The ever-worsening priest shortage does not lend itself to decent pastoral care of the sick or dying.  The Catholic pastor in a small town where I used to live was routinely called (sometimes in a single day!) to tend to parishioners who were hospitalized in distant (fifty miles, one way) locations in all four cardinal points of the compass!  (And he had a large migrant population to attend to as well, all by himself!)  And all that was forty years ago now!   And that picture is NOT changing for the better!