising.
Some minister to the many Poles who have emigrated westwards in recent years, but most work with local parishes.
About 95 per cent of Poles say they are Catholic. Over half attend Mass weekly, far more than the 10-20 per cent seen in former Catholic strongholds such as France, Italy and Spain.
The number of seminarians is high, assuring a surplus of fresh blood here while the ranks of the clergy elsewhere thin out for lack of young men willing to join the priesthood.
Poland has 22.5 seminarians per 100 ordained priests whereas Italy has only 11.6, Spain 9.5 and France 5.6. Ireland - once a great "exporter" of priests - has only 3.6 per 100 priests.
There are about 10 U.S. seminarians per 100 priests.
With 6,427 student priests in 2004, Poland accounted for about one quarter of all seminarians in Europe. It easily surpassed the 5,038 total of all U.S. and Canadian seminarians.
"There are not enough priests in Western Europe and that's why we are being trained to work there," said Tomasz Gora, 20, at the Salvatorian order's seminary in Bagno near Wroclaw in southwestern Poland.
The situation has not gone unnoticed at the Vatican, where Pope Benedict urged Polish bishops visiting him last December to keep up the missionary work.
"Encourage your priests to do their missionary service or pastoral work in countries where clergy are scarce," he told them. "It seems that today this is a special task and, in a certain sense, also a duty of the Church in Poland.
