We Must Build — Recovering Catholic Geography
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There is No Vocations Crisis#
All across the country parishes are merging, Masses are split between different times at multiple sites, vocations directors are expressing alarm, bishops are restructuring diocesan ministries, and there are thousands of parishes without a resident priest.1 Every fact in that list is true, but the story that we tell about them isn’t.
Today, the most conservative ratio of practicing laity to active diocesan priests is roughly 860.2 This is a crowd easily served by two Sunday Masses of 430, with canon law providing for bination.3 How are 860 practicing Catholics per active priest not enough?
The ratio is more than sufficient: we have more priests per practicing Catholic today than at the statistical peak of Catholicism in the United States.4 And that doesn’t even tell the whole story. Today’s numbers are not analogous to the peak’s. Then, nearly every priest alive was active, because priestly retirement only became common after the Council.5 Today, a third of diocesan priests are retired, and while some are infirm, many still say Mass and hear confessions.6 If we count every living priest, today’s ratio of practicing laity to total priests is better than the Golden Age itself.7
And the priests do not serve alone. There are 18,425 permanent deacons,8 and nearly 40,000 paid lay ministers who do the catechesis, youth work, and pastoral care that once fell to priests and sisters;9 in 1970 permanent deacons did not exist and there were not yet enough lay ministers for them to be tracked. There have never been more ordained men relative to practicing Catholics.10 So where is the panic coming from?
The Church is in crisis, but the framing is all wrong. The ratios hold not because the Church is healthy, but because the number of priests and the number of practicing laity have declined together. One number has not collapsed: the number of parishes. The endpoints of 1970 and today hide a hump in the interim decades from a building boom as the Church chased the laity to the suburbs, followed by closures that erased the boom,11 even as the nominal Catholic population grew by more than eighteen million.12 Practicing laity has fallen by more than half, the parish footprint has decreased by about a tenth, and so the average practicing congregation has been cut in half.13 The priesthood can easily serve the practicing Catholic laity, but it can’t staff 16,125 parishes. The stagnant parish footprint and decreasing number of priests mean that there are more parishes than active diocesan priests,14 and the number of parishes without a resident priest has grown sevenfold. It is this Detroitification of the Catholic Church that has conjured up the narrative of the vocations crisis.
50<br>staffing gap
19,620 parishes, the peak<br>88−12%<br>parishes<br>57–45<br>priests, however counted<br>44−56%<br>practicing laity<br>100<br>Parishes, priests and practicing laity · indexed to 1970<br>1970 = 18,224 parishes · 59,192 priests · 29.7M practicing laity<br>197019801990200020102020
Parishes, priests and practicing laity,<br>1970–2025, each indexed to 1970, so every mark<br>starts at 100 and the shape is what fell. The priesthood is a band because the<br>count depends on who you agree to count: every living priest along the top,<br>33,462 of them today; active diocesan priests alone along the bottom,<br>15,118, every religious and retired priest discarded. The laity ends<br>level with the strictest count and below the widest, which is the ratio holding.<br>Parishes rose to 19,620 in 1990 before the closures and end<br>at 16,125, so the average practicing congregation falls from<br>1,630 to 804. The staffing gap marked<br>above the band is the Detroitification the section names. Practicing laity is<br>self-identified Catholics times weekly Mass attendance, 13.0M<br>today and the one survey series here, which is why it is the jagged<br>line.
The collapse of the laity and the priesthood are not two separate crises; one is downstream of the other. Vocations are formed from the practicing laity, so a smaller laity will mean fewer priests. It’s no coincidence that ordinations have fallen almost exactly as fast as the practicing population. Measured against the nominal Catholic population, vocations have collapsed. Measured against the Catholics who still practice, they never did.15 The vocations pipeline is not broken: its source is dying. A priestly vocation is a call that a young man ordinarily answers only after a certain kind of formation, when he has seen the care that the priest can give to others, when he has been surrounded by those who take vocational questions seriously, and when he knows what it means for the priest to stand at the altar and say, “This is my Body” and “This is the chalice of my Blood”. A priestly vocation and a practicing Catholic are formed in a certain kind of place.
During its...