Do Eastern Rites have more Priests & Bishops?

[DL82]

In my experience, there seem to be a far higher proportion of priests and bishops to laity in the Eastern Rites than in the Roman Church. Is this simply because Eastern congregations are small in the West, or does this apply across the Eastern Church?

Bishops in particular seem to be much more common in Eastern Rites, given the size of their congregations, than in the Latin rite.

Also, all the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches I’ve been to have had a priest AND a deacon, and the deacon seems to be a full-time member of the clergy.

I’d be really interested to understand the reasons for this. I find it really reassuring being in such a small gathering of laity which is so well served by many clergy, but wonder why this doesn’t seem to be the case in the Western rite.

 

[Volodymyr_988]

I would say that it’s because there are less Eastern Catholic Laity. Remember that the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has more Catholics than any of the other Sui Juris Churches (maybe the Ukrainians have more, it depends on whose stats you use.)

Also, the Archdiocese of LA only ordained something like 5 priests last year. That’s hardly enough priests.

 

[Hesychios]

It is true that the priest to layperson ratio is much greater in most Eastern catholic churches than in the Latin church in North America. I don’t know what it’s like in Europe, where entire counties may be predominately Byzantine, it’s possible the Latin parishes might be the small ones in those limited areas.

I used to have the statics for this, but I have not addressed the issue since about 2004.

In brief (restricting the analysis to the USA) the priest to layperson ratio over the entire USA is something like 1 to 1,500 and this is an average including all of the Eastern Catholics Sui Iuris churches as well as the Latin. (Considering what the ratio is like in many places across the globe, the USA has an abundance of priests.) I used numbers from 2005, and you can check this yourself.

I don’t have handy the statistics for all of the Eastern Catholics in North America handy at the moment. But I can remember the stats for the Eparchy of Parma in the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Metropolia, and I think that it is typical for the whole Ruthenian church in the USA. Other Eastern Catholic churches may be quite different one way or another. There are about 12,000 Byzantine Catholics in that diocese, and they have 34 priests serving (or something close to that). The ratio for the Parma Eparchy is approximately 1 to 350 laypersons. On top of this, the Eparchy has the bishop, with his travelling and chancery expenses. The value of the vestments alone for these thirty five men of God must be enormous, not to mention all of the gold chalices and spoons studded with precious gems that are kept in good repair for 34 or more liturgies each Sunday.

Now there are a lot of factors that should be considered, but it is anyones’ guess as to how they are able to maintain that number. To put in into perspective, I know the Archdiocese of Chicago and the Diocese of Joliet which have that many registered laity and more within many single parishes. None of them have 34 priests assigned.

I think that a healthy percentage of those priests in the Parma Eparchy are actually Latins doing double duty, having been granted faculties, but I would not think they were more than a dozen. If I am correct about this, then the Eparchy still had to develop vocations for 24 men out of an apparently tiny population. I don’t know how many parishes in the Latin church can boast of developing vocations to the priesthood for 24 living men (much less 35).

The Eparch of Parma has recently begun to accept married men as priest candidates, but the reality is that the majority of these vocations are from the Cum Data Fuerit era.

Michael

 

[Andreas_Hofer]

Michael,

Do you have any idea to what extent Eastern numbers are skewed by the discrepancy between what I’ll call “paper” and “practicing” Catholics? For instance, in France last I checked only 3% or so of Latins actually attended Mass weekly. The U.S. isn’t nearly so bad, but still only 25% of Latins “regularly” attend - and that doesn’t mean every week. That drastically changes the number of Catholics a priest is practically serving. I don’t think Eastern numbers would be nearly so dire in the diaspora, but I do think we’ll get our most accurate picture of different churches’ ratios if we can guage those discrepancies, too.

 

[GregoryPalamas]

Just an observation but if the Byzantine Catholic Church were a Protestant mega Church we might be 2 or 3 congregations. I don’t know if that’s good or bad except that we are quite small as a Church. Our bishops must cover great distances and that probably is the reason for us having four of them in the US. We are very retisent to grow as a national church. I have some guesses as to why but many of us are praying and working that we will be more outward looking in the future.

CDL

 

[Hesychios]

Michael,

Do you have any idea to what extent Eastern numbers are skewed by the discrepancy between what I’ll call “paper” and “practicing” Catholics? For instance, in France last I checked only 3% or so of Latins actually attended Mass weekly. The U.S. isn’t nearly so bad, but still only 25% of Latins “regularly” attend - and that doesn’t mean every week. That drastically changes the number of Catholics a priest is practically serving. I don’t think Eastern numbers would be nearly so dire in the diaspora, but I do think we’ll get our most accurate picture of different churches’ ratios if we can gauge those discrepancies, too.

I am not at all in a position to make any such assessment. Perhaps individual eparchies have these statistics on their websites, but I don’t have access to such information. Most eparchies probably make reports to the membership which can include such information, either printed in a church bulletin or the diocesan newspaper.

I would not think that more than a third of registered parishioners are active most Sundays, but that is my opinion and not grounded in fact There can be a wide variation between parishes and my exposure is not broad enough to even make any generalizations.

I am of the personal opinion that there has been a big “shakeout” in the last four decades in membership in the USA. These people are not suffering low birthrates or any such thing, they are simply not being counted anymore.

A huge number of the people who are canonically Byzantine (Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Russian etc) are worshiping as Latins. There may be hundreds of thousands of them in a country such as the USA. When they serendipitously “discover” the church of their own great-grandparents they can be surprised to find that they are not under any obligation to do anything formal to claim a place in the church because they are heirs through patrilineal descent, yet the reality is they have not been counted as being Eastern in generations, and have little to no experience living the life of an eastern Christian.

There are potentially additional millions having ancestors in the Byzantine churches but still technically Latin. Again I am speaking of the North American situation.

I know that this does not answer your question. Sorry.

 

[ASimpleSinner]

Bishops in particular seem to be much more common in Eastern Rites, given the size of their congregations, than in the Latin rite.

Some of that is a function of the size of the nation. If all of our parishes were in Ohio, the Ruthenians would likely not have 4 bishops. They might have just one maybe two.

But when you are spread from sea to shining sea, even though your parishes might be exceedingly small (some have less than 50 attending on a sunday) they could well be entirely too far to administer.

For a long time the Chaldeans had just one diocese covering the entire US - and it was located where most of their parishes at the time were.

Now understand that same is true for some Latin diocese. At one point, the whole of the south outside of certain major sees like New Orleans or Atlanta or parts of Florida had no more parishes and faithful than they did inside of New Orleans or Atlanta or parts of Florida.