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IsaacSheen
Guest
Does anyone know where I can find ordination statistics for the US? Either a diocese breakdown of how many priests have been ordained each year or some other relevant statistics. Thanks!
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Joannm
Guest
CARA (Center for Applied Research of the Apotalate), out of Georgetown University, usually has those statistics. cara@georgetown.edu
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Bruised_Reed
Guest
There are 2 articles in Catholic World Report: Part I, Part II. I think there was one in Crisis Magazine earlier this year. I don’t know if it was specifically about ordination statistics or just had info.
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rien
Guest
The current issue of CWR (12/07) has an update,
Overall the numbers are bleak. Despite Pope JP2, the article states since his election in 1978 seminarians in the US have dropped 49%. They reference the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate as the source for the number.
The article notes that outside Europe and North America seminarians are up quite a bit since 1978.
But the bottom line is that JP2 was not able to stem the collpase of religious in the US - despite his orthodoxy. That is my reading between the lines of the CWR article.
The article does p(name removed by moderator)oint a number of dioceses like Spokane which have exprienced significant increases in seminarians. Problem is these are all small dioceses (Denver the largest is not small but medium sized) and obviously they don’t put a dent in the collapse of vocations in the largest dioceses.
Plug for CWR, it is a great mag. It is struggling like other orthodox publicatiuons. Seemingly the interest is not there. Several orhthodox Catholic publications have gone under recently and the rumor is more will fold soon. Crisis most recently. The CWR issues are getting troubling small. If you still need to find an Xmas gift please consider giving a gift sbscription to CWR. I’d hate to see it go under.
Overall the numbers are bleak. Despite Pope JP2, the article states since his election in 1978 seminarians in the US have dropped 49%. They reference the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate as the source for the number.
The article notes that outside Europe and North America seminarians are up quite a bit since 1978.
But the bottom line is that JP2 was not able to stem the collpase of religious in the US - despite his orthodoxy. That is my reading between the lines of the CWR article.
The article does p(name removed by moderator)oint a number of dioceses like Spokane which have exprienced significant increases in seminarians. Problem is these are all small dioceses (Denver the largest is not small but medium sized) and obviously they don’t put a dent in the collapse of vocations in the largest dioceses.
Plug for CWR, it is a great mag. It is struggling like other orthodox publicatiuons. Seemingly the interest is not there. Several orhthodox Catholic publications have gone under recently and the rumor is more will fold soon. Crisis most recently. The CWR issues are getting troubling small. If you still need to find an Xmas gift please consider giving a gift sbscription to CWR. I’d hate to see it go under.
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Pious_Mat
Guest
The Vatican said in 2000 that the vocations crisis was over.
Stats as per 2000:
in 2000, 109,828 seminarians preparing for the priesthood around the world, which is an enormous increase from the 60,142 in 1975.There were 404,626 priests serving the Catholic Church in 1999. some of those priests have returned to their ministry after having abandoned the priesthood. And the number of defections from priestly life is falling; in 1975 there were 3,314 men who left the priesthood; in 1997 there were 1,006.
Things still aren’t like they were in 1960, but they’re certainly getting better.
Stats as per 2000:
in 2000, 109,828 seminarians preparing for the priesthood around the world, which is an enormous increase from the 60,142 in 1975.There were 404,626 priests serving the Catholic Church in 1999. some of those priests have returned to their ministry after having abandoned the priesthood. And the number of defections from priestly life is falling; in 1975 there were 3,314 men who left the priesthood; in 1997 there were 1,006.
Things still aren’t like they were in 1960, but they’re certainly getting better.
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ASimpleSinner
Guest
The number of seminarians is all well and good, but just a small picture. Yours truly was once counted as a seminarian. A cleric? Never.
Worth noting would be retention rates and ordinations. Worth considering is how today’s priest to faithful ratio is… (Seldome mentioned, we still have 3x priests per Catholic than most places in South America. Our current rates keep with trends from the turn of the last century.)
Not for nothing, we have 16.6K+ deacons (married, perm) in the US church, with an additional (according to CARA) 3.2K in formation programs at various levels. Measuring strictly the number of clergy in the US church, we have more now than we did 40 years ago.
I am widely optimistic about the future. Very much so. Growth and renewel is in fact the order of the day in a small but growing group of diocese and religous orders and institutes. With each passing year, more young orthodox priests are ordained who, in turn encourage and promote more men to do the same.
Anyone with doubts about this needs to visit some of the sems that have been growing.
Interestingly the newest issue of Catholic World report has come out and the top 20 and bottom 20 diocese with seminarians per capita have been published:
TOP 20
- Lincoln ( 38/93,988)
- Juneau (2/5473)
- Tulsa (17/55,462)
- Rapid City (7/25,729)
- Cheyenne (13/49,121)
- Duluth (18/68,037)
- Peoria (43/174,008)
- Denver (93/384,611)
- Wichita (28/120,527)
- Lexington (11/48,070)
- Tyler (14/61,390)
- Bismarck (14/62,898)
- Fargo (18/82,891)
- Nashville (15/69,400)
- Spokane (21/97,655)
- Pensacola-Tallahassee (14/65,209)
- Memphis (14/67,342)
- Mobile (14/67,434)
- Yakima (16/77,149)
- Sioux City (17/87,528)
- Monterey (5/195,200)
- Reno (3/121,347)
- San Bernadino (28/1,146,960)
- Detroit (31/1,286,985)
- Syracuse (8/345,736)
- Boston (39/1,845,846)
- Rockville Centre (28/1,431,774)
- Galveston-Houston (29/1,495,030)
- San Antonio (13/673,526)
- Santa Rosa (3/159,763)
- Rochester (6/341,772)
- El Paso (11/656,035)
- Hartford (10/668,231)
- New York (37/2,542,432)
- Los Angeles (60/4,448,763)
- Laredo (3/229,141)
- Las Vegas (7/539,953)
- Metuchen (7/603,214)
- Honolulu (1/143,240)
- San Diego (5/950,743)
In 1952 it was written in TIME mag "Twenty-five years ago, there were only 175 American Jesuits in the mission field; today there are 1,022. " The seeds of that sort of growth in certain orders and diocese is present. Perhaps not the Society…
God won’t be stymied by our inabilities to foster vocations. We will provide priests for Ameica or He will, one way or another. Pray for priests, deacons, and religous.
http://www.fssp.org.uk/dentonpic2.jpg
http://blog.ancient-future.net/uploaded_images/CATHOLIC-200-chapel-nairobi-719526.gif
http://blog.ancient-future.net/uploaded_images/Catholic-other-projects-novices-771000.jpg
http://www.vocationist.org/Father Antony with Seminarians12.JPG
http://blog.ancient-future.net/uploaded_images/Catholicnovices.ms-774382.jpg
Negatavism? I am too optimistic to be bothered.
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IsaacSheen
Guest
Thanks everyone for giving me great resources.
ASIMPLESINNER,
You managed to give me the city I was looking for for my friend. His theory is that our diocese would be one of the worst for ordinations in the US. He wasn’t too far off. It’s in the bottom 20.
Thanks again everyone.
ASIMPLESINNER,
You managed to give me the city I was looking for for my friend. His theory is that our diocese would be one of the worst for ordinations in the US. He wasn’t too far off. It’s in the bottom 20.
Thanks again everyone.
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ASimpleSinner
Guest
That is a good point. Publication costs have gone up appreciably… and a lot of folks that did print-media advertising do so on the net. Additionally a lot of us just don’t subrscibe to magazines anymore.
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Lepanto
Guest
Unfortunately, those numbers are deceptive.
Not to crash this party, but probably 40-50% of the seminarians studying in the US for American dioceses are men born in other countries who came to the US to serve here. This is not a secret – it’s been happening for years.
For better or worse, many dioceses have to “shop” for seminarians from Latin America, Poland, Africa, etc. to have anybody in the priest pipeline.
Half the seminaries in the US, many currently operating well below capacity, would close tomorrow if all these men went home.
God bless these men who come to serve the Church in America – but really, this is not a good solution. We have to start growing our own vocations. Importing seminarians is only a short-term solution.
In the meantime, the US reverts to mission status…
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ASimpleSinner
Guest
I am not certain at all how those numbers are deceptive. Even assuming the top 20 diocese are heavy with foreign-born candidates who were recruited, why is it not the case the bottom 20 are doing the same? NYC couldn’t recruit overseas candidates? LA? Huh?
For the purpose of comparison, I find the list rather useful. If LA had the seminarians to faithful ratio Lincoln did, they would have almost 2000 seminarians.
I have much hope for the future. God is helping those that ask for His help, and then help themselves. The workers are many. Are we asking for them?
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Lepanto
Guest
Some dioceses, such as Lincoln, don’t need to import seminarians because they strongly encourage their own. This tends to be the case with dioceses that promote orthodoxy.
Just check out the vocations websites of some dioceses. Many have profiles of their seminarians. You’ll quickly see that many seminarians are foreign nationals (or recently naturalized citizens). As I said, God bless them. We need them!
Regarding the bottom dioceses — somebody has to be at the bottom of any list. Whereas they may be importing seminarians, they clearly need many more. Also, not all dioceses have a strong motivation to grow or even import the number of seminarians that they need. This is due to their anti-clerical culture. Instead, they shrink and consolidate their parishes and develop new ways for laity to take over functions formerly performed by clergy.
From the CARA report “The Class of 2007: Survey of Ordinands to the Priesthood” (available on www.usccb.org):
“One in three ordinands was born outside the United States, with the largest numbers coming from Vietnam, Mexico, Poland, or the Philippines. Religious are more likely than diocesan ordinands to be foreign-born. The percentage that is foreign-born (31 percent) is nearly the same as it was in 2006 (30 percent), but has increased from the 24 percent reported in 1998.”
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ASimpleSinner
Guest
TO be sure, I don’t doubt the veracity of your comments, just wonder what conclusion we are to draw from it.Some dioceses, such as Lincoln, don’t need to import seminarians because they strongly encourage their own. This tends to be the case with dioceses that promote orthodoxy.
Just check out the vocations websites of some dioceses. Many have profiles of their seminarians. You’ll quickly see that many seminarians are foreign nationals (or recently naturalized citizens). As I said, God bless them. We need them!
Regarding the bottom dioceses — somebody has to be at the bottom of any list. Whereas they may be importing seminarians, they clearly need many more. Also, not all dioceses have a strong motivation to grow or even import the number of seminarians that they need. This is due to their anti-clerical culture. Instead, they shrink and consolidate their parishes and develop new ways for laity to take over functions formerly performed by clergy.
From the CARA report “The Class of 2007: Survey of Ordinands to the Priesthood” (available on www.usccb.org):
“One in three ordinands was born outside the United States, with the largest numbers coming from Vietnam, Mexico, Poland, or the Philippines. Religious are more likely than diocesan ordinands to be foreign-born. The percentage that is foreign-born (31 percent) is nearly the same as it was in 2006 (30 percent), but has increased from the 24 percent reported in 1998.”
You originally asserted those numbers are deceptive. How so?
I am not seeing the correlation between the data you are citing and deception.
I would also be curious to find out what the historic trends have been for the US. A nation of immigrants with a Catholic population of >1% at its founding after the Revolution… I suspect at any given time a good number of our priests were foreign born.
Just not sure where you are going with this just yet.
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bilop
Guest
They could, but they don’t seem to. I am fairly familiar with the recently ordained Priests in NY, and I think they were all local. Some were foreign born, but I don’t think they moved to NY just to study for the Priesthood.
God Bless
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Lepanto
Guest
The list, as presented without any accompanying verbiage from the article, is deceptive because it tries to shed some light on the health of vocations in the various dioceses, yet the numbers do not differentiate between home-grown seminarians and those who came from a foreign country to study for the priesthood for a client American diocese. A diocese is NOT healthy if it has to recruit from the outside.
A friend of mine in the diocese of Rockeville Centre (one of the bottom 20 in the list) says that probably 25% of their recently-ordained priests (ordained within last 10 years) and current seminarians were recruited from Africa, primarily Nigeria. Any diocese that can not muster its own vocations and has to rely on outside help is in trouble. Also, it may not be canonically a mission diocese, but it is so de facto.
Of course the US was mission status at first, but eventually the Holy See lifted mission status off the US when this country’s Catholic population was able to reliably supply its own priests (I think this happened in the 1890s).
Could you kindly provide the link to that list? I couldn’t find it. Thanks.
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ASimpleSinner
Guest
Last things first: I clipped and pasted the list from a blog where the owner had typed out (what is presented) himself. As yet, that article is not online. (see romancatholicvocations.blogspot.com/2007/12/by-numbers-best-and-worst-us-diocese.html)
Your pointing to the fact that one of the diocese in the bottom 20 is having to import their vocations sort of re-enforces some things implied in the making of a list. But among the top 20, is importing as common?
I don’t believe that the numbers listed are “missing verbiage” so to speak. It is what it is, a list. From there, start looking at each diocese to see what you can see.
I am not in disagreement with you that a diocese should in fact be able to home-grow. With that I agree. I would also argue that in a few places where things have been “crazy” long enough, bringing men “in from without” is probably advantagous as well.
This is an interesting article of ten years ago… Interesting to see how things have played out in Lincoln and in Saginaw… encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-19962933.html
10 years later, one wonders what its author believes about the new bishop of Saginaw, and his growing number of seminarians.
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Joannm
Guest
I would have to disagree with your friend. While there are a number of foreign nationals studying at the Seminary, not all of them are from the Diocese of Rockville Centre but also from Brooklyn. There are more Hispanics studying (mostly from Brooklyn) but they have immigrated to the States many years ago. Rockville Centre also has ordained a number of Polish priests but they were not recruited but came here on their own, wanting to minister in the United States. I really can’t think of any Nigerian priests ordained for Rockville Centre over the last 10 years, and I have been at almost every ordination Mass over the past 10 years.
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