Brave New Church
The Center of Applied Research in the Apostolate (Cara) provides the statistics. It tells us that the number of priests in the United States in 1965 was almost 36, 000. In 1998, that number had dropped to some 31,000, 7,800 of whom, says the Official Catholic Directory for that year, are “retired, sick or absent”. Religious order priests went from some 22,000 in 1965 to some 15, 000 plus in 1999. Of the 19,000 plus parishes in the United States, some 2,500 do not have a resident pastor (mostly in the West North Central part of the country.) The total number of priestly ordinations in our country in 1965 was 994. By 1997 it had dropped to 521. By April of 1998, only 346.
In practical terms, all the statistics presented here mean that, on the front lines, where we live, things are desperate. The Dubuque archdiocese, for example, which had 286 priests in 1985 is projected to have only 117 in 2005. The Archdiocese of Boston has announced that it ordained nine men in May of 1998. Such a number can’t come near to replacing the 25 to 30 who have retired or died that same year. Or, if you want to put it more dramatically, consider it this way: for the dioceses of Boston and New York combined with their four million Catholics and 800 parishes, only 14 men were ordained in 1999. How about this: in the four years from 1997 to 2000 seven dioceses with a combined Catholic population of more than one million had no ordinations at all. The Archdiocese of Newark expects to have only 192 priests twenty years from now compared to the 540 it has today. Major archdioceses like Boston, New York, Chicago and Los Angels all ordained fewer than 10 new priests in the year 2000. There is hardly a diocese in the country, then, that has not or is not planning parish closings or mergers. By 2005, three years from now, only one in eight priests will be under age 35 with the average age of priests close to 60. Many are also unaware of the small number of priests under 40 right now.
Exactly which of these numbers is affected by "little kids" in minor seminaries?
But my real concern is that you find yourself in the company of liberal,modernist,progressive Amchurchians. See, Colleen's comment on the "Rent-a-Priest" founder and compadre of the writer of one of your articles.