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Priestly ordinations within the Diocese of Bismarck June 2024. (photo: Courtesy photo / Bismarck Diocese)
By Luke Larson, National Catholic Register, July 27, 2025
Luke Larson is a native of Saint Paul, Minnesota currently working in Washington, DC. His background includes research work at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungary, teaching at a Catholic high school in Kisvárda, Hungary, and two years of seminary formation at the Saint Paul Seminary. He is a graduate of Minnesota State University.
In an era of declining vocations to the priesthood in America, the Diocese of Bismarck in North Dakota is helping lead the way to renewal.
Among all 175 dioceses in the United States, Bismarck has seen the highest rates of ordination in the country. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate — a Georgetown University research center that provides data on the Church in America — uses the official numbers from each diocese to provide a concrete statistic for measuring this: Catholics per recent diocesan ordination.
It shows which dioceses — relative to their Catholic populations — have produced the most priests from 2019 to 2023, the five most recent years in the data. The lower the number, the higher the rate of ordinations.
Measuring relative to the Catholic population is important because, while 15 ordinations during the five-year window would be low in a large diocese like Chicago with more than 2 million souls, it is very high for a diocese with just 60,000 faithful, like Bismarck. …
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