Worship woes

New Delhi, Aug. 11: The global economic slowdown appears to have had an unlikely victim — prayer outsourcing.

Even a year ago, Americans, Canadians and Europeans used to flood churches in India, especially those in Kerala, with requests to hold special Masses for them. Now Indian church bodies say there has been a sharp fall in outsourced “Mass intentions” coinciding with the downturn.

One reason for the overseas requests was that the West faces a shortage of priests; another was that a Mass outsourced to Kerala costs $5 (Rs 240) whereas one in the US costs $60.

Senior priests are hard pressed to explain the trend for two reasons. One, people are supposed to turn to religion during bad times; and two, during a recession, more people can be expected to take the cheaper option.

A priest said it was not that westerners were requesting Masses in their own countries instead of outsourcing them — he had found out from US church authorities that Masses had not increased there.

Indiancatholic, the website of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India spokesperson, says the “recession has led to a 50 per cent drop in the outsourcing of ‘mass intentions’, or remembrances… from western countries’’.

Archbishop Sebastian Adayanthrath, the auxiliary bishop of the Ernakulam-Angamly archdiocese in Kerala, said his archdiocese used to receive about 350 Mass intentions a month from overseas. The figure has fallen to 5-10 requests a month over the past one year.

Most of the requests came from Catholics. Christians make up 23 per cent of Kerala’s population, and about half of them are Catholics. The state has more than 6,000 Catholic priests, and it is this that helped it dominate the market for outsourced Mass.

In the US, the shortage of priests means there’s often a long wait for a special Mass dedicated to a single intention. Under Catholic Church norms, a priest can conduct only one Mass a day and do a Mass intention for just one person.

Prayer outsourcing has been going on for about a decade, but it caught international media attention in 2004 when a special Mass was held in a small Kerala church, praying that English soccer star David Beckham returns to form.

Similarly, when F1 champion Michael Schumacher won the Australian Grand Prix, a German fan requested a thanksgiving Mass that was held in a parish in Kerala, that too in Malayalam.

Only rarely, however, do the requests come directly to individual priests. Usually, the western client gets in touch with a bishop in his own country or the Vatican through a parish priest, and the bishop then informs a Kerala archdiocese, which selects the church and the priest for the Mass.

The priest gets to keep the fee of $5, which is nearly five times the Rs 50 a local Christian is charged for a Mass intention.