The Invisible Vocations Crisis

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 …