New Catholic immigrants.

It's not found in most dictionaries. Yet it has become a household word in the developing campaign rhetoric as we make our way toward another national election.

Outsourcing. This word is used to indicate the movement of jobs to other countries. Call your credit card company to check on your account and you might well be speaking to someone as far away as India. The voice on the other end of the phone has been trained in accent reduction and schooled in the latest American idioms. People halfway around the globe will say to you, "Have a good day" in Heartland-sounding English.

But there's a flip side to outsourcing--insourcing. Don't look for this word in your desktop dictionary nor in the Oxford English Dictionary. But do look for it in a nearby parish. Catholic dioceses across the United States increasingly rely on priests from other countries to fill the gap created by the ongoing decline in the number of clergy in the U.S. Walk into a parish in Albion, Indiana; Tahlequah, Oklahoma; or myriad other towns today and experience ecclesial insourcing in action.

Ecclesial bean counters tell us that the number of foreign priests serving in parishes in this country now hovers around 20 percent. Although detailed statistics are hard to come by, it is generally agreed that American Catholicism insources priests primarily from India. Priests from Poland, the Philippines, Mexico, and various countries on the continent of Africa also increasingly populate parish rectories. In some areas of the U.S., priests are insourced from countries to match a newly arrived Catholic immigrant population. More often than not, however, insourced priests serve parishes as American as apple pie.

Some dioceses insource seminarians. This more long-term approach to the decline in priest numbers doesn't immediately produce priests for the ecclesial work force. But it does give these insourced males an opportunity to learn about U.S. culture and to become proficient in American English.

Will insourcing change the face of American Catholicism? You bet it will.

But it won't be the first time the presence of priests from elsewhere was so noticeable. This country was officially listed as a mission territory until 1908. Vast numbers of priests were insourced from many European and British Isle countries, at first to establish the church in this country, then to follow its westward expansion, and finally to minister to the large numbers of Catholic immigrants. It wasn't until 1911 that the first missionary order of priests was established in the United States for the purpose of outsourcing American priests to other countries.

Is this nation becoming other countries' mission territory once again? Not really, since the presence of Catholicism is institutionally rooted across the United States. And we are far from the point where bishops will be appointed from other countries as was the case in the first several hundred years of U.S. Catholicism.

No doubt, outsourcing will be one of the hot-button campaign issues of this election year. But don't look for Catholic insourcing to make it to the presidential debates.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.