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The Collapse of Religious and Priestly Vocations
The collapse of priestly and religious vocations in the Western world is truly disastrous. When I was ordained in 1947, when the Catholic and general population of the United States was much smaller than it is today, there were in round numbers 187,000 nuns, 32,000 priests, 12,000 Brothers and 48,000 major seminarians. Today there are 94,022 nuns (one-third of whom are incapacitated), 50,209 priests (with a median age of 59), 6,260 Brothers and between 6,000-7,000 major seminarians! In the years 1966-69, 932 priests were ordained in the U.S.; in 1990-94, only 289 (cf. Schoenher and Young, Full Pews and Empty Altars).
Since 1962 some 23,000 priests and many more nuns in the U.S. have left their commitment to Christ, to the scandal of many. Worldwide more than 111,000 priests have abandoned their vocation. Today I know parents who are reluctant to have their sons aspire to the priesthood for fear of the kind of seminary he might enter, or further, fear as a priest he may leave later, to their embarrassment.
It is interesting to note that the beginning of the collapse of vocations came shortly after the introduction of the Pill in 1960, which some say inaugurated the disastrous sexual revolution. Others say the now discredited Kinsey Report of 1948 was the starting-point of the modern sexual upheaval. Today the average American family has about two children, thanks to surgical abortion, abortifacients, contraception and sterilization. Keep in mind many of these children are born in immigrant families. According to the U.S. Census, some 58% of married couples at ages 44-45 have resorted to the barnyard approach to birth control, having neutered themselves. It is safe to say that up to 85% of fertile Catholic couples are involved in sinful birth prevention, mostly by sterilization and abortifacients.
What is the impact of this on young people? I suggest it is enormous. Young people are not stupid; by absolutizing sexual pleasure and by splitting off the procreative from the unitive in the marriage act with the rejection of Humanae Vitae, parents have left the impression, magnified by the press and electronic media, that sex is for fun, is for everyone - thus distorting any healthy concept of truly sacrificial, loving, generous, chaste parenthood. And I must add: how many future priests and nuns have abortionists killed?
The great Jesuit youth leader, Father Daniel Lord once wrote, "More boys become priests and more girls become nuns because they know happy priests and happy nuns than any other reason I know." The Pope echoed this thought when he told the seminarians of Dunwoodie Seminary, "The Church needs joyful priests, capable of bringing true joy to God's people, which is the Good News in all its truth and transforming power." Surely the radical, feminist nuns are a sorry lot and anything but inspiringly happy - and that is many of our Sisters. The too many priests who say they are too tired from the weekend to offer Mass for the parish on Monday or who hide behind telephone answering machines would hardly inspire young lads to happily follow them into the Lord's vineyard.
Then there is the sad problem of the demoralized and discouraged papist priest, orthodox and loyal to the Pope and magisterium, farmed into the hinterlands. Such a discouraged priest would find it hard to encourage vocations. We constantly meet fine young men who know the situation and who have many misgivings about joining a diocese or a religious order because of the chaos in the Catholic Church.
Nor will contracepting, sterilized teachers in "Catholic" schools and CCD classes inspire the young into religious life. Inadequate religious instruction - often heretical - and the enormous theological confusion stemming from seminaries and "Catholic" colleges and universities where dissenting theologians flourish while bishops do nothing, stifles any yen to enter God's cause as religious or priest. We need to remind ourselves, too, that among the 40 million babies surgically aborted since 1973 were future priests and religious - 5,000 priests calculates shrewd observer Michael Engler.
Today's soft living - the curse of affluence - is likewise a deterrent. It is astonishing that by the time a young Catholic graduates from high school he has spent 16,000 hours in the classroom but has seen 18,000 hours of TV. I put great hope in sacrificing, one-income, home-schooling families to produce young people more ready to offer their lives to God in religion. There are one million home-schooled in such families; the number is growing fast, as are independent private Catholic schools controlled by parents.
One sad fact about increasing mixed marriages is that such produce very few vocations. And surely the all too many Catholics who live the alternative lifestyle we used to call "shacking up" will be no source of young Catholics eager to serve the Lord more fully. As Pope Pius XII told parents of large families in Italy in 1951, the large, truly Catholic family is "the seedbed of vocations." Some orthodox religious congregations still fully Catholic are flourishing with recruits. Their vocation directors tell me that their novices come mostly from right-to-life families and Marian groups. And most surely, the very many fallen-away Catholics are no help here. As more and more Catholic hospitals close down or join with secular organizations or give up Catholic teaching in doing sterilization operations, we can be sure that this former source of vocations will also dry up.
Every study of vocations that I have ever seen has shown that most priests and religious come from not the very rich, nor the very poor, but from larger, middle-class families whose parents are deeply religious. Because these parents disciplined themselves, they have a disciplined home. Some years ago eight American bishops were moaning to a cardinal in Rome about the shortage of vocations. The cardinal thereupon asked each bishop individually how many children there were in their family. The average was six! "There you have your answer," remarked the cardinal.
In the last 5-7 years, while traveling the world in my prolife apostolate, I have asked groups of priests, religious and seminarians the size of their families. The average was 5-6, with the lowest in Puerto Rico, where the seminarians came from families of 3-4 children - this still much higher than the average Puerto Rican family.
Undoubtedly it was the scandals of bishops and priests in Ireland that lost the recent referendum on divorce there. In a poll, 57% of Irish adults said that these scandals had seriously tarnished the hierarchy and clergy's credibility. And what has been the impact of such scandals in the U.S., with the bishops having to pay more than $650 million of the people's hard-earned cash for pedophilia cases? What is the impact of this on vocations, to say nothing of other priestly and episcopal scandals?
Born on a large dairy farm in a German Catholic enclave outside Minneapolis, I was the 15th of 17 children. My mother once told me she prayed that she would have a large family, and as you can see, she was a good pray-er. Three died after childbirth, leaving 14, 11 girls and 3 boys. My brother and I always joked that we became priests to get away from the girls. But then two girls became nuns (you can't win with these women).
But there is another theory about vocations: when people tell me that ours must have been a very pious family to have produced four vocations, I jokingly respond by saying that the Lord calls some into the priesthood and religious life because He doesn't trust them in marriage. Be that as it may, in 1947 I was the 27th priest in a parish of 230 families pastored for 33 years by the saintly, gruff Father Anthony Miks; by 1947 the parish had produced over 100 religious women. I cannot remember a single priest scandal during my Catholic grade school and high school years.There was never any doubt in our minds that our parents were saints; I suggest it was saintly people who produced all these vocations. Where are the parents today that pray that at least one of their children enter the priesthood or the religious life? Now that parishes are closing in disturbing numbers because of the shortage of priests; now that ever fewer priests and nuns are working for the spiritual welfare of the laity; now that more and more laymen are taking over parishes and conducting prayer services on Sunday as a substitute for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the crisis of vocations will escalate. Meanwhile, the Catholic population continues to grow, and takes on ever more immigrants who often have the Faith in their bones, even if not in their minds and souls, and so understand it very little. Unfortunately often many of these immigrants are very neglected, given the shortage of religious and clergy. Why is it that the Philippines and countries in Africa and some in Latin America and some dioceses in the U.S. have a goodly number of vocations? It lies in the quality of their family life, their Catholic culture and the devotion of their priests and religious.
Why is it that in this country dioceses like Peoria, IL, Arlington, VA, and Lincoln, NE, have an abundance of seminarians and priests? Arlington with 250,000 Catholics has some 50 major seminarians; Lincoln with only 80,000, has 44 major seminarians. I have noted in both dioceses good parishes with Catholic schools. Lincoln, for example, has eight parishes in the city, all with Catholic schools and a surprising number of nuns teaching. In addition, the Lincoln diocese has a parish on the campus of the football-famous University of Nebraska, which under the direction of Rev. Msgr. Leonard Kalin, its chaplain, has produced many vocations for years. I offered Mass twice there late in the night; I was surprised by the number and fervor of students participating. Now under the great leadership of Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz, Lincoln has a bright future. So it can be done! It has to be done!
There is another aspect to consider in thinking about vocations, the growth of the world's religions. Before the year 2000, the Catholic Church will no longer have the largest number of adherents. Taking that position will be Islam, the followers of Allah and his prophet Mohammed. Before the year 2000, there will be 100 million more Moslems than those who still call themselves Catholics. Here is the relentless, naked reality of statistics: while the annual growth rate of the Christian population is about 1.5 percent (a percentage smaller than the annual percentage increase of the world's population as a whole), Islam is advancing at the astounding rate of 16 percent annually, followed closely by the great religions of the East: Hinduism (13 percent) and Buddhism (10 percent). In Asia the percentage of Catholics has been steady for some time at somewhat more than 2% of the population. China is still off-limits for missionaries with, however, an estimated 12-15 million struggling, persecuted Catholics.
In the light of the vocation disaster, the work of Human Life International in promoting life and the family; preparation for marriage; natural family planning; home schooling; chastity in the young and in the married; the publication of literature in several languages to foster these ends; conducting national and international seminars and symposia - all of this worldwide apostolate - would seem to indicate that what we do is the most important work in the world, as this Pope remarked to me on 17 November 1979. The evils in modern society - the loss of faith, contraception, sterilization, value-free sex education, abortion and the threatening euthanasia - are not only anti-life but are destroyers of families in multiple ways. What destroys families, destroys the Church. Let us pray that the Lord of the only harvest that really counts will inspire the young to serve Him exclusively. And may ever more courageous parents welcome a generous number of children in their homes in this anti-life/anti-family world.