How’s the priest shortage affecting the Deep South? A paper in Mississippi takes a look at one parish in one diocese, where lay ministers are taking charge and pointing to a new way of church management:

Dressed in a knee-length black skirt and tweed blazer, Pam Minninger stood at the entrance of St. Joseph Catholic Church greeting her parishioners before Sunday Mass.

As worshippers filled the pews, Minninger walked to the front of the church to open the service.

“Welcome to Mass,” she said before making the day’s announcements. “The Holy Spirit has summoned us to this sacred space.”

She then retreated to the back of the church, sliding into a pew next to her husband.

As a child growing up Catholic, Minninger, 50, couldn’t have imagined the job she’d one day do for her church. It didn’t exist. She runs the parish in this small metro-area town, doing everything a priest once did except celebrate the sacraments.

“I have had the opportunity to be with people during the happiest times of their lives and during the saddest times of their lives,” said Minninger, St. Joseph’s lay ecclesial minster. “Seeing God working in people just never fails to inspire me, and it feeds me spiritually.”

As the ranks of U.S. Catholic priests continues to dwindle, the church has turned to lay people to fill leadership roles once strictly reserved for clergy. Since the early 1990s, the number of lay people running parishes has more than doubled, and today the number of people preparing for professional lay ministry outpaces the number of seminarians studying for the priesthood by nearly six to one.

Close to 20 lay people run churches and missions in the Catholic Diocese of Jackson, where more than 40 percent of its 102 faith communities lack a resident priest. The diocese is among the top 10 in the country assigning lay people to run its parishes.

“This diocese here seems to be on the cutting edge in the direction the church is going and people like me are facilitating that,” said Jerry Woods, 65, who started running Christ the King Catholic Church in Fulton nine years ago after retiring as a technical specialist for nuclear power plants. “If we look around Mississippi, lay ecclesial ministers are going to become more and more important to the ministry of the church.”

Nearly 31,000 Catholics nationwide work as lay ecclesial ministers, doing everything from running religious education programs to working as church business managers. The reforms of Vatican II in the 1960s paved the way for increased lay involvement. But a church law established in the early 1980s expanded the role of laity by allowing them to lead parishes.

Eighty percent are women. And as is the case in Mississippi, many of the ministers work in small or rural Catholic churches, helping to keep a Catholic presence alive.

“Everyone would prefer to have priests, even the parish life coordinators themselves,” said Mary Gautier, a senior researcher at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. “But everyone is trying to pitch in and make sure that viable communities can remain viable.”

Gautier considers the emergence of people in this role a stop-gap measure. “It’s not like all parishes are going to be replaced by lay people,” Gautier said. “It’s to help them out until there’s such a time as there’s enough priests to go around.”

The link has more details and statistics, along with some background.

Photo: Pam Minninger greets parishioners. Photo by Rick Guy/Clarion Ledger.