A posting over at Amy’s on the subject of priest shortages brought forth dozens of comments, many on the theme famously expressed by Archbishop Curtiss that orthodox teaching and practice in a diocese encourage vocations. It’s a reasonable connection to make, but I have to admit that attempts to prove it using statistics haven’t worked.
An NOR article by Doug Tattershall arguing for the thesis actually gives numbers that show how weak it is: the top 20% of Mr. Tattershall’s list includes not only famously orthodox Lincoln and Fargo but also more liberal Greensburg, Mobile, Lexington, Steubenville (despite FUS), Raleigh, Charlotte, St. Augustine, and Crookston.
On the other side, staunch Cdl. O’Connor’s New York and Cdl. Law’s Boston are not near the top as we’d hope, but down near the bottom of the list, along with liberal Richmond, L.A., and Honolulu.
A similar statistical summary for a three-year period is available on-line at Petersnet; search for the author’s name, “Humm”, to find the lists of “Ordinations – Per Capita”. Daniel Humm’s breakdown of the dioceses by size gives us a clue: high-ranking Mobile, Lincoln, and Fargo are all small and largely rural dioceses; big NYC, BOS, Brooklyn, and LA are near the bottom. Is diocesan size itself the factor — in which case we’ll have an argument for breaking up the mega-dioceses — or is there something going on in cities that contributes to a low ordination rate?
If anybody out there has some geographical mapping software and would like to generate some graphics from the data, that might help us to figure it all out.