No Rest, No Self-Care: African Catholic Priests Must Pay Attention to Their Wellbeing
A Personal Reflection
During a current self-care formation for African priests, leading African Catholic psycho-spiritual expert, Fr. Collins Okeke, reiterated the need for a proactive response to the complex challenges facing Catholic priests in Africa today. Basing his research on the well-being of Catholic priests in the United States, he advised the Church in Africa, particularly considering recent deaths by suicide among priests and religious.
At the same formation program, Archbishop Fortunatus Nwachukwu shared a sobering fact from his home diocese of Aba, Nigeria, where the diocesan cemetery is filled with priests under 50. Younger priests, he said, are dying not of persecution or old age, but of preventable and treatable illnesses, the slow harvest of an unsustainable lifestyle: no rest, no exercise, no regular medical checkups, no outlet for stress, no one to whom they can honestly say, “I am not well.”
If the American data is a warning about burnout and psychological exhaustion, the graves in Aba are a warning about something that is frighteningly real and tragic. Self-care for the African priest is not simply a lifestyle preference. It is, in the light of emerging evidence, a matter of life and death.
What the data shows
Research from Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) reveals a troubling pattern beneath priestly life. While 89 percent of priests identified overwork as a problem, 78 percent identified loneliness and isolation, and 73 percent identified burnout, only about a third believed these concerns were being adequately addressed. The 2025 National Study of Catholic Priests deepens this paradox.
However, American priests report high personal well-being, 8.2 on a ten-point scale; 39 percent experience at least one symptom of burnout. Diocesan priests are particularly vulnerable, with 7 percent experiencing high burnout compared with 2 percent of religious priests. Perhaps most revealing is the gap between personal and communal flourishing: priests rate their own well-being at 8.2, but the well-being of their diocesan community at only 5.7. Priests, it seems, may be personally resilient even as ecclesial environments struggle to flourish.
A priest can love his vocation, remain faithful to prayer and ministry, and still be exhausted, lonely, emotionally depleted, or psychologically vulnerable because of an unhealthy ecclesial environment.”
The message is important: a priest can love his vocation, remain faithful to prayer and ministry, and still be exhausted, lonely, emotionally depleted, or psychologically vulnerable because of an unhealthy ecclesial environment. Data from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, stress the impact of healthy relationships, social connection, and a sense of belonging regarding human well-being and proper adjustment. These findings resonate with Kenneth Pargament’s extensive work on religion, spirituality, coping, and resilience, particularly his emphasis on the relational, communal, and spiritual resources that sustain people through changing seasons.
For priests serving in ecclesial settings governed by hierarchical authority, group dynamics, and inherited patterns that often presume normalcy, conformity, and order, the environment can at times become deeply alienating and disempowering. Such conditions may create unexpected saturation points of pain, loneliness, isolation, and helplessness. The paradox is particularly painful as the very ecclesial and relational structures instituted to provide belonging, fraternity, and support can at times become sources of isolation, friction, rivalry, envy, resentment, and tribal and clannish cleavages that become exclusive rather than inclusive. Profound spiritual struggles stem from such experiences.
When ecclesial structures fail to adequately hold a priest’s pain or support his holistic growth and personal integration, healthy and life-giving relationships go beyond desire; they become essential. Trust and compassion in spaces where a priest can share without judgment, but rather with guidance and care, are needed for healing and resilience.
Five dimensions, one neglected whole
Even though these data are from research in the U.S., they also speak to the African context given the recent spike in the number of African priests and religious dying by suicide, and the number of younger priests and religious in Africa dying so young. These data point to a more holistic understanding of priestly health, built around at least five mutually reinforcing dimensions: psychological and emotional well-being; spiritual rootedness; relational and fraternal connectedness; sustainable patterns of work, rest, exercise and physical health; and healthy relationships with ecclesial institutions and leadership. Neglect in one dimension inevitably places pressure on all the others, and in Aba diocese in Eastern Nigeria, it seems the neglect of the fourth dimension is proving catastrophic.
A distinctly African weight
I find this disparity in overall general health among priests highly personal. I currently direct the African Catholic research component of the Global Formation Project on the spiritual maturity of pastoral agents, an international and ecumenical research initiative led by psychologist David C. Wang of Fuller Theological Seminary and supported by the Templeton Religion Trust and other Templeton foundations. The project studies the human and spiritual formation of Christian leaders across cultures and traditions. Its earlier North American phase followed more than 1,500 seminarians from 18 theological schools over three years, including the extraordinarily stressful period of the COVID-19 pandemic, using more than fifty validated measures of emotional well-being, relationships, vocation, resilience, and the capacity to cope with stress. How can we use this research intentionally?
One lesson from this body of research is especially important for priests and religious today: spiritual commitment does not immunize anyone against the psychological consequences of trauma and prolonged stress. Research on religious leaders predating COVID-19 found roughly one-third reporting work-related post-traumatic stress symptoms above clinical thresholds, with more than half falling into a range warranting clinical concern. COVID-19 then provided an extraordinary real-life laboratory for observing how crisis, uncertainty, isolation, loss, and sustained responsibility affect those preparing for religious leadership.
This challenge carries a distinctly African weight. Our cultures often place enormous expectations on priests and religious: to be spiritually strong, endlessly available, financially generous, emotionally composed, and able to carry the burdens of entire families, parishes, and communities on their own shoulders. Clerical culture reinforces the dangerous assumption that vulnerability is weakness. Priests learn to accompany everyone else’s pain while concealing their own; they preach hope while privately struggling with exhaustion, disappointment, loneliness, anxiety, addiction, depression, and the quiet progression of illnesses that could be avoided by routine checkups.
Grace does not abolish human vulnerability. Priests can be traumatized. Priests can be overwhelmed. Priests can suffer depression, anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and burnout.”
These realities challenge one of the most dangerous myths in priestly and religious life: that because we preach hope, celebrate the sacraments, counsel others, pray regularly, and have given our lives to God, we should somehow be immune from psychological or physical collapse. We are not. Grace does not abolish human vulnerability. Priests can be traumatized. Priests can be overwhelmed. Priests can suffer depression, anxiety, loneliness, exhaustion, and burnout. We as priests can run our bodies into the ground. Under an unbearable convergence of pressures, internal or external, a priest can reach a point where his normal coping resources fail him entirely.
This is why self-care and self-compassion must become integral to our understanding of priestly formation. We must learn to recognize our limits, name our pain, seek professional help when necessary, cultivate real friendships, rest without guilt, get our annual checkup, and allow others to care for us. Perhaps one of the deepest acts of humility available to a priest is the courage to say plainly: I am struggling; I need help. Such an admission is not a failure of faith or vocation but a courageous act.
When Helping Others Is Hurting the Priest
Carmen Berry, in When Helping You Is Hurting Me, offers a helpful analysis in understanding the sources of the wounds many of us carry as priests. Many of us were formed in the seminary and in our Christian upbringing to help others, even to the point of dying with our boots on. The church and society also expect us to be “cheerful givers,” to suppress our emotional pain, our unmet needs, and to pour our lives out in service, especially for those worse off than ourselves. What we were never sufficiently taught was how to care for the child still living within us; how to tend our own precious lives; how to fill the gaping holes in our hearts; how to name openly, without shame our failings, our weaknesses, our inner hurts and inner demons, that deepest fragility of our humanity which cries out, quite simply, for a divine caress, for the transcendence and healing that only grace through real and Christlike friendship can give.
We believed, wrongly, that carving time to attend to our own needs, our health, our relationships would be selfish, even un-Christlike. Thus, some of us substitute work for wholeness, filling the widening emptiness that giving-oneself-away inevitably leaves behind with still more giving. I remember a very helpful spiritual pattern cultivated from my own seminary days, in our charismatic prayer group: after intensive sessions of healing prayer or exorcism, we would deliberately set aside a “filling-in” time — a capacious space consciously left open for the Holy Spirit to restore what had been poured out, to return strength and calm to hands that had just spent themselves on others.
What we were never sufficiently taught was how to care for the child still living within us; how to tend our own precious lives; how to fill the gaping holes in our hearts; how to name openly, without shame our failings, our weaknesses, our inner hurts and inner demons, that deepest fragility of our humanity which cries out, quite simply, for a divine caress, for the transcendence and healing that only grace through real and Christlike friendship can give.”
What Scripture already knew
Scripture does not flinch from this need. When Elijah triumphed over the prophets of Baal, the high point of his prophetic career, he collapsed in the wilderness and asked to die: “It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers” (1 Kings 19:4). God’s response? A caress in the form of a meal and a nap: an angel touched him, fed him, and let him sleep double the amount of time he would normally spend sleeping before a single word is spoken, “for the journey is too great for you” (1 Kings 19:7). Only after Elijah had been fed and rested did he hear the still, small voice from God that sent him out again to work. The lesson is unmistakable: even the most zealous of the Lord’s servants must be nourished and rested before he can hear God again and serve his brothers and sisters. Jesus modelled the same rhythm with his own exhausted disciples: “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while” (Mark 6:31). This was an instruction from the Lord of the harvest himself, who also gives them this ancient wisdom: “Physician, heal thyself” (Luke 4:23) as a warning built into the vocation from the beginning.
Self-compassion is not self-indulgence.
Authentic and effective pastoral care can only be built on the foundation of self-care and self-compassion. We, priests, must learn to self-apply the wisdom we so readily dispense to the faithful. Scripture’s second great commandment does not ask us to love our neighbor instead of ourselves, but as ourselves (Mark 12:31). In other words, rightly ordered self-love is not the opposite of charity but its precondition. As healers, we must first be healed, for we cannot give what we do not have.
Enriching pastoral care, then, means weaving a new quality of connection and intimacy animated by love, respect, compassion, trust, and hope among priests. It means acknowledging the intrinsic beauty of every person, including priests and religious, and allowing God to heal our brokenness. Rather than exhausting ourselves trying to please everyone, even our superiors, we must attend to the silent needs of our bodies and souls and trust that God can work through our vulnerabilities. Ultimately, it means choosing to live our beautiful lives rather than merely act them out: offering ourselves joyfully from a place of grace, trust, love, and contentment, and making peace with our limits and our fragile, unguarded humanity.
A responsibility the Church must share
Religious superiors and diocesan bishops must build ecclesial cultures in which priests and religious can seek psychological assistance, develop genuine friendships, get adequate rest, receive regular health care, and speak honestly about their struggles without fear of stigma or of being judged unfit for ministry.”
But responsibility for self-care cannot rest solely on priests. We are each other’s keepers, or as Pope Francis said in his inaugural homily, we are all guardians of one another. Religious superiors and diocesan bishops must build ecclesial cultures in which priests and religious can seek psychological assistance, develop genuine friendships, get adequate rest, receive regular health care, and speak honestly about their struggles without fear of stigma or of being judged unfit for ministry. Bishops and religious superiors must treat their priests and religious as adults who are subjects of ascription and whose freedom and agency must be respected in the responsibilities assigned to them. The Church should review all threats of punishment for non-compliance.
The Church cannot exhort exhausted priests to care for themselves while preserving ecclesial structures and cultures that perpetuate overwork, tension, pressure to please superiors, unquestioning loyalty, and sycophantic, transactional relationships that lead to inner disintegration, isolation, and toxic silence. Aba’s cemetery is not simply a diocesan tragedy; it is a question the whole Church in Africa must answer before more names are added too soon to its rolls or before another priest or religious dies by suicide and frustration. The faithful are keenly observing us. What steps will we take?
