There is a certain amount of stability (as in not hitting the mountain side) in the US numbers right now, in that the number of ordinations per year has been steadily around 428/year for the last 30 years. If that keeps up for another 20 years (a big if, admittedly) then the net change would go to about …
There is a certain amount of stability (as in not hitting the mountain side) in the US numbers right now, in that the number of ordinations per year has been steadily around 428/year for the last 30 years. If that keeps up for another 20 years (a big if, admittedly) then the net change would go to about zero as the generations of priests who died would be about the same size as the generations being ordained and the total number of priests in the US would stabilize.
I think the idea of showing priests per 100k Catholics or some such number would be really good. I'd also like to look at it in a way that focuses on Catholics the age at which they would be most likely to seek ordination. If, say, a country had a lot of older Catholics but most young people had completely abandoned the faith, we'd expect ordinations to be low (and also expect that the number of Catholics would drop dramatically in another couple decades.) So maybe a ratio of ordinations to marriages or ordinations to baptisms would be interesting, since getting married in the Church or having a child baptized is something that people would often do in their 20s or 30s, which is also the age a man might enter the priesthood.
Reviewing your second paragraph — terrific logic. I love it — very clever analysis. However, I think that the number of marriages, baptisms and ordinations are likely to be highly correlated, which would be disguised if you do no include the number of Catholics in the target population. That way, you could plot each of your three variables “per 100,000 Catholics” or similar.
Chris,
Thanks for the suggestions.
There is a certain amount of stability (as in not hitting the mountain side) in the US numbers right now, in that the number of ordinations per year has been steadily around 428/year for the last 30 years. If that keeps up for another 20 years (a big if, admittedly) then the net change would go to about zero as the generations of priests who died would be about the same size as the generations being ordained and the total number of priests in the US would stabilize.
I think the idea of showing priests per 100k Catholics or some such number would be really good. I'd also like to look at it in a way that focuses on Catholics the age at which they would be most likely to seek ordination. If, say, a country had a lot of older Catholics but most young people had completely abandoned the faith, we'd expect ordinations to be low (and also expect that the number of Catholics would drop dramatically in another couple decades.) So maybe a ratio of ordinations to marriages or ordinations to baptisms would be interesting, since getting married in the Church or having a child baptized is something that people would often do in their 20s or 30s, which is also the age a man might enter the priesthood.
Reviewing your second paragraph — terrific logic. I love it — very clever analysis. However, I think that the number of marriages, baptisms and ordinations are likely to be highly correlated, which would be disguised if you do no include the number of Catholics in the target population. That way, you could plot each of your three variables “per 100,000 Catholics” or similar.