In a 2008 address in Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict told the U.S. bishops that “the ability to cultivate vocations to the priesthood and the religious life is a sure sign of the health of a local Church.”
By Benedict’s metric, some American dioceses are thriving today, producing lots of priestly vocations from holy families, schools and parishes. Others are struggling.
To get a concrete measure of this, the Register analyzed data on ordinations collected by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). CARA compiled numbers from the Official Catholic Directory, an annual report that collects official data from each diocese on total Catholic population, ordinations and other statistics. CARA compared each diocese’s current Catholic population to its number of ordinations during the most recent five years in the Official Catholic Directory’s data, 2019 to 2023. In other words, the total Catholics per recent diocesan ordination in every diocese.
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