As Vatican statistics document yet another decline in the number of Catholic priests and seminarians, many Church officials seem determined to do everything apart from return to traditional practices, despite traditional orders seeing continued growth in vocations and attendance.
The latest official statistics for the Catholic Church released by the Vatican make for grim reading. True, the number of Catholics overall has grown, but at the same time, the number of priests and seminarians has continued to decline. In fact, the decline in the number of seminarians has continued unabated since it began in 2012.
There are only 106,495 seminarians globally as of 2023, down from 108,481 in 2022.1 The highest number of seminarians in recent years was in 2011, which saw 120,616 men preparing for the sacred priesthood.
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In fact, every year from 2021 has seen the new lowest record for number of seminarians since the Jubilee Year of 2000.
Priestly numbers have also dropped, though not quite in such drastic figures – but this is only a matter of time. A large number of parishes – many Catholics will surely be able to think of examples close to them – are served by aging priests in their late sixties, seventies and eighties.
As these clerics retire or go to meet their maker, such parishes will be left priestless, and the data show that there is no cohort of seminarians coming through to replace them. Germany – a nation whose Catholic news has been so dominated by the highly heterodox Synodal Way in recent years – is a prime example of this decline. Incredibly revealing statistics have highlighted a new record low for ordinations in the nation’s 27 dioceses – just 29 priests overall in 2024.
Germany’s trend of overall decline has been in place since 1962 when there were 557 ordinations. Since then, barring a few years of minor increases over the previous year, that number has continued to drop to the new low of 29, with some dioceses having no ordinations at all.
A notable increase in ordinations can be determined in Germany in the later eighties, as young men who entered seminary following Pope John Paul II’s election ascended to the altar. But since 1992, their ranks have persistently diminished.
In 2023, Irish Catholic bishops began a year of prayer for vocations, as the ancient national seminary of Maynooth housed just 21 men instead of the hundreds it was built for. Of the 26 dioceses in Ireland, 10 had no seminarians in formation, according to a September 2022 report by the Irish Catholic at the time.
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The downward spiral of Ireland’s vocations crisis has been noted by careful observers for many years. No fewer than eight diocesan seminaries have closed in Ireland since 1993 due to the steady erosion of the Catholic Faith and vocations across the island.
For more specific U.S. figures, the picture is equally dire. A recent study showed that only 16 of over 150 U.S. dioceses ordained enough priests to maintain their current levels of clergy. Considering the recorded decline in clergy numbers in recent years, maintaining the current figure is hardly a great achievement.
However, for the remaining U.S. Catholic dioceses, this equity was not even accomplished. The situation will only worsen soon, as the study also noted that dioceses surveyed “report that approximately 40% of their active priests are over the age of 60.” This average figure varied greatly, with one diocese reporting some 70% of priests were aged over 60-years old.
In the face of this obvious and unavoidable crisis, sensible Catholics might expect Church officials to look towards viable solutions, desperately aware of the need to change whatever has gone wrong, leading to such a dramatic drop in clergy.
But this, it seems, is not the case.
Just days ago, the Archdiocese of Chicago boasted of the liturgical modernism promoted by incumbent Cardinal Blase Cupich and how he made instituting female altar servers at his cathedral one of his earliest priorities in 2014. The Archdiocese is home to just under 2 million Catholics but has seen consistently low numbers of ordinations for the size of the Archdiocese: four men were ordained in 2024 and five in 2023, a point which commentators have been swift to highlight.
Church historians have widely documented the dramatic fall in priestly vocations and Church attendance in the years following the Second Vatican Council.
Whilst there were 58,000 priests in 1965 in America, there were only 45,000 in 2002 despite the population growth: there were also 1,575 ordinations in 1965, with only 450 in 2002.2
Though 75% of U.S. Catholics attended Mass weekly in 1955, that figure had dropped to 50% by the mid-nineties and had further dropped to 39% by 2014-2017.
Scholars in many countries have ably documented this explosive deterioration in the Faith. The Church, numerically, is in a sorry state.
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One of the very few signs of hope for the Church in recent years – in terms of signs of vitality – has been in the traditional Mass, or the Latin Mass as it is commonly known. The annual Latin Mass pilgrimage to Chartres in France has been perhaps the most visible testament to this of late. Populated chiefly by young people under 20, the three-day Pentecost weekend pilgrimage has gone from strength to strength, breaking attendance records in recent years. The 2024 iteration saw 18,000 people join.
Priestly Latin Mass groups have also recorded year-on-year records of new admissions to their seminaries, notwithstanding—and some argue even helped by—the Pope’s Latin Mass restrictions.
Young, traditional priests have recounted how, when preaching Catholic doctrine in its fullness, it is the wayward liberals who object—the same individuals who already implicitly reject much of Catholic teaching. Yet young families eager to live their Faith do not complain when Father actually proclaims the truth from the pulpit.
The young men drawn to these Latin Mass congregations and societies tend to defy the cultural norm: they are young, keen to adhere to a regimented lifestyle and rigorous training in all the aspects needed for a priestly life. But most importantly, it is these priests whose churches are seeing large families congregate around them, as the heterodox and uninspiring liturgical habits of many a parish that conforms to the modern world seem only to hemorrhage worshipers – thus visibly demonstrating where the practical future of the Church lies.
Despite this, as is well documented, Church officials appear determined to do anything but promote the traditional Mass and thus open the door to having many vocations and young families in the Church.
Expanding on why he ushered in sweeping restrictions on the traditional Mass, Pope Francis said that it was because “it is unhealthy for the liturgy to become ideology.” Devotion to the Latin Mass is a “nostalgic disease,” he said on another occasion.
Even though numerous scholars, theologians, liturgists and historians have pointed to the fact that the changes in liturgy and practice following Vatican II led to a mass decline in the Catholic Faith, Pope Francis recently attested that, in fact, the Church needed to continue in this same line. “We still need to fully implement Vatican II,” he wrote in his memoir, Hope.
Cardinal Gerhard Müller offered the closing Mass for the 2024 Chartres pilgrimage and recounted that “a senior representative of the Roman Dicastery for Divine Worship” was dismayed when he heard of the huge numbers of young pilgrims on the traditional Mass pilgrimage. Cdl. Müller said the un-named official “objected that this was by no means a cause for joy because Holy Mass was celebrated according to the old Extraordinary Latin rite.”
“The Church is in crisis, and families are rushing to this pilgrimage,” noted outgoing president Chartres Pilgrimage Jean des Tauriers last year. “They’re moving closer to the traditional rite precisely because of this crisis in the Church and to simply pass on the faith to their children.”
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Many priests of Latin Mass churches have attested to this in recent post-COVID years: Their congregations have doubled or tripled as people desirous of attending Mass desperately looked around for where they could still do so. For some, the fervor of the Latin Mass parishes attracted them by the simple fact that Mass was offered there. For others, the deciding factor was the ability to receive Holy Communion reverently on the tongue when many other churches were prohibiting the practice.
Evidence from every age proves that people are drawn to tradition, truth, beauty and reverence. This is now being witnessed once again with the gradual but determined resurgence of the traditional Mass against the dying out of the heterodox, liberal liturgies and parishes.
Michael Haynes is an English journalist based in Rome as part of the Holy See Press Corps, writing chiefly on LifeSiteNews and PerMariam.
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