UNITED STATES
Commonweal
Mary Gautier
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) has been collecting data about priestly formation for fifty years and therefore is in something of a privileged position when it comes to examining trends over time and their implications for priestly ministry today.
As the anecdotal reflections by Paul Blaschko and Barbara Parsons suggest, seminaries now find themselves between a rock and a hard place for several reasons. The first factor is a dramatic decline in the number of priests over the past forty years and a corresponding decline in the number of ordinations. The total number of priests in the United States reached a peak in the late 1960s, and has been decreasing steadily since then. The number of men being ordained each year is only about a third of the number needed to replace priests who are retiring, dying, or leaving. In fact, in the United States more priests die each year than are ordained. This fact puts additional pressure on seminaries to do their very best to retain seminarians.
At the same time, there are more Catholics in the United States today than at any time in the nation’s history. Unlike previous generations, however, these Catholics no longer live where their grandparents and great-grandparents first settled. The demographic and geographic changes have resulted in massive closures of underutilized parishes in the urban core of cities in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest, like those most recently announced in the Archdiocese of New York.
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