The argument is based on an economic model of supply and demand, in which "priests are service providers and laypersons are service consumers."[1] In the "religious economy" of the Catholic Church, supply (number of priests) is dropping while demand (number of laity) is rising, so that soon there will not be enough of the former to meet the needs of the latter. Schoenherr succinctly sums up the thrust of his extensive research: “The stark facts are that, while the diocesan priesthood population will have declined by 40 percent between 1966 and 2005, the lay population is increasing by 65 percent. The laity-to-priest ratio, a fairly accurate measure of supply and demand, will double between 1975 and 2005 from 1100 to 2200 Catholics per active priest.”[2] By 2005 he envisions a reduced cadre of only 21,000 active diocesan priests “burdened with overwork, trying to meet the sacramental and other religious demands of more than 74 million U.S. Catholics.” It is, therefore, “obvious from the data that the losses in the supply of celibate priests are approaching the crisis point. The only choice is to staunch the hemorrhaging supply or cut back key operations.”[3] According to Schoenherr and Young, this dilemma presents a clear call for fundamental structural and theological changes in the Catholic priestly ministry, a call which they do not shrink from posing in stark and partisan terms. According to Young, the dilemma is “whether to reinforce male celibate exclusivity in ministry and thus reproduce the structures of patriarchy, or to reinforce the primordial tradition of eucharistic sacrifice and hierarchy of control which compose the essence of Catholicism.” He predicts that as a result of the priest shortage “in order to preserve the hierarchic sacramental priesthood the Church will need to jettison male celibate exclusivity in priestly ministry, first through the ordination of married men to the priesthood and later through the ordination of women.”[4] For Schoenherr the dilemma is “whether the Catholic tradition of eucharistic worship should be sacrificed on the altar of mandatory celibacy”. This conflict is “moving toward an intense ideological struggle”, he claims, because “practicing Catholics should [not] be deprived of the Mass because of the scarcity of celibate priests.”[5]
As Young rightly claims, “the Schoenherr-Young projections have been well received by both social demographers and social scientists who study religion.”[6] Indeed, the idea that there is a current or impending shortage of clergy has not met with any serious statistical or sociological critique, and has attained the status of common wisdom about the institutional Catholic Church. Chang states it well: “The priest shortage facing the Catholic Church is taken for granted today as a social fact.”[7]
Despite this, as I intend to demonstrate, the predicted clergy shortage or crisis is far from “obvious from the data”. Although repeated with vigor and unimpeachable projections of the number of priests, the terms of the argument are highly inaccurate. First, demand by the laity for the services of the church has not increased, but in fact has significantly declined, since the 1960s. Second, although the number of priests has declined almost precisely as predicted, several countervailing factors have softened the impact of that decline on services to laity. Third, in historical terms the current staffing level of clergy in American parishes and dioceses is not particularly low. I will present each of these arguments in turn, and suggest in conclusion that the trends of decline in the church do in fact suggest that the Catholic Church is undergoing a crisis, but it is an altogether different crisis than the one predicted above.
Data for this study are taken from the Official Catholic Directory (1898-1999).
Published annually since the mid-1800s, the Directory
reports from institutional records a wide variety of information about the
American Catholic Church’s activities and organizations, including the number
of priests, parishes, members, and certain rituals and services. While the possibility of bias or error in
institutional data is well known, the substantial reliability of these records,
summarized annually from diocesan reports by the same company for over a
century, is quite plausible. They
represent the best data available for long-range assessment of sociological
trends in the Catholic Church, and are frequently used for this purpose,
including most previous studies of the clergy decline.[8] Moreover, the data of the Official Catholic Directory have been
shown to be highly congruent with the Schoenherr-Young projections of clergy
decline. In 1998 Lawrence Young showed
that the two measures varied by less than one percent through 1995, “taking
this as a validation of the demographic models used in the projections”.[9] More recently, Harris has reported that the
Schoenherr-Young projections predicted the number of priests reported by the Directory in 1997 to within one-tenth of one percent.[10] The data of the Directory, therefore, appear particularly suited to examine the
matters of interest in this study.
Records were obtained from the Directory for the years from 1899 to 1999. Data were not available for 7 years: 1905,
1910, 1935, 1951, 1952, 1957, and 1962.
In addition, some fields were missing for 1909 and 1936. Pertinent information for these years has
been interpolated. In addition, all
figures reported are multi-year moving averages.
To set the issues in context, consider Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 replicates data from Schoenherr 1993 and Hoge 1986 to show the decline in clergy since the 1960s. The measure used is the number of priests per 10,000 Catholics. At the start of the period this ratio is nearly 13; by 1999 it had declined to less than 8. For both of these major studies, this chart captures the prima facie evidence for the crisis of the clergy shortage. Two factors are seen as responsible for the decline: the wave of clergy resignations in the decade following the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1966, and ongoing demographic trends that keep the pool of available candidates low.
Figure 1 About Here
Figure 2 About Here
Figure 2 reports the same ratio but extends the picture backward to the turn of the 20th century. What this longer perspective suggests is not that the clergy decline is less than reported—if anything, it is worse—but that the idea that it is uniquely related to the aftermath of Vatican II is misplaced. In fact, the decline in the priest-parishioner ratio had begun at least a decade before 1965. It had dropped at a faster rate prior to Vatican II than following it. Through the mid-1980s the decline from mid-century had been at a rate and magnitude to match the increase in priest-parishioner ratio during the first half of the century. Whatever forces social and ecclesiastical that conspired to raise the ratio during the span of years preceding the war appear to have worked in the opposite direction, or been successfully countered, in the decades following it. We might think of the first 40 years as one of gradual rise, and the next 40 years as one of corresponding decline; then in the last 20 years of the century an apparently new source of decline appears. In any event, the bellwether period, if any, suggested by this longer view is not the Second Vatican Council, but the Second World War.
Fewer
Catholics Demand Services
Schoenherr and Young paint a picture of a greatly
increased number of laity demanding services of a greatly reduced number of
clergy. The increase in lay demand is
as vital to their argument as the reduction in clerical supply. As Schoenherr says, "[A] component of
the clergy shortage is the increased demand for priestly services produced by
continuing growth in church membership."[11] If demand by the laity for the services of
the church has not increased or will not increase as much as they have claimed,
the argument for a clergy crisis is reduced accordingly. The sole statistic that they use to estimate
lay demand, however, is well known to significantly overstate lay participation
in the Catholic Church.
In estimating lay "demand" Schoenherr and
Young simply use the number of self-reporting Catholics in any given year, as
measured by Gallup polls.[12]
According to their model, an increase in the number of Catholics is taken to
represent a directly proportional increase in the amount of services “demanded”
from the clergy. This assumption is
demonstrably false. The same Gallup
surveys that they use, as well as highly reliable longitudinal surveys by the
National Opinion Research Center, have observed that the rate of participation
in the sacraments among Catholics has been declining since the 1960s, a fact
which has been noted by nearly every sociological study of Catholics in the
last 20 years. For example, D’Antonio
et al. traced the decline in weekly mass attendance reported on Gallup polls in
5-year intervals from a high of 74% in 1958 to only 52% in 1983.[13] The National Opinion Research Center’s
General Social Survey, which measures weekly attendance more precisely, reports
consistently lower weekly attendance than Gallup in any given year, but shows a
nearly identical trend of decline. While there may be more Catholics on the
rolls in 1999 than in 1965, today's Catholics attend Mass and partake of other
sacraments in much smaller proportions than in 1965.
When this decline is taken into account, the
argument that the Church will lack sufficient clergy to administer the
sacraments loses most of its support.
Figure 3 shows the trend. In
this figure the absolute number of Catholics in any given year is adjusted by
the proportion in national-sample polls reporting that they attended Mass
weekly (or more often). For 1958 to
1971 I used indices from Gallup polls; from 1972 to 1999, figures from the
General Social Survey. Years in which
this item was not measured are interpolated, and the chart reports a 7-year
moving average. I do not claim that
these calculations, as the data that underlie them, form a precise estimate of
the number of persons in Mass in any given year, much less any week; but they
do provide a reasonably reliable basis for comparison, using the best
information we have. Moreover, since
abundant research has shown that people consistently over-report church
attendance on surveys, we can be confident that the true level of mass
attendance since 1958 is lower than
that reported in Figure 3. Prior to
1958, on the other hand, I estimated weekly attendance conservatively at a
constant 60%; in the absence of precise data, the true rate of mass attendance
was most probably higher than
this. In this way, comparisons of more
recent years with those in the first part of this century are weighted against
my argument, that is, against overstating the current ratio of priests to
weekly mass attenders.
Despite these weightings, Figure 3 shows that the
ratio of priests to weekly mass attenders has not declined, but in fact has
significantly increased, since the 1960s.
The ratio of priests per 10,000 weekly mass attenders rose from under 20
in the mid-1960s to, by the early-1980s, almost 30—it’s highest level in this
century, and an increase of roughly 50%.
Since the early 80s it has declined slightly, but in 1999, at about 27,
the ratio remains higher than at any time in the first 7 decades of the
century.
One should not be misled by these numbers into
thinking that there is not a serious decline in the supply of priests to
minister the Eucharist; what they reveal, rather, is that the numbers of
laypersons interested in receiving the Eucharist are declining at a fairly
similar rate. The point they make here
is simply that, relative to this unfortunate decline in lay demand, there is no
shortage, much less a crisis, in the supply of clergy. As one insightful reviewer of Full Pews
and Empty Altars put it, “Schoenherr and Young have proved that Catholic
altars are becoming empty, but they do not prove that Catholic pews are full”.[14]
Schoenherr and Young argue that inactive Catholics
should be considered a component of demand for services since "they
represent a potential claim on priestly services. If the church were to honor their preference with some sort of
pastoral attention, these non-practicing Catholics could not be ignored in
assessing the severity of the priest shortage".[15] Although it's debatable who is not paying
attention to whom, this conditional argument is no doubt correct in theory, but
as an empirical matter it is clearly false.
Any potential claim or offer of services notwithstanding, it is the
actual demand for services made by actual Catholics that must form the basis
for an objective, scientific assessment of any actual clergy shortage.
Table 1
Sacraments per
1,000 Catholics in 1950 and 1995
|
|||
|
Sacrament |
1950 |
1995 |
Percent change |
|
Baptism |
33.4 |
17.0 |
- 49% |
|
Marriage |
11.4 |
5.0 |
- 56 |
|
Funeral |
9.3 |
7.7 |
- 17 |
If they make any demands on the Church at all, those
who are not active in Mass attendance typically seek the services of the Church
at three points in their lives: for baptism, marriage, and to be buried. These
three occasions, the "life cycle sacraments", comprise at least the
first level of added services that otherwise inactive Catholics seek from
priests. But as with Eucharistic
reception, the demand for these services has manifestly not been increasing
since the 1960s. According to the
Official Catholic Directory, following Harris,[16]
participation rates since the 1950s have declined for all of the life cycle
sacraments as well. As Table 1 shows,
from 1950 to 1995, the rate (number per 1,000 Catholics) of funerals declined
by 17%; the rate of marriages and baptisms were cut in half. Harris attributes the declines in baptisms
and funerals to demographic changes, but is at a loss to account for the dramatic
reduction in church marriages.
Figure 4 About Here
As with Mass attendance, the decline in demand for
the life cycle sacraments has outpaced the decline in the supply of
priests. Figure 4 shows the number of
life cycle sacraments performed annually per priest over the last 50 years. In the
most recent years there have been just under 39 of these sacraments per priest
performed annually; but in the mid-1950s there were over 40. Thus, while the
rate has been rising since the mid-1970s, it is still slightly below its peak in the 1950s. As with the Eucharist, and considering just
the supply of priests, the data do not indicate that the “baptismal right of
access to the sacraments”[17]
is in jeopardy or approaching crisis. As one
recent surveillance of OCD data on priests by region and diocese concludes,
"Although fewer priests are available for ministry today, the sacramental
needs of Catholics continue to be met . . . ."[18] In fact, the availability of priests for
sacraments in the late 1990s is about the same as it was in the early 1960s.
This statistic understates the true current supply of sacramental access,
however, because the Church at the end of the 20th century reflects
significant changes increasing lay access to the sacraments that were not
present in the 1960s.
The contribution of permanent deacons should be an
obvious component of any supply-demand model of recent clergy care in the
Church. As Schoenherr and Young themselves explain, "[t]he restoration of
the permanent diaconate in the Catholic Church was one of the reforms following
the Second Vatican Council. The church
in the United States welcomed the innovation and adopted the reform in 1971. .
. the church confers upon deacons the right to preach, baptize and witness
sacramental marriage. . . . .”
Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, Schoenherr and Young refuse to
consider deacons in their model. This
refusal may have been due in part to the newness of this class of ordained
persons in the modern church; but the reason they give is a theoretical
one. In a section titled “Why Count
Only Priests?”, they clearly
acknowledge that “[D]eacons perform some ministerial tasks once reserved to
priests and so augment clerical manpower.” But they insist on excluding
deacons, they explain, “precisely because [the priest shortage] is the driving
force for change in the structure of Catholic ministry”.[19] Apparently, even though deacons are
acknowledged to be a factor on the supply side, they are not considered in part
because to include them would weaken or distract from a consideration of
structural changes in the priesthood.
Studies in the 1970s and 1980s often excluded
deacons because their numbers were small compared to priests, few were
full-time ministers, and there was some perceived lay resistance to receiving
ministry from a deacon.[20] More recent evidence indicates, in fact,
that deacons perform a significant—and increasing--amount of the practical
pastoral work of the Church. Today
deacons are commonly called upon to perform the most frequent sacraments in the
Church besides Eucharist and Reconciliation (Confession). By 1999 there were 4 deacons for every 10
diocesan priests[21], with the
ratio growing higher each year. D’Antonio et al. found that, among the most
committed Catholic laypersons, 64 percent said they would be willing to accept
baptism, and 48 percent said they would accept marriage, performed by another
lay person.[22] Since presumably the willingness to accept a
deacon for these rites would be even higher, the felt pastoral need for a
priest for these rites is not strong.
In addition to performing marriages and baptisms, deacons also routinely
visit the sick and preach homilies—all activities that, until 1971, fell
exclusively on the shoulders of the clergy.
A 1995 survey by the United States Catholic Conference found that, in
their current assignments, 92% of deacons visited the sick, 93% preached
homilies, and 98% performed baptism and/or marriage liturgies.[23] Since deacons are fully qualified and do
actively and frequently participate in providing life cycle sacraments, an
accurate accounting of supply and demand for these rituals should reasonably
include them.
In Figure 4 the dotted line shows the number of life
cycle sacraments per clergy when deacons as well as priests are included. When all the qualified clergy are included,
this ratio is much lower than when only priests are considered, and has
increased only slightly from its lowest level in the 1970s. By this measure, not only is there not a
crisis in the supply of the services of the Church, but the availability of
qualified clergy for these commonly-demanded sacraments is greater than in the 1960s.
Indeed, it is not far below the highest level it has been in this
century.
Another statistic often cited as evidence of a
priest shortage is the growing number of parishes without a resident
priest. The effect of the declining
number of priests, we are told, will be “to dramatically increase the number of
priestless parishes in the United States, already more than 2,000”; a situation
which is taken as yet more evidence that “celibacy is eroding Catholicism.”[24] “Management choices,” Harris concludes after
a survey of the clergy decline, “seem to lie somewhere between giving up the
ideal of priest-as-pastor and closing one-third of the parishes in the
country.”[25]
The assumption of this argument is that the ideal of
priest-as-pastor requires a priest resident in every parish, with the
implication that anything less than this is unusual, detracts from pastoral
services, and is something strongly to be avoided in the Church. This assumption is worth interrogating in
light of current staffing practices in the Church. But the real problem with this argument is the implication that
the current level of non-resident parishes is particularly high in historical
terms. In fact, just the opposite is
the case.
Figure 5 About Here
Figure 5 reports the proportion of churches without a resident priest in the American Catholic Church annually since 1898. Because of changes in definitions throughout the century, “churches” in this figure must include both missions and parishes in order to be comparable over the entire period. As a result the amount of nonresidency reported is higher than what is measured by counting only parishes. For example, counting only parishes about 10% are without a resident priest in the most recent period; counting missions and parishes, about 20% of churches are nonresident. By this measure, up until World War II about a third of Catholic churches did not have a pastor in residence; after mid-century that proportion has gradually declined to about a fifth. As is evident, far from being unusually high, the rate of nonresidency is currently at its lowest point in the century.
Figure 6 About Here
Figure 6 reports a related statistic, the ratio of priests to parishes (not including missions), over the same period. This figure does reflect a decline from the flush days of the 1960s, when there were over 2.5 priests per parish on average. But the current level (just over 2), while lower than in the 60s, is still much higher than at any time before World War II. Although it has declined in the last few decades, it appears that by historical standards the availability of priests to parishes is not particularly low.
I do not intend in any way to suggest that the
current level of “priestless parishes” is desirable, or that there is not an
ideal of priest-as-pastor in the Church.
On the contrary, it is clear that there is a strong preference for priests,
when they are available, to pastor parishes as opposed to functioning in some
other capacity. The correlation between
the trends in Figure 5 and Figure 6 is -.96.
Moreover, in times when priests are in shorter supply, far fewer of them
are involved in non-parochial ministries.
I would also be quick to acknowledge that some regions, particularly the
midwest, suffer a far greater shortage of pastors than others. [26] The point I wish to make is simply that,
with regard to approaching the ideal of priest-as-pastor in practice, it is not
possible to construe the present situation as a crisis, or even as unusually
deprived. There are more priests per
parish today than there were for the entire first half of this century. Counting missions, there are fewer
non-resident churches than at any previous time in this century. The current situation, while certainly
amenable to improvement and in some respects worse than in the 1960s, is by the
standards of the past century not particularly bad, and certainly not a crisis.
These figures do not take into account, moreover,
the rapidly growing involvement of lay persons in pastoral care activities that
just a generation ago were largely restricted to priests. Perhaps this trend is
theologically or culturally undesirable, but it is nonetheless a strong force
in American church life. In 1997
Catholic parishes employed nearly 30,000 lay ministerial employees, a figure
that had been growing by over 1300 per year since 1990.[27] As Harris notes, this comprised "more
than half the professional labor pool of the American Catholic Church."[28] As with deacons in regard to the sacraments,
this group increasingly provides services that until recently were typically
the province of priests, including parish administration, catechization, and
counseling. While the effect of their contribution has not yet been estimated
precisely, clearly the activities of lay professionals counteract to some
extent the declining availability of clergy (and professed religious). Murnion et al., pointing out that the
numeric increase in lay (and religious) parish ministers has corresponded to
the rise in single-priest parishes, note that "clearly the lay/religious
parish ministers are compensating for the lack of priests. . . ."[29] Thus the supply side of parish services is
somewhat higher than is suggested by the priest-parish ratio.
The supply and demand argument that the Catholic
Church is suffering a crisis shortage of priests fails to convince, I have
argued, because it ignores clearly documented decreases in demand and increases
in supply. On the demand side, the
argument fails to account for the dramatic decrease in participation in the
Church by laity since the 1960s, as evidenced by declining mass attendance and
participation in the life cycle sacraments.
On the supply side, the argument ignores the rise of the ministry of
deacons and lay professionals.
Furthermore, in historical terms the current ratio of supply to demand
is not unusually small.
These findings in no way call into question the
careful projections of clergy decline that have been made by the clergy crisis
school of thought. Nor should they be
taken to suggest that there is no basis or need to seek greater numbers of
priests. To say that there is no
crisis overall is not to deny that there are crippling shortages of priests in
certain segments and geographic areas.
The implications of this evidence for our larger
understanding of the Church’s life are at least twofold. First, the contention that a clergy crisis provides
an impetus for structural or theological change in the definition of priesthood
is simply without basis. To whatever extent ordaining women or married men was
seen as an answer to the problems posed by a clergy shortage, to that same
extent those actions may now be seen as not necessary. Whether or not those actions are desirable
on other grounds is a matter beyond the competence of this study.
Second, my findings suggest that the decline
in the clergy is not due to social forces that uniquely affect priests, but is
only one symptom of a more general socio-religious trend in the Catholic
Church. The clergy decline is not in
itself a problem only because it is part of a more widespread problem of
general decline in the Church. In this
sense, the absence of a clergy crisis is a much more serious problem than the
presence of one.
This suggestion is bolstered by a comparison of the
decline in priests with the decline in weekly mass attenders since the
1960s. Figure 7 shows the trends. The top set of data points reports the
number of priests, the bottom set the number of weekly mass attenders, reported
in 1,000s in order to scale the trends together for comparison. The lines in the figure are ordinary least
squares regression lines for each set of data; the regression equations are
reported on the chart. One can see by
inspection that the unstandardized slopes of the two trend lines are very
similar; the numbers are within 7% of each other.[30]
Despite rising formal affiliation, regular worship
and sacrament participation in the Catholic Church has declined at a rate
virtually identical to that of membership in the priesthood. Beyond explaining why there is not a clergy
shortage, this fact also suggests that similar causes may underlie the two
declines. Taken together they provide
further evidence of the well-known general decline in religious practice in the
Catholic Church. Ordination (conceived
either as initiation or persistence in the ordained state) and regular mass
attendance indicate widely varying levels of behavioral commitment to religious
ideals. (So does, in a different way,
reception of the life cycle sacraments, which as we saw above has declined as
well.)
Supply and demand in economic models is usually
mediated and balanced by changes in cost; and in this case it appears that both
(potential) priests and (potential) worshippers are fairly equally less willing
to pay the behavioral costs of belief than formerly. This congruence indicates that the Church finds itself with fewer
priests--and fewer worshippers--not as a result of opposition to a matrix of
social factors that uniquely affects priests, but as a result of its
susceptibility to factors that affect both clergy and lay alike. In this sense they are correct who see in
the priest decline signs of a larger “crisis of faith”.[31]
This kind of crisis is much more serious than a
shortage of priests; yet if it is more than something confined to the clergy,
it is also more than something confined to the Church. A general decline in traditional religious
practice in the industrialized world is one of the most common, if not entirely
uncontroversial, findings of the sociology of religion of the last few decades.
The crisis of faith of which the clergy decline is an indication, this
suggests, is not a crisis unique to the Catholic faith in particular, but of
faith sui generis, that is, the
cultural practice of faith in general.
What has diminished, in other words, is not the substantive power of the
particular ideals of the Catholic faith, or even the level of personal belief
in them, but the tendency or perceived necessity in American society for any religious belief to find expression
in institutional practice. In accord
with the diverse theories regarding this more general decline, then, the
evidence of this paper may be taken variously as an indication of: the maturing
and cultural assimilation of American Catholicism (Stark); the corrosive effect
of cultural pluralism on definite religious belief (Berger); an ongoing
secularizing
(of behavior, not belief) trend in Western culture (Wuthnow); the increasing
privatization of belief; or some combination of these. Whatever the larger social trends in play,
they are, however, just that: larger social trends, and not unique defects in
the Church’s institutional structure or theology. They signify a (cultural) shortage of faith, not a
(institutional) shortage of priests.
NOTES
[1]. Richard A. Schoenherr and Lawrence A. Young, Full pews and empty altars: Demographics of the priest shortage in United States Catholic dioceses (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 18, 126-143.
[2]. Richard A. Schoenherr, "Numbers Don’t Lie: A
Priesthood in Irreversible Decline," Commonweal
(7 April, 1995):11-14. See also Schoenherr and Young, Full Pews and Empty
Altars, xvii.)
[3]. Schoenherr, "Numbers Don’t Lie", 12.
[5]. Schoenherr, "Numbers Don’t Lie", 13.
[6]. Young, "Assessing and Updating the
Schoenherr-Young Projections," 1998.
[8]. Dean R. Hoge, The Future of catholic leadership: Responses to the priest shortage (Kansas City, Mo: Sheed and Ward, 1987). Schoenherr and Young, Full pews and empty altars. Young, "Assessing and Updating the Schoenherr-Young Projections," 1998.
[9]. Young, "Assessing and Updating the
Schoenherr-Young Projections," 1998, 7.
[11]. Schoenherr, "Numbers Don’t Lie", 12.
12. In fact, they compare membership figures
from the Directory with those from the Glenmary Research Center and from Gallup
polls, concluding that the latter, somewhat larger figures are the more
accurate, ignoring the proportion inactive that they report.
[13]. William V. D’Antonio, American Catholic laity
in a changing church (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1989), 44.
[15]. Schoenherr and Young, Full pews and empty
altars, 308.
[16]. Harris, "Supply, Demand and Parish
Staffing."
[17]. Young, "Assessing and Updating the
Schoenherr-Young Projections," 1998, 8.
[18]. Bryan Froehle and Mary Gautier, Catholicism
USA: A Portrait of the Catholic Church in the United States (Maryknoll, New
York: Orbis Books, 2000), 123.
[19]. Schoenherr and Young, Full pews and empty
altars, 16.
[20]. David C. Leege, Parish Life among the Leaders,
Report No. 9, Notre Dame Study of Catholic Parish Life (Notre Dame, Ind:
Institute for Pastoral and Social Ministry, 1986). Hoge, The Future of
Catholic Leadership. Dean R. Hoge,
Jackson W. Carroll and Francis K. Scheets, OSC, Patterns of Parish
Leadership: Cost and Effectiveness in Four Denominations (Kansas City, Mo: Sheed and Ward,
1988).
21. The 1999
Official Catholic Directory reports 12,675 permanent deacons and 31,370
diocesan priests in the Church, or 40.4% as many deacons as diocesan priests.
[22]. William V. D’Antonio, J. D. Davidson, D. R. Hoge
and R. A. Wallace, Laity American and Catholic: Transforming the Church
(Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1996).
[23]. United
States Catholic Conference, Survey of Deacon Supervisors, Principal Investigators Bishop Dale J. Melczek, Reverend Eugene
Hemrick, Dr. James R. Kelly, Deacon Samuel M. Taub. (Electronic Data File:
American Religion Data Archive, www.thearda.com, 1996).
[25]. Joseph Claude Harris, "The church and its
choices if the priest shortage continues," National Catholic Reporter (September 3, 1999): 18.
[26]. The proportion of parishes without a resident
pastor varies widely, from a high of 33% in the Upper Plains Region to only 4%
in New England. In general, priestless
parishes are most common in the midwest and much rarer along the
east coast and
mountain regions of the United States.
For complete data by region see Froehle and Gautier, Catholicism USA.
[27]. Joseph Claude Harris, "Creeping Democracy in
the U.S. Church" National Catholic
Reporter (January 21, 2000): 34-36. See also Harris, "Supply, Demand
and Parish Staffing," and Philip Murnion, David DeLambo, Rosemary Dilli,
and Harry Fagan, New Parish Ministers: Laity and Religious on Parish Staffs
(New York: National Pastoral Life Center. 1992).
[28]. Harris, "Creeping Democracy".
[29]. Murnion, New Parish Ministers, 21.
30. That is, -324
(the weekly attenders trend slope) is 93% of –347 (the priests trend
slope). Standardized comparisons and
tests of significance are not appropriate since neither of these variables
represents a sample and no claim is made regarding equal variances. Nonetheless, such statistics also indicate a
high degree of similarity: the beta for the weekly attenders trend is -.8 and
for the priests trend is -.93. The
correlation between the two variables is .64.
[31]. Pope Paul VI,"Sermon on December 30, 1976
(Vocation Sunday)", cited in Hoge, Future of Catholic Leadership,
17. Pope John Paul II, "Sermon on May 10, 1981," cited in The
Conclusive Document: Statement of the International Congress of Bishops on
Vocations, May 1981 (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1984), 13.
"Celibacy defended in synod's report to pope," National Catholic Reporter (November 5, 1999), quoting the Final
Report of 1999's European Synod.