Brendan: Terrific piece of numerical journalism. You once again prove the importance of arithmetic, a much ignored science.
However, I think your “net change” statistic is not intuitive — when I first looked at the US chart, I thought, “Oh, it’s pretty much stable” — which is the wrong conclusion. It is as if the airplane is slowly easing down into the mountainside, instead of suddenly nosediving into the ground. Eventually plane and surface will meet.
It’s always fun to come up with statistics for other people to calculate. I’d like to see a graph of this simple ratio: Number of Catholics in a country divided by number of active priests in that country in the same year. My hunch is that would be a graph that would show us how fast we are approaching the crash.
Another thought. Reversing the calculation, dividing number of active priests by number Catholics would show the graph in darker terms — plunging down (priests per Catholic) instead of up (Catholics per priest.)
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.
Thanks for doing this research! Just for clarification, this is only taking into account ordinations of diocesan priests and not priests that are ordained for particular religious orders, correct? If that's the case, I'm curious if there are any countries or areas that have strong vocations for particular religious orders that aren't showing up in this data because its limited to diocesan ordinations.
Also, I'd love to see this same sort of analysis done but on a US diocese-by-diocese basis. I'm sure you have a enough on your plate, though, so just a suggestion. Thanks again!
If I may ask, if an analysis is done in the future concerning vocations to religious orders, will Third/Lay Order vocation trends be included? As a Lay Dominican myself, you could say I have a vested interest in seeing the results and having others know about us.
Fascinating stuff; it also would [have] be[en] interesting to see the trends extended back a decade or two to include the trends before and after Vatican II. More always would be welcome, though I know it's a lot of work.
Going by the numbers I've seen over at catholic-hierarchy.org of the number of priests in dioceses (secular and regular), I would suspect that the numbers for ordination to regular orders would show a rather more-discouraging picture, though I've never looked at them in a systematic way, and he only shows the numbers in a diocese in a given year.
I'm glad to hear that a diocesan analysis is underway. It's an important consideration. In addition to population normalization (after all, for instance, my archdiocese has more Catholics in it than some 15 states have people), is there a useful way to correlate trends to the "atmosphere" of the Church in particular dioceses? For instance, does Wichita's stewardship model seem to help (I recall you've touched on this model earlier)? Do smaller dioceses get higher or lower rates of vocations? How much does the rate of abuse cases correlate? How does (and I admit I have no particular idea how to measure this) the mix of 'orthodoxy vs. dissent' in the presbyterate relate to ordination rates? That sort of thing.
I was thinking while I was reading the story that in my "long" almost-nine years of preaching, pushback against my occasional (maybe every other year, including last year) homilies encouraging consideration of religious, particularly priestly, vocations has decreased. But then it occurred to me that the families that who did most of the pushing back in the past largely haven't been inside the church for the last couple years …
I too would be interested to see this further broken down in the United States! Growing up in the Lincoln Diocese, I was often told that they had a very high amount of seminarians compared to more populated dioceses. I wonder if there is a difference in rural vs urban diocese or states. I would suspect that there is a sharper net loss of priests in more urban or coastal areas.
Dear Brendan
Your Avatar looks as if You should go out more often 😵💫: Take a hike 😉
Brendan: Terrific piece of numerical journalism. You once again prove the importance of arithmetic, a much ignored science.
However, I think your “net change” statistic is not intuitive — when I first looked at the US chart, I thought, “Oh, it’s pretty much stable” — which is the wrong conclusion. It is as if the airplane is slowly easing down into the mountainside, instead of suddenly nosediving into the ground. Eventually plane and surface will meet.
It’s always fun to come up with statistics for other people to calculate. I’d like to see a graph of this simple ratio: Number of Catholics in a country divided by number of active priests in that country in the same year. My hunch is that would be a graph that would show us how fast we are approaching the crash.
Thanks again for your excellent work.
Chris Carstens
Thanks Chris, good suggestion! And glad to know how the net change chart appeared to a reader. Thank you.
Another thought. Reversing the calculation, dividing number of active priests by number Catholics would show the graph in darker terms — plunging down (priests per Catholic) instead of up (Catholics per priest.)
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.
Brendan,
Thanks for doing this research! Just for clarification, this is only taking into account ordinations of diocesan priests and not priests that are ordained for particular religious orders, correct? If that's the case, I'm curious if there are any countries or areas that have strong vocations for particular religious orders that aren't showing up in this data because its limited to diocesan ordinations.
Also, I'd love to see this same sort of analysis done but on a US diocese-by-diocese basis. I'm sure you have a enough on your plate, though, so just a suggestion. Thanks again!
Neil,
It's a good question about religious orders, and maybe religious orders in general would be a good topic for a future post!
I do have some diocese level analysis in progress, so that's something that will be available at some point too.
If I may ask, if an analysis is done in the future concerning vocations to religious orders, will Third/Lay Order vocation trends be included? As a Lay Dominican myself, you could say I have a vested interest in seeing the results and having others know about us.
Fauken,
I would have to check whether third orders are included in the Vatican statistics.
Fascinating stuff; it also would [have] be[en] interesting to see the trends extended back a decade or two to include the trends before and after Vatican II. More always would be welcome, though I know it's a lot of work.
Going by the numbers I've seen over at catholic-hierarchy.org of the number of priests in dioceses (secular and regular), I would suspect that the numbers for ordination to regular orders would show a rather more-discouraging picture, though I've never looked at them in a systematic way, and he only shows the numbers in a diocese in a given year.
I'm glad to hear that a diocesan analysis is underway. It's an important consideration. In addition to population normalization (after all, for instance, my archdiocese has more Catholics in it than some 15 states have people), is there a useful way to correlate trends to the "atmosphere" of the Church in particular dioceses? For instance, does Wichita's stewardship model seem to help (I recall you've touched on this model earlier)? Do smaller dioceses get higher or lower rates of vocations? How much does the rate of abuse cases correlate? How does (and I admit I have no particular idea how to measure this) the mix of 'orthodoxy vs. dissent' in the presbyterate relate to ordination rates? That sort of thing.
I was thinking while I was reading the story that in my "long" almost-nine years of preaching, pushback against my occasional (maybe every other year, including last year) homilies encouraging consideration of religious, particularly priestly, vocations has decreased. But then it occurred to me that the families that who did most of the pushing back in the past largely haven't been inside the church for the last couple years …
Thank you for this Brendan! Easy to read, easy to understand and very helpful/important
I too would be interested to see this further broken down in the United States! Growing up in the Lincoln Diocese, I was often told that they had a very high amount of seminarians compared to more populated dioceses. I wonder if there is a difference in rural vs urban diocese or states. I would suspect that there is a sharper net loss of priests in more urban or coastal areas.