[Gocamino] Catholic news from

[Sil]

I would like to wish all on this list a safe, happy and peaceful festive
season and everything of the best for the New Year.  I found this rather
poignant report on a parish church on the pilgrimage road in France, between
Cahors and Moissac.
Catholic News tells the story of an African priest who was assigned to the
parishof Lauzerte.  The number of foreign clergy working in French parishes
increased sixfold in the five years between 1997 and 2002. Sadly less than
10 percent of Catholics attend Sunday Mass in France and 40 percent of the
population of 59 million denies any faith.
While the country's population has risen by a third since 1945, the number
of Catholic priests has dropped by two-thirds, reaching 22,855 in 2004, a
decline especially marked among diocesan clergy. As vocations dwindle,
ordinations are becoming rarer too, with just 135 new priests nationwide in
2004, and 121 the year before.
Father Joseph Longo is rector of Lauzerte (a town fortified against English
invaders in the Middle Ages between Cahors and Moissac on the traditional
pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela
and is in charge of 19 parishes, visiting each every two months.  His
church, the 13th-century St. Barthelemy Church on Lauzerte's main square and
although up to 3,000 pilgrims stop here each year to pray at the nearby
pilgrims' garden Father Longo admits the local church's practical prospects
look bleak.  Lauzerte's famous Clarissan convent was turned into a police
station during the French Revolution, and its only other convent, inhabited
by three elderly Daughters of Jesus, closed two years ago.  The Montauban
Diocese plans to cut costs by selling the building and the adjacent rectory
as well.
You can read more at:

http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0607314.htm


Sil