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By Luke Larson, National Catholic Register,
Luke Larson is a native of Saint Paul, Minnesota currently wrorking in Washington, DC. His background includes research work at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest, Hungay, 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
The Register analyzed data on ordinations collected by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
In a 2008 address in Washington, D.C., Pope Benedict told the U.S. bishops that “the ability to cultivate vocations to the priesthood and the religious life is a sure sign of the health of a local Church.”
By Benedict’s metric, some American dioceses are thriving today, producing lots of priestly vocations from holy families, schools and parishes. Others are struggling.
To get a concrete measure of this, the Register analyzed data on ordinations collected by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). CARA compiled numbers from the Official Catholic Directory, an annual report that collects official data from each diocese on total Catholic population, ordinations and other statistics. …
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