Article: Sad Decline in Priestly Vocations

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The dioceses pays the seminary to train the men they’re going to use after ordination.

However, the seminary may not even be in that dioceses.

Jim
 
No one is arguing that point. I’m saying that when a Diocese announces ORDINATIONS, those are priests that will be serving that Diocese. Where they studied matters not for this discussion.
 
Not always.

My dioceses has ordained men who went back to their homeland to serve, Africa and South America.

Jim
 
First of all, praise God for the three new priests in your diocese. May they have many blessed and fruitful years of ministry.

The ordination numbers reported by the Diocese of Lincoln are only those men who have been ordained for that Diocese. It does not include any missionary priests or any ordained for another Diocese.

St. Gregory Seminary in Lincoln does educate men for other dioceses, but it is a college seminary only so none of the men in formation there would be ordained in Lincoln.
 
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This was in the article. : )

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Ordination All-Stars

The research note is from the Winter edition of The CARA Report . CARA has been releasing research in this quarterly print format for nearl...
nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com nineteensixty-four.blogspot.com

Ordination All-Stars
The research note is from the Winter edition of The CARA Report. CARA has been releasing research in this quarterly print format for nearly 20 years, since 1995, and has won a number of awards for “general excellence” from the Catholic Press Association during this time. You can get your copy here.

Following the procedure originally devised by the late Fr. John Klein of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and using data from The Official Catholic Directory, from time to time CARA has reviewed the proportion of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood relative to the latest Catholic population figures for each diocese. Only Latin-rite dioceses that have had at least five ordinations during the reporting period are included.

The tables here present the results of the latest review, for the three ordination years 2010–12 and using year-end Catholic population figures for 2012. The first table lists the top 20 dioceses according to the priest-to-parishioner ratio; the second the top 21 dioceses (because of a tie) based on the largest absolute number of new priests ordained.

CARA has presented the results of the five top-20 comparisons for ordination years 1993-1995, 1997-1999, 2000-2002, 2003-2006, 2007-2009, and now 2010-2012. An analysis of the results of all six data points indicates that of the 57 dioceses that placed in the top-20 for Catholics per ordinand ratio at least once:

Only the Diocese of Lincoln was in the top-20 all six times.
Three dioceses were listed five times: Bismarck, Fargo, and Wichita
Three more were on the list four times: Peoria, Sioux Falls, and Tyler

And 13 were listed three times: Alexandria, Atlanta, Birmingham, Duluth, Knoxville, Mobile, Omaha, Owensboro, Pensacola-Tallahassee, Savannah, Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Tulsa, and Yakima
 
Augustinian said:
men in their 30’s and 40’s also have other fiscal responsibilities- student loans, credit cards, mortgages, car notes. The average American in AD 2018 is technically broke.
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If they thought they might want to be a priest, or change careers to anything different in midlife, I’d expect them to live in such a way to take care of that first.

I wasn’t broke in my 30s and I know plenty of other people, male and female, who weren’t either, especially if they didn’t have kids (we already established a guy with kids can’t run off to the seminary). A lot of these folks aren’t well off either. They simply didn’t incur any big loans or credit card debt and live in apartments or group homes with cheap car or no car. They also don’t live in expensive housing markets, so they aren’t paying San Francisco amounts of rent. They find it pretty easy to pick up and move to different cities (sometimes different countries) or different jobs. Often they found a way to get through college cheap, whether it was scholarship, in-state tuition, living with parents for a few years to pay off the loan, or working and going to night school.
 
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My own dioceses ordinations are the proof;.

Heck, the current parish administrator of my parish comes from South America. He was ordained in the diocese just seven years ago. He worked for three years in the dioceses learning English, then returned to Columbia and worked there before returning to the States.

He was still part of the statistic of men ordained in the dioceses.

The same is true of a current priest who was ordained last year. He comes from Africa and will work here for a few years before returning to Africa, if that’s his desire.

Jim
 
Respectfully, your diocese is proof only of your diocese. My diocese, for example, has never done this as far as I know.

I still maintain that 90%+ of ordinations to a particular diocese are of priests who will be serving that diocese.
 
“As far as you know” is the operative.

I’ve also observed the ordinations in the neighboring dioceses like the Archdiocese of Boston, which also has the largest seminary in New England, of which the surrounding states send their candidates for the priesthood to.

Hey, if I’m wrong, Praise God !

Jim
 
Simple solution to this decline is to go back to the CC original stance on letting Priest be married that was held for 1000+ years. Even St. Peter our 1st Pope was married.

I’d even consider the Priesthood if the CC ever allows it being that I’m married.

The price the CC has paid is the scandals of pedophiles as Priests who have hurt soo many individuals. Now that the pedophiles have been exposed, they won’t seek the Priesthood, which is another reason for the decline. This celibacy decision opened the door for Satan.
 
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In many countries, other ecclesiastical communities are decreasing in membership numbers as well. They let their pastors marry.

There are pedophiles working in schools, health care facilities and other ecclesiastical communities. It is not talked about as much in media as when it becomes known that a Catholic priest is abusing someone.

Relationships within families is another factor. More common with male relatives and those married into the family than with women.
 
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I worked as a sex abuse investigator for years. Most abusers of children also had past or current sexual relationships with adult women. There is no correlation between celibacy and abuse.

In the cases involving clergy of other denominations there was never any media coverage. There was rarely any coverage in cases involving perpetrators who were professionals other than Catholic priests.
 
I used to think something more along the lines of what you just wrote. My suggestion is to read about the potential problems of married priests in the Catholic church. There are many many good articles about it. A thread seems to pop up here on Catholic Answers Forum almost weekly on the subject. Be open to counter arguments. Your should know the counter arguments.

I do think Viri Probati…older married men ordained as priests could be a very good solution both the Amazon and the US and Europe.

Some very reasonable counter arguments…
  1. Celibacy does not directly cause abuse. Abuse happens in all churches. There may have even been some anti-Catholic bias in the Australian report that came out about abuse earlier this year. Are there factors about Celibacy that may contribute indirectly to abuse…maybe…but the issue is far more complicated.
  2. You’d be asking parishes to pay a lot of money (some certainly have that money) for a priest and his likely large family. The poorer or smaller parishes won’t have this money.
  3. Becoming a priest will become a profession or a job…rather than a gift.
    a. It will become a really coveted job and family connections will be required to get the job in all reality.
  4. Yes priests could marry once upon a time. However, this is more complex.
    a. Often Catholic priests were to abstain from sexual relations with their wife when married. Essentially, this is not too far off from the idea of Viri Probati being proposed today.
    b. The institution of priesthood in the Catholic church is a lot older than the idea of marriage historically. 1000 years ago marriage had a lot more to do with passing along property to heirs.
 
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There’s no correlation between celibacy and abuse of itself.

However, celibacy drew people into the priesthood who should never have been there, and this was because the Church was scrapping the bottom of the barrel so-to-speak, to fill the ranks.

If the Church had lifted mandatory celibacy, there would still be sexual abuse, but a lot less.

Also, married men with children would’ve reacted faster seeing a child abused by a priest, than the Church did.

That all being said. Having married priest opens up a new set of problems that the Church would have to deal with, and two that come to mind are birth control and divorce.

Will a married priest and his wife actually follow Humanae Vitae ? Even if they did, if they only had one or two kids, there would be skepticism about whether they did or not.

Then of course is when a marriage breaks down and the priest and his wife divorce. What then ?

The Permanent Diaconate gives an idea of what having a married priesthood would be like.

It’s not a cure all and it’s a little too late to handle the current shortage.

Jim
 
“JimR-OCDS said:
There’s no correlation between celibacy and abuse of itself.

However, celibacy drew people into the priesthood who should never have been there, and this was because the Church was scrapping the bottom of the barrel so-to-speak, to fill the ranks.

If the Church had lifted mandatory celibacy, there would still be sexual abuse, but a lot less.

Also, married men with children would’ve reacted faster seeing a child abused by a priest, than the Church did.

[quote/]

Having worked in field of abuse for many years, I would not come to this conclusion. My own opinion is that priests were impacted by the sexual revolution, just as laity were.

One might complain that celibacy should have cured any and all sexual disorders. One might also complain the same thing about marriages, Bible reading, socialism, or other things that ALL failed to cure all kinds of problems.

Should we abolish marriage because it failed to prevent some laymen from being caught up in the astonishing overall increase in sexual issues in the West?

I don’t know, but have second hand information, that in public school districts it was common practice to transfer sexual perpetrators, and keep all information out of the public eye. I DO know, from direct experience, that in child welfare and human service agencies this was the case, for some professionals and government approved and paid foster parents. This does not condone what the Church did, it is just that the media is targeting now, and it is not related to celibacy.
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Fact is the studies from people like Dr Philip Jenkins. showed that the majority of sex abuses cases committed by priests, were not pedophilia by definition, but homosexual males having affairs with young teenage boys, many who were exploring their own homosexual tendencies.

Those homosexual priests often have said that homosexuality was so unacceptable in their young days, that the priesthood seemed like a viable career path

In fact at St John’s Seminary in Brighton MA, where the pedophile Fr Shanley attended, heterosexual males were squeezed out of the seminary because they reported the homosexuality they witnessed. Fr Shanley used that information in trying to blackmail Cardinal Medeiros. In fact, a coworker of mine who decided to become a priest, entered that seminary and left in disgusts after seeing the homosexual activities and culture it had taken on.

Today, the drop in sexual abuse by priests not only has to do with the Church’s zero tolerance and the many lawsuits, but the fact that homosexuals no longer have to stay behind closed doors.

Sure, there will be pedophiles, which has little to do with homosexuality, but as I pointed out, the majority of sexual abuse cases by priest, wasnot pedophilial, but homosexuality.

The Church knows this, which is why they’re not accepting males with strong homosexual leanings anymore.

Jim
 
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ehh…

An adult having sexual relations with a young teenager is pedophilia…no matter the sexes or tendencies.
 
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