When Salvador Anonuevo became a Catholic priest in 1986, he never thought about serving anywhere outside his native Philippines. After all, for much of its history, his Southeast Asian homeland depended on foreign missionary priests to serve the largely Catholic populace.
“There was a time when there were more European priests than Filipino,” he said.
Yet, for the past three years, Anonuevo unexpectedly found himself serving as a foreign mission priest in South Hampton Roads.
Gripped by a persistent shortage of homegrown clergy, it is the Catholic Church in the United States, including the Diocese of Richmond, that now relies heavily on foreign-based priests to serve domestic parishioners and lead worship services.
“The United States has become a mission territory,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Caroluzza, who oversees Catholic churches in eastern Virginia on behalf of the Richmond diocese.
This month, five priests from Poland, Kenya and the Philippines will arrive in the diocese, joining more than two dozen clergy from South Korea, Vietnam and other countries who are here on long-term assignments. Several Hampton Roads parishes have international priests, including St. Luke Catholic Church on Salem Road in Virginia Beach, where Anonuevo is assigned.
Maintaining a minimum number of priests is crucial for every Catholic diocese because only ordained priests can perform certain sacraments, such as communion, that are essential to parishioners.
Priests belonging to dioceses overseas have become the single largest source of new clergy for the Richmond diocese, Caroluzza said.
“Most of them are on temporary loan for three-year periods, and we can extend that if we talk to their bishop,” he said.
While their presence may be a reminder of the shortfall in American ordinations, foreign clergy sometimes provide a bonus on top of their basic clerical credentials: Many have language skills or cultural backgrounds that equip them to work with fast-growing immigrant groups that are swelling the United States’ Catholic population.
For example, Anoneuvo said he connects easily with the Hispanics who are among St. Luke’s parishioners because, as a Filipino, he comes from a Latin-influenced culture and speaks Spanish; Spain controlled the Philippines as a colony until 1898.
Nationally, foreign-based priests represent about 16 percent of the roughly 27,000 priests active in parish and diocesan ministry, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, which studies the Catholic Church.
Their presence helps offset the nosedive in American ordinations that followed the social upheaval of the 1960s and the new Catholic policies and practices promulgated by the Second Vatican Council in the same decade.
There were 994 diocesan priests ordained in the United States in 1965 but just 771 in 1975, 533 in 1985 and 427 in 2000. The most recent data suggest that the slump has flattened and even reversed slightly in some areas, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In the Richmond diocese, there were no ordinations in 2002, and only one priest was ordained in 2003. One ordination is expected in 2004 and four more in 2005, said the Rev. Michael Renninger, who oversees priest vocations for the diocese.
Meanwhile, the number of priests belonging to and active in the Richmond diocese dropped from 116 in 2002 to 111 in 2003 because of retirements, death and transfers to the military chaplaincy, said Anne Edwards, the diocesan chancellor.
There were 31 international priests on loan to the diocese as of late 2002, compared with 21 in 1998, Edwards said, citing the most recent statistics available. Of those 31 priests, 10 came from the Philippines, seven from Vietnam, two from South Korea and five from various African nations.
Renninger acknowledged that the ongoing influx of foreign priests is a contrast with the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, when priestly vocations boomed in the United States.
“We were one of the countries sending surplus, mission priests to places like Africa and Central America and the Philippines,” he said.
Those former mission regions are now experiencing their own vocational boom and, in some cases, have more priests than can be absorbed by their own dioceses.
That allows bishops in those countries to share priests with dioceses in the United States and Europe.
Bishop Walter F. Sullivan, who retired in September as head of the Richmond diocese, said Filipino priests are serving here because of a deal he struck years ago with Bishop Jesus Y. Varela, who led the Diocese of Sosorgon in the Philippines at that time.
Under the agreement, the Richmond diocese provides financial support to needy seminarians in the Philippines. In return, it can borrow priests attached to the Sosorgon diocese.
The arrangement fills pulpits in Virginia that otherwise likely would have remained vacant. Coincidentally, it provided priests perfectly suited to serve the large Catholic Filipino community in Hampton Roads and elsewhere in the Richmond diocese.
“Once we obtained the services of Filipino priests, there was an outpouring of Filipinos attending our parishes and schools,” Sullivan said.
Similar stories may be more common than modern Catholics may realize. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American bishops often relied on clergy born and trained overseas to serve the immigrants pouring into the United States. Non-native priests often were assigned to serve their own ethnic community wherever it settled.
“During the huge Irish immigrations, there were seminaries in Ireland designed to train priests to come to the U.S.,” Renninger said. “As the Italians came over, there were Italian-speaking priests.”
The foreign-born priests in the United States today aren’t limited to serving immigrants. Anonuevo’s 350-family congregation at St. Luke includes Filipinos, Hispanics and native-born Americans such as Patty Trail.
Having a foreign mission priest assigned to her parish “never even fazed me,” said Trail, who has attended St. Luke for 13 years. She became Anonuevo’s administrative assistant when he was assigned to the parish about a year ago.
“It doesn’t take an American citizen or a diocesan priest to minister to you,” she said. “It takes someone who has that true depth of spirituality, that true relationship with Jesus himself. I saw that deep spirituality in Father Salvador.”
Anonuevo, 45, grew up on the island of Luzon, in a small town where almost everyone was Catholic and the local priest was esteemed as a leader of the entire community.
“He had the kind of life I wanted: to serve people, preaching and reading God’s word as an official minister of the Catholic Church,” Anonuevo said.
Although he never expected to be a foreign missionary, Anonuevo said he saw nothing odd about being sent to serve God overseas, in the wealthiest nation on earth. In the universal church of Jesus Christ, he said, there are no borders.
“I’m not here as a Filipino priest serving an American community,” he said. “I am here as a Catholic priest serving a Catholic Christian community. It doesn’t matter where you were ordained or what your nationality is. I am simply a Catholic priest.”