The Foreclosure Related Crisis is Having an Effect on Prayer Outsourcing
The foreclosure related crisis is having an effect on prayer outsourcing to Indian churches. Only about one year ago Europeans, Canadians and Americans used to flood Indian churches.
Today the Indian church authorities are noting a sharp drop in these requests for “Mass intentions” coming from outside. This drop is timed with the economic downturn.
The requests to India came mainly because of the West facing an acute dearth of priests. The Mass requests were mainly sent to Kerala because here the cost is $5 as against $60 in USA.
The senior priests are finding it difficult to explain why the requests have dropped. America is going through a bad patch and it is generally during these cloudy days that people turn to religion. Secondly with the recession being on, there is all the more reason for people to turn to cheaper options available in India. The Americans requests for Mass in their own country had not gone up either according to the church authorities in USA.
A representative of Catholic Bishops Conference said, “Recession has led to a 50 per cent drop in the outsourcing of ‘mass intentions’, or remembrances… from western countries.”
The auxiliary bishop of an archdiocese in Kerala (Ernakulam-Angamly) Archbiship Sebastain Adayanthrath said that previously 350 Mass intentions were received by his archdiocese per month from the West. In the past twelve months it has dropped to 5 or 10. The Catholics mostly made the requests. In Kerala 23% of the people are Christians and of these, half are Catholics. In the state there are over 6,000 Catholic priests allowing it to dominate the outsourced Mass market.
The priest shortage in USA results in a long queue for special-Mass targeting a single intention. A priest can hold only one Mass per day and the Mass intention can be done for only one person.
For the last ten years prayer outsourcing has been popular but it made media news in 2004 when a Mass was held for David Beckham in Kerala praying for his return to form. A similar request was made for holding a Mass in the local language (Malayalam) for Michael Schumacher when he won the Grand Prix.
The requests by the western applicant are routed through the bishop of his or her native country or the Vatican to the Kerala archdiocese. The latter selects the particular church for holding the Mass. The fee for the priest is $5 – it being five times more than INR 50/- that the local Christian has to pay for the same service.
