Ordained One: Buried One Hundred and Twenty
In almost twenty years of episcopate, I have buried one hundred and twenty priests, and I have ordained only one in the dioceses of Yonne and the Jura.
If you go to the source, the Archbishop, Monseigneur Yves Patenôtre, chatters on about lay involvement and all that one might expect from a French bureaucrat, basically, 'It ain't my fault'.
Sens-Auxerre is one of those diocese in France where practice has always been a little poor but presumably this Bishop's predecessors managed to attract the 120 priests which this bishop has buried. The problem is that the absence of priests, though bad in itself and a source of great evils, indicates a lack of health in the Church. In France things are certainly not all bad, Paris is doing comparatively well, Frejus-Toulon has as many ordination as the rest of France -excluding Paris- as the rest of France put together. The absence of priests indicates a deep disease, a loss of faith.
Perhaps Monseigneur Patenôtre needs to examine his conscience: has he actually been teaching the Catholic faith over the last twenty years, has he demanded his priests do the same? In France more than anywhere else ideology or theological speculation replaces faith.
Reported by Fr. Ray Blake