Is this data not available in some electronic data that you can mine more easily? How crazy. Or maybe the Vatican just doesn't have public access, but only to the print? It sounds like you have to data mine for anything so I can see your decision to check just a few places, but only choosing large dioceses may skew things. Would be interesting to compare 10 large dioceses and 10 small ones. Maybe there are pillar subscribers who would volunteer time to look through PDFs to get data into Excel?
I live in a diocese that has 19 seminarians. One of our newer priests made a comment that maybe half would go all the way through seminary and become priests. In the US and my particular diocese most will only have a year or two of actual training in a parish before they become a pastor. Not all priests are meant to be administrators. FYI I have a son that is a priest but is not a parish priest.
"Analyzing the number of diocesan ordinations per million registered Catholics in the five major US dioceses for which we collected data, the trend that emerges is of a Church in which vocations were already decreasing in the decade before the Council, but which dropped far more rapidly in the twenty-five years afterwards."
This is really the key paragraph of the whole article after a bit of a strange lede. To summarize:
After a post war uptick of vocations in the immediate post war period, vocations were beginning to decline. In the midst of that early (and relatively slight) decline Vatican II happened. Instead of leading to a new springtime of faith that everyone hoped for, the downward trend accelerated until finally stabilizing under JPII. Those stabilized numbers have not been able to keep up with population growth in much of the world.
But if you want a more thorough understanding of what happened to vocations in the aftermath of VII you also have to consider how many men and women left their religious vocations at that time. As we know (although I'd love to see the Pillar report the numbers) there were a large number who left in the midst of the rapid changes.
It'd be interesting to assess the vocations situation through a global lens rather than just what usually happens, based on the Europe/America experience. As an Australian I know we probably mirrored the Europe/America experience but I also know just how open we have become to accepting clergy from regions that were previously regarded as primitive and lesser in our ingrained cultural prejudices. Vatican II was a great antidote to that sort of prejudice. Vatican II opened Christianity to a more 'catholic' experience which we should be so grateful for.
A friendly suggestion: I would be interested in seeing if what I perceive was a bump in vocations in the timeframe during and immediately after WWII is true, compared to the period before (say, the 1920s and 30s) and after. In my early diocesan days in the 1990s, I noticed that my diocese seemed to have a post-WWII boom of late-1940s and early-1950s vocations that was unlike earlier times and that also was not sustained as we moved into the later 1950s. My diocese's own vicar general had been influenced to pursue a vocation, I believe, by what he saw serving as a WWII soldier. Curious if the data supports what I perceive was a WWII-impacted vocation bubble in the U.S. As those men retired in the 1980s and 90s, we spoke about a dearth of vocations, but to me it always seemed like the post-WWII ordination boom was the anomaly rather than the norm over the course of the first half of the 20th century.
1. When including many charts of data, it would probably be good to number them: Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, etc. It's a small thing, but it can be really clarifying, especially when you want to refer back to data later in the article.
2. When looking at data, it's often important to identify outliers and exclude them from certain analyses. For instance, it should be pretty obvious that Lago's massive triple spike in ordinations/million is not just heavily skewing the average in that chart but rending it ultimately meaningless.
It does not surprise me that vocations were decreasing prior to Vatican II. The council was called for a reason and a consistent global trend in declining vocations is one (but a downstream) symptom of a wider malaise that the council was trying to address. It sharp declines post Vatican II is a painful but I think necessary (one could also argue an overcorrection) generated by Vatican II’s re-emphasis on the dignity and responsibility of the lay vocation. For a lot of young men and women discerning or in seminary or religious life realised that the desire to serve the church did not require holy orders or religious vows. In about 100 years I think we’ll come to see that as a good thing. Lord knows the kind of damage done by men (and women) in a vocation they aren’t called to or should have discerned out.
Amazing data analysis brother
Is this data not available in some electronic data that you can mine more easily? How crazy. Or maybe the Vatican just doesn't have public access, but only to the print? It sounds like you have to data mine for anything so I can see your decision to check just a few places, but only choosing large dioceses may skew things. Would be interesting to compare 10 large dioceses and 10 small ones. Maybe there are pillar subscribers who would volunteer time to look through PDFs to get data into Excel?
I live in a diocese that has 19 seminarians. One of our newer priests made a comment that maybe half would go all the way through seminary and become priests. In the US and my particular diocese most will only have a year or two of actual training in a parish before they become a pastor. Not all priests are meant to be administrators. FYI I have a son that is a priest but is not a parish priest.
"Analyzing the number of diocesan ordinations per million registered Catholics in the five major US dioceses for which we collected data, the trend that emerges is of a Church in which vocations were already decreasing in the decade before the Council, but which dropped far more rapidly in the twenty-five years afterwards."
This is really the key paragraph of the whole article after a bit of a strange lede. To summarize:
After a post war uptick of vocations in the immediate post war period, vocations were beginning to decline. In the midst of that early (and relatively slight) decline Vatican II happened. Instead of leading to a new springtime of faith that everyone hoped for, the downward trend accelerated until finally stabilizing under JPII. Those stabilized numbers have not been able to keep up with population growth in much of the world.
But if you want a more thorough understanding of what happened to vocations in the aftermath of VII you also have to consider how many men and women left their religious vocations at that time. As we know (although I'd love to see the Pillar report the numbers) there were a large number who left in the midst of the rapid changes.
It'd be interesting to assess the vocations situation through a global lens rather than just what usually happens, based on the Europe/America experience. As an Australian I know we probably mirrored the Europe/America experience but I also know just how open we have become to accepting clergy from regions that were previously regarded as primitive and lesser in our ingrained cultural prejudices. Vatican II was a great antidote to that sort of prejudice. Vatican II opened Christianity to a more 'catholic' experience which we should be so grateful for.
A friendly suggestion: I would be interested in seeing if what I perceive was a bump in vocations in the timeframe during and immediately after WWII is true, compared to the period before (say, the 1920s and 30s) and after. In my early diocesan days in the 1990s, I noticed that my diocese seemed to have a post-WWII boom of late-1940s and early-1950s vocations that was unlike earlier times and that also was not sustained as we moved into the later 1950s. My diocese's own vicar general had been influenced to pursue a vocation, I believe, by what he saw serving as a WWII soldier. Curious if the data supports what I perceive was a WWII-impacted vocation bubble in the U.S. As those men retired in the 1980s and 90s, we spoke about a dearth of vocations, but to me it always seemed like the post-WWII ordination boom was the anomaly rather than the norm over the course of the first half of the 20th century.
A few comments for the future:
1. When including many charts of data, it would probably be good to number them: Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, etc. It's a small thing, but it can be really clarifying, especially when you want to refer back to data later in the article.
2. When looking at data, it's often important to identify outliers and exclude them from certain analyses. For instance, it should be pretty obvious that Lago's massive triple spike in ordinations/million is not just heavily skewing the average in that chart but rending it ultimately meaningless.
It does not surprise me that vocations were decreasing prior to Vatican II. The council was called for a reason and a consistent global trend in declining vocations is one (but a downstream) symptom of a wider malaise that the council was trying to address. It sharp declines post Vatican II is a painful but I think necessary (one could also argue an overcorrection) generated by Vatican II’s re-emphasis on the dignity and responsibility of the lay vocation. For a lot of young men and women discerning or in seminary or religious life realised that the desire to serve the church did not require holy orders or religious vows. In about 100 years I think we’ll come to see that as a good thing. Lord knows the kind of damage done by men (and women) in a vocation they aren’t called to or should have discerned out.
Well, when you eliminate 50 PERCENT of your population from ordination, don't come crying and moaning to others about your problem...