The Invisible Vocations Crisis
Whole generations of American Catholics have simply stopped making vocational commitments of any kind.
In the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, the number of Catholic priests in the United States began to decline precipitously. Thousands of men left ministry and the number of men entering seminary to replace them began to shrink rapidly.
According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown, there were 59,192 Catholic priests in the United States in 1970. By 2020, that number had fallen to 35,513. The number of seminarians followed a similar trend. In 1970, there were 805 ordinations. By 2000, the number of ordinations had fallen to 442.
The decline was steepest among religious orders, with the number of religious priests in the US falling from 21,920 to 10,308 between 1970 and 2020, a decline of 53% percent. (The greatest vocational collapse was among institutes of women religious, but that is a story for another day.)
Most American Catholics are familiar with these trends. Many older Catholics know men who left the priesthood in the years following the Council. Except in a handful of dioceses, few Catholics under the age of 50 have ever known a Church in which the “vocations crisis” was not a constant reality of ecclesial life.
Thankfully, in recent decades the decline has leveled off. The number of seminarians and new ordinands has remained more or less stable for some time, though the total number of priests in ministry continues to decline as older priests retire or die and the number of Catholics in the United States has continued to grow.
Marriage rates among Catholics in the United States have also crashed in the decades since the Second Vatican Council.
Unlike the crisis in priestly vocations, the collapse of Catholic marriages has continued more or less unabated. In 1970, there were 426,309 new Catholic marriages recorded in the United States out of an estimated 54.1 million Catholics. In 2024, there were an estimated 77.2 million Catholics in the United States but only 108,865 new Catholic marriages.
Some of this decline can be attributed to uneven demographics — in 1970, the Baby Boomers were getting married, which made the per capita rate unusually high. And the sharp decline in marriage rates in the US population generally suggests that the decline in marriage among Catholics is not a uniquely Catholic problem. Lower marriage rates have been paralleled in recent years by a lower divorce rate, which is something of a silver lining.
Still, something is clearly amiss.
The vocation crisis is not merely a crisis of priestly and religious vocations—though that problem is real and remains acute in many parts of the American Church.
Whole generations of American Catholics have simply stopped making vocational commitments of any kind.