To The Editor: Your recent front-page story about the Council of Parishes of Southern New Jersey demanding an immediate halt to the restructuring of parishes and schools shows an emotional attachment of Catholics to their parishes and schools being merged. However if you were the Bishop, and you knew that in 2015 you would have 84 priests to pastor 124 parishes, what would you do? Canon Law, which protects parishioners by demanding stability, requires that only incardinated priests (those permanently contracted to the diocese) or religious-order priests whose order has a contractual relationship with the diocese, are eligible to be pastors. Our present 60-plus international priests are ineligible unless they incardinate, as some have. Catholic schools close when too few local parents send their children even when confidential tuition aid is available, for all admit it is very expensive. But money cannot substitute for too few enrollments since it imbalances the budgets of all but the wealthiest parishes. When parishioners abandon a school, there is little reason to artificially extend its life, especially when indignant parents demand that the diocese subsidize their suburban schools while poverty-stricken inner-city schools need help. We Christians have a prior duty to the poor before the rich which some seem to forget. Again if you were the bishop, and you knew that the average diocesan priest today is 64, and that only 12 men are in all stages of seminary theological training, and that many times that will retire or die by 2015, what would you do? What will the average age be in 2015? By then, the bishop will be forced to do another, even more painful consolidation. Fair-minded people are saying this bishop had the courage to do what two or three previous bishops should have done since they had the same demographics. This is the unpleasant logic of the problem: too few priests eligible to pastor necessarily fewer and larger parishes. It does not help to complain that one's grandmother was married in a particular merged church. Grandmothers were married in all our churches. But too few grandsons have chosen the priesthood, the only real solution. How many council members have a son in the seminary? However what is really unpleasant and in fact scandalous is the atrocious disrespect toward the bishop in print and in public by angry Catholics who seem to repel any information or facts, like a bishop's ability to provide a pastor for a parish of 1,800 families but not for one of 250. It is fine to question the wisdom of the merging this or that parish. But the venom and vinegar with which Catholics threaten to take this to Rome (all Rome cares about is whether a bishop consulted widely enough, and most concede Bishop Galante did), or to fruitlessly take this to court makes non-Catholics wonder about the loyalty to a spiritual leader reacting to a problem handed to him his first day here. REV. ROBERT J. GREGORIO Pastor Resurrection Parish Marmora