Imagine There's No Clergy
Projecting Data on Priests, Parishes, and Priest to Laity Ratios to 2060
I’ve recently been putting a lot of work into collecting and extending data on Catholic trends backwards to before Vatican II in order to get a better picture of the true effects of the Council. (Short version: it wasn’t solely responsible for modernism, decline, and apostasy, as negative trends slightly preceded the Council, but it definitely didn’t help, and seems to have supercharged all metrics of decline in Catholic practice.) From this, and also from some recent writing on the downstream effects of shortages of priests, someone who had previously written on this topic shared with me the idea of attempting to model some of these trends forward in time.1
What will, this man asked, parishes in the Church look like in 10, 20, or 30 years if the number of priests continues to decline?
The Church knows the age of every priest and the age of every seminarian and they can likely predict with near 100-percent certainty the number of retirements, deaths, & separations of priests as well as the number of seminarians who are successfully ordained as priests in the next 10 years. My suspicion is that they will not share this information because they know that there is a massive demographic time bomb that is about to hit. What will Catholic life be like when the Laity to Priest ratio goes from 2,500:1 up to 5,000 to 1 ... or to 25,000 to 1? What will it be like to be one of those priests? I think this is the real reason that the Church is rushing to shut down the Latin Mass. They simply can not tolerate a 25,000 to 1 Novus Ordo coexisting along side of a 500 to 1 Latin Mass. They have no choice but to shut it all down.
We can’t predict with absolute certainty, especially so far out, but after working through the data, this man’s guess about how bad the priest shortage will soon be in many parishes, and perhaps his belief for why many in the Church are against the Latin Mass (that it would force them to admit that the revolution hasn’t worked) appear quite validated by the data.
Imagine there’s no clergy, except at traditionalist orders, and that’s the future, one that will either force those excited by the spirit of Vatican II to dig in and hold on to their revolutionary fervor, driving people even more towards the growing, thriving traditionalist parishes, or one that will force them—or someone, eventually—to admit that the revolutions of the last 60 years actually haven’t helped the Church.
Methodology
(Skip this section if you want to get right to the data and charts themselves)
Using actuary data and the current average age of U.S. Catholic priests (around 65), as well as past data on the number of their departures from the priesthood for other reasons, I was able to calculate the number of currently ordained priests who will likely still be alive and in ministry out to 2060.
Separately, looking at the last fifty years of ordinations and seminary enrollment, I projected the number of yearly ordinations out to 2060, assuming the current average age of ordination (35) remains approximately constant, subtracted deaths and other departures from the priesthood from this cohort of future projected ordinations, and then added these totals to the first cohort to estimate the total number of priests by year.
I next considered two (or actually 2.5)2 cases and modelled this number separately for each, one where the number of ordinations remains constant at 2025 levels and one where it follows the past fifty-year trendline and declines at about 4% per year.
In addition, as a baseline, I produced a simple exponential projection for the number of priests that made no demographic guesses but merely extended the average rate of the past fifty years of decline exponentially into the future.
Number of Priests
The results range from a high of 15,000 priests assuming ordinations remain constant to a low of around 8,000 if current trends continue or worsen, down from the present number of about 34,000.
By itself, this number is really bad, a 50% to 75% decline from the current number of priests, but to really put it in context, as with the man who shared his theory and question with me, let’s next show what this looks like for the average Catholic or Catholic parish.
U.S. Catholic Population
And to answer this, first of all, how many Catholics will there be in 35 years?
Though the number of people who claim to be Catholic has grown, albeit more slowly than before, since the Council, it’s been declining for the last decade, and as TLM_Ryan argues, also from a demographic-focused perspective on Pre-Conciliar Radio, this decline will only accelerate.
Looking at past trends, without good ability (at least at present) to scientifically model any of this, I took U.S. government population projections for the United States, took as a baseline Catholics’s current 21% of the general population, and then projected the number of Catholics in the country forward while assuming a 0.5% decline per year in the Catholic to general population ratio, which approximately matches the trends od the last few decades..
Projecting the number of these Catholics who actually attend Mass every week or more as well, based on current CARA survey data and assuming an average 0.7% decline in the ratio of this to the general American population, as has been the case in the United States ever since Vatican II, I thus produced this chart looking forward to 2060:
Catholic to Priest Ratio
Next, calculating the number of Catholics per priest and the number of weekly Mass-attending Catholics per priest, I came up with the following final chart for my two primary scenarios.
With the number of priests declining far faster than the general Catholic population, the ratio of people to priests will balloon, with as many as 10,000 or more Catholics per priest, triple to quadruple the current levels.
Imagine the average Catholic parish with one priest, and then imagine him running four of them by himself—somehow. That’s the future, assuming the number of priests serving average Novus Ordo parishes don’t decline even faster than that from men choosing to serve in an order or fraternity that values their work, and doesn’t feature bureacracies working at cross purposes to evagenlization and sacramental ministry.
In other words, it could be even worse than this.
A Parish in 2060
Of course, there will be many parish closures that will mitigate, if we can even call it that, some of this effect. With a declining Catholic population and fewer priests, surely we’ll instead have the dream of the Parish and Diocesan Renewal specialists of fewer but far larger and healthier parishes, right?
Yes, but then imagine the average priest handling a parish of 12,000 people, or actually more than that, since many priests have ministries as chaplains outside of the parish system, all by himself. Even for a large 1,000-seat church, for everyone to attend, that’s twelve Masses every Sunday that he, or that is, every single priest, has to offer. Of course, as has been another tale of the last 60 years, Mass attendance has declined abysmally, lots of people who claim to be Catholic going only rarely, but unless there’s a crash program to suddenly triple the seating capacity, of every Catholic Church, impossible due to the cash strapped nature of the finacialized and bueracratized, yet still struggling parishes and dioceses, decline in Catholic practice is inexorably baked into the picture.
And that’s just the beginning.
Everyone’s supposed to go to confession at least once a year—bare minimum. What does that look like with another 9,000 people on average needing to see each priest?
What do your chances of receiving the Last Rites look like when priests are stretched four times more thinly than they are at present?
Example 1: St. Mary’s in Dubai
Actually, on these terms, we don’t have to guess. Several countries, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, South Sudan, Cuba, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Angola, Aruba, Mozambique, Sudan, Venezuela, Armenia, Honduras, and Malawi, almost all either thoroughly Islamic or Communist, and hostile to Christianity, are already at this laity-to-priest ratio of 10,000+ to 1 per the data of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostalate (CARA) that I’ve been building off of.
St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, is one model that might show what this future world of parish life will look like. Due to restrictions on the faith from the Islamic government, with 350,000 Catholics being served by only 9 priests, or around one priest per 40,000 Catholics. While they have 7 Masses on Sunday, in practice, the extremely low priest to laity ratio means that oddities like having vigil Masses for Sunday beginning as early as 7:00 AM on Saturday. Good luck making it to confession (two-minute-long confessions would have to be run by two priests simultaneously for 16 hours a day every single day) to have a chance of making it in. Good luck even getting to know someone who knows your priest, let alone knowing him personally.
I’m not going to say that maintaining one’s faith is impossible in these circumstances. But all the incentives are aligned against it.
And to be clear, though, this isn’t the fault of the mostly Franciscan priests who serve this parish. It’s a matter of pure mathematical necessity (and Islamic restrictions that won’t allow the construction of additional Catholic churches in Dubai).
When there’s one priest for this many people, as this visualization of 40,000 dots shows, there’s not really much that can be done other than the church becoming a rushed, sacrament-dispensing machine that must depend on lay bureaucracy and corporate practices with no time for spiritual depth.
Success, in these circumstances, rather than looking at the true spiritual health of the faithful, gets redefined to engagement, mere attendance, and metrics alone (and, again, as stated above, doesn’t even do well by these), as there’s no time to treat it any differently.
Example 2: St. Matthew’s in Charlotte
One doesn’t have to look all the way to the Middle East to see what this future holds for Catholicism in the United States, but only as far as Charlotte, North Carolina, and St. Matthew Catholic Church, with five priests and 35,000 parishioners. Often termed a Catholic “megachurch” not only for its size and modernist architecture/design, but also for its marketing and communication strategies, specifically inspired by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, and also for the fact that it has a “sattelite campus”, “St. Matthew’s South”, the Franciscan-run parish and its current 7,000 to 1 laity to priest ratio is still far far better than what all Catholic parishes will be facing by 2060.
Note that there are 2 hours of confession times per week, or 208 per year for 35,000 people, meaning that if everyone makes it to confession only once, they need to average only 20 seconds in the confessional!
With six weekend Masses, there’s space for maybe around half of their parishioners to attend each Sunday, and things are a lot better, relatively speaking than at St. Mary’s in Dubai, but most Catholics at St. Matthew’s, even if they want to, have little chance of any relationship with their priest other than as a Sacrament dispenser, while the priests are forced, due to the scale, to rely on a a vast middle management of dozens of lay administrators.
As I’ve written about at length in the past, and these anecdotes below relate, this type of managed rationing of the sacraments just doesn’t work:
Even if you’re entering the Church or attempting to get your child baptized or confirmed, your interactions will be with one of these many lay administrators, like the “Baptism Scheduler,” rather than with the priests themselves.
The Managerial Success Stories
But on a certain level, this parish is thriving, is it not? There are 100 ministries. There are 35,000 members. There are coordinators and councils, and ministries and procedures set up for everything. There’s a 20-page-long bulletin.
The process of redefining success so that it looks more like managerial parishes that are run and operate more like corporations has been an ongoing trend since the 1960s, with many Catholic parishes founded in that era in a rootless, suburban environment, not grounded in local tradition, clanship, or community. They no longer had a Catholic life for their pastors merely to guide and assist. Instead, in these new parishes, and at the same time as the council was “implementing” its changes and the sinews of Catholic culture were collapsing from lack of priests, religious, and motivated laity, the result was a one-two punch that reduced Catholicism as a faith more and more to merely Catholicism and the parish as an institution.
Furthermore, Vatican II also supercharged this trend by legitimizing it. Whereas active cooperation with secular governments would have been suspect at any time earlier in Church history, it was, under Dignitatis Humanae, merely cooperation for human fraternity, the bureaucratization of parishes, and the sidelining of their relationships with their people in lieu of a “parish structure” justified as “active participation”, “lay involvement”, and “anti-clericalism.”
Incorporate managerial methods, such as large staffs of laymen focused on “managing” various ministries or departments, and you subtly start to incorporate managerial ends. Success gets redefined from saving souls to the next budget cycle, to ensuring that there’s a baptismal process rather than baptism numbers, that there’s online engagement with the parish rather than retention in the faith, and from relationships with the saints and the Church’s tradition to relationships with the federal government.3
If your view of Catholicism is transactional, defining success in terms of the number of programs, rather than by whether Catholics actually attend Mass, hold the tenets of the faith, and their children will stay in the faith, then lay-managed mega-parishes like these do look like success.
In what’s left, after a massive coming rack of closures, of the consolidated and larger regular diocesan parishes, the sacraments will continue to be decentered over time due to a lack of priests, synodality (whatever it is), and other lay activities being more prioritized not merely for ideological but also for mere practical necessity due to the shortage of priests.
Go to such a parish, and regardless of how much effort the priest puts in, there’s no way for him to sufficiently minister to all of the faithful, meaning that these parishes, while their registered numbers of parishioners may briefly look impressive on paper, will hemorrhage, as the average diocesan parish has already done for the past 60 years faithful to unbelief and lapsing in the Faith far faster than these 12,000 or more to Catholics to one priest parishes manage to win converts. (By TLM_Ryan’s numbers, for every one convert to Catholicism, eight people leave the faith)
Across history, rather, where most of the time the average parish has always served a small, local, tight-knit community, one that has a chance of having a personal relationship with their pastor and moral accountability to him and to the community writ large. This works only in a small parish, roughly in the range of Dunbar’s number, the maximum number of social connections one person can have at any one time. While there have certainly been other factors hurting Catholic faith and practice, large parishes, where one is far more anonymous, have none of these incentives, and certainly haven’t helped keep people actively in the faith.
Big churches, like those we’ve increasingly seen over the last 60 years and will see far more of over the next 35 years, just don’t work.
Furthermore, when you define success by the ways of the world’s corporate managerial practices (or those of Protestant megachurches), the world’s ways will always appear more appealing. No matter how many parish transformation programs you pay for, nothing can make up for the fact that the lowest common denominator product of a parish that treats faithful like a commodified product that can be bounced around between consolidated mega-parishes just isn’t appealing.
And that scenario, of increasingly bueracratic lay managed parishes with one priest and tens of thousands of faithful, is the best case one. Who can tell whether priests can handle tripling or quadrupling the number of parishioners? My projection of flat or slowly declining ordinations is actually an optimistic one, assuming that vocations won’t further decline or priests suffer mental breakdowns from being forced to attempt to handle 20 to 25 times the Dunbar’s number maximum.
Things could get a lot worse, and no diocesan transformation plan to shutter parishes is addressing the root problem: not enough men want to work at the average diocesan parish. (Could it get so bad that they decide there’s no obligation to attend Mass anymore, that virtual attendance counts, or issuing general absolution regularly? It sounds like satire, but the trend looks so bad that I’m sure crazy ideas will become reality.)
Bishops and commentators may talk about a priest shortage, but no one’s talking about how bad it actually is going to be, a priest famine. The reasons they don’t talk about it are two-fold, first, in that admitting that there’s a crisis this bad would force them to confront its roots, and they depend on not doing so for their legitimacy, while, secondly, they have no other plan to solve it other than claiming that it’s traditionalists who are the sole cause of present day strife.
A Two-Track Church?
But this famine of priests isn’t because of an overall shortage of vocations. Even as the clergy shortage in the average diocesan parish is going from bad to worse, there doesn’t even appear to be a shortage at the places today that serve as alternatives.
The Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), for example, even with being extremely selective and even with its irregularities, has a thriving seminary enrollment, and has been at about an 800:1 laity to priest ratio at its chapels for a while, while the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) is even better, at around 300:1.
With growing numbers of faithful, but, simultaneously with thriving seminary enrollments, these ratios will stay constant demographically over time, with the difference between them and regular diocesan parishes growing starker and starker over time.
What’s the incentive for the priest—or the faithful—for that matter, to partake in a system headed for inexorable decay, especially when there are organizations like the FSSP which could have a 25 times better laity-to-priest ratio? What’s the incentive, liturgical and theological concerns aside, if you actually care about your faith and keeping it, to stay in a place where not only are you more likely to lose your faith, but you’re crowded into a massive, yet still declining system of diocesan parishes and don’t even know your pastor?
No matter what happens in Rome regarding the SSPX situation, the Traditionis Custodes situation, or anything else regarding traditionalism, the demographic trends are baked in. We’re headed for a two-track Church, one track, a temporary one, that can’t last of its own accord, of managerial lay-administered mega-churches with little chance to see or know a priest, with incentives even worse than today’s aligned against one staying in the faith, and another, one of churches with a 500 to 1 ratio, close, as far as I can tell, to the historical average, and one demographically, that is far better at reproducing itself, both as regarding faithful and as to vocations.
The trends can’t be stopped, but for those whose positions depend on pretending there isn’t a problem, the vast gap between these two versions of Catholicism lays bare the structural flaws of the last 60 years. Whatever role Vatican II, liturgical reform, and all the new modes of the trumpeted accompaniment of “modern man” over the last 60 years, through to synodality, have played, they aren’t a sustainable version of Catholicism.
Again, as the man who reached out with this idea suggested:
I think this is the real reason that the Church is rushing to shut down the Latin Mass. They simply can not tolerate a 25,000 to 1 Novus Ordo coexisting along side of a 500 to 1 Latin Mass. They have no choice but to shut it all down.
Because of this, for them, traditionalism has become the enemy that needs to be stamped out, as, if left to thrive, it would destroy the entire basis of the ecclesial-corporate-government “partnerships” that have defined the post-Vatican II Church, especially in the United States, as, increasingly over time, Catholics either stay in their parish and follow the trend of the average parish toward losing their faith or seek out those alternatives in the Church where they will be spritually fed.
While Patrick Neve’s recent article suggesting everyone needs to stay and support their parish raises a valid point, looked at from a different perspective, his point is moot with the coming massive numbers of parish closures. Why support a parish that will have to be shut down anyway, and in which you might not even be able to reliably receive the sacraments and grow in the faith, one that shares incentives in its lay administration that are often against those of any priest trying to do good work? Arguably, it would actually be more charitable to attend churches that are proven thriving alternatives to the overcrowded megachurch “Mass centers” that are coming. Think about it as making them less crowded and making the priest’s job easier while making the difference between the experience at such parishes and that at alternatives starker.
Traditionis Custodes was an attempt to slam the door shut before the gap became too obvious between consolidated megachurches increasingly priest-less, and eventually, after a long period stretched thin, without faithful either, and the thriving traditional alternatives.
This gap, again, regardless of what else happens, will be temporary. For even as through towards the 2060s, Novus Ordo parishes will become increasingly priestless, long-term demographic decline amongst average Catholics will also make them increasingly short of laity as well, even as the traditional parishes become full of priests and growing in laity as well from higher birth AND vocations rates.
The priestly demographic decline is so baked in that when it’s a choice between parishes where there are next to no priests and soon to be next to no laity, or making an accomodation to the ways the Church has always practice the faith that are producing clergy (and laity), eventually even those who owe their power to the revolution will decide that the revolution is less important than institutional survival.
The data is in. Either they admit it someday and change course, or there won’t be any of them left.
But don’t let the bad trends frighten you. This decline, while definitely a crisis that will lead to more people leaving the Church, doesn’t appear to be affecting those who aren’t into the modern stuff, meaning that it’s in fact more charitable to leave those declining parishes that are sclerotic lay-run bureaucracies with priorities running at cross purposes to the faith.
By doing so, you’ll help force this crisis to a head faster and help it be over sooner as well.
Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to directly help grow the number of priests and religious as well, either!
Without good data on the age distribution of Catholic priests at present, I did two sub-models, one where I presumed that all Catholic priests were exactly the mean age, and one with an assumed standard normal distribution and standard deviation of around 15 years from the mean age of 65. The results, in the end, don’t overly differ.
Dr. Eugene McCarraher, “Smile When You Say ‘Laity’: The Hidden Triumph of the Consumer Ethos”, Commonweal. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/smile-when-you-say-laity:
Indeed, I recently learned that my own parish council is studying the “Total Quality Management” principles of the avuncular business guru, W. Edwards Deming, the Teilhard of corporate America. TQM is the most fully developed specimen of corporate therapeutics yet devised, replete with faux-zen aphorisms, hosannas to interrelatedness, optimization, and system, and lots of amiable psycho-noodling about flow. (Deming also refers a lot to Saint Paul’s notion of the Mystical Body, which becomes in TQM an exemplary model of corporate structure.) Now I don’t know if or how the parish council intends to actually use this stuff, but I think it suggests two things. Given opportunity by the priest shortage and legitimation by Vatican II, the professional-managerial laity now possesses a wrestler’s hold on the clerical imagination. Moreover, the laity who will be inheriting even more of the real power in the U.S. Catholic church are well-schooled in the therapeutic, increasingly “spiritualized” culture of corporate life.
Ratios are not raw numbers. Traditionalist communities have excellent ratio to priest numbers because they don't have that much laity by raw numbers. My understanding is that those attending parishes with alternative liturgies are fractions of the current missal in most dioceses.
Traditionalism attracts a certain kind of priest, as the liturgy is in the uppermost thoughts of most in attendance. How willing that sort of priest is to cope with large congregations, the ability of traditionalism to attract anyone beyond a certain mindset, or the ability keep their cradles seems to always go woefully undiscussed. I suspect if analysis done with an open mind, there would be discovery that traditionalism is not the "secret sauce" to Church growth. Tiny congregations that get slightly bigger for short while have fantastic rate of growth. But nobody every publishes something like "We had 300 parishioner congregation and made it to 350 in 2 years, and then it leveled off because we lost 2 big families over those two years." It's a fantastic percentage of growth over 2 years, but no one would think it's the future if they saw raw numbers.
Vatican II removed Confession as a requirement for the Eucharist. By my understanding, that requirement was only implemented at Vatican I. Catholics appear unique in a relatively modern urging each other to frequent confession for venial sins. We don't need priests to absolve our venial sins. All that's required is to say a Confiteor, or the Fatima prayer, or even the Our Father. We can get spiritual advising from laity, which works when the laity is large compared to priests. Save Confession for mortal sins and the recommended Church dosage and suddenly our priests can get some sleep again.
Unfortunately, the priest shortage is already here. It's not a future problem. How it's being filled is by missionary priests from where arguing about Vatican II isn't even on the radar. Our new pastor from Africa, for whom English appears to be a 3rd language, has slightly reduced the Latin in our current missal. We're already having language barriers anyway so it's not helpful.
In that, traditionalism as it presents in the US, is a luxury set of ideals. People will have to drive long distance for *any* Mass, not just their preferred one as this continues on. Missionary priests to the West probably aren't have much sympathy to the faithful who have some bizarre need to confession the same venial sins frequently or to move a language that nobody in the room understands. Many of our missionary priests come from places where shoes for all the children in the room are not a given. The relentless focus on production values in the liturgy by the traditionalist communities will be rightly seen as a product of wealth, not a necessary spiritual element.
Unfortunately, the complaints in the middle of the article are largely "But, I can't just talk to the priest and get an end run around the rules meant to deal with volume." Those rules have existed as long as I can remember, and I go to small parish now. Maybe if you're used to the tiny traditionalist communities, sure, you'd know something different. However, most of the those are not dealing with the numbers of the closest small parish up the street. Yes, it's modern beucracry and it stinks. It stinks for the priests, too, although God willing they can find community with their brothers. We can offer it up to God as our path to sainthood. If the worst thing that happens on my way to Heaven was some paperwork, I would have had a pretty nice life.
Thank you for the data crunching! Very interesting food for thought. Not to nit pick your numbers, but, do you have any indication on the parishes to priest ratio? I come from a rural area where, generally speaking, most priests oversee 2-3 church’s often times far apart. Another oddity is that these parishes are generally smaller so your priest to parishioner numbers may look phenomenal while in reality you have small and shrinking church’s being pit stopped by priests.
I have heard similar things in urban areas that have undergone mergers where 2-3 parishes get consolidated and put under one priest.