Why Priestly Life Looks Like a Miracle
About fifteen years ago, I began to investigate the state of vocations in the Church. What I found was sobering. At that time, in my own diocese, there was about one diocesan priest for every 3,000 Catholic men.
To an engineer like me, those numbers were staggering. If something happens only once in 3,000 tries, statisticians don’t call it normal — they call it an anomaly, an outlier, or even an error. The positive spin we use in the Church is “miracle.”
But think of what that means: if vocations really were chosen at random, it would take the equivalent of tossing a coin twelve times and having it come up heads every time before a man became a priest. If that actually happened, most of us would laugh, say it was a bum toss, and start over.
What if Priestly Vocations Were Realistic?
Just for the sake of discussion, I asked myself: what if one priestly vocation came from every 100 men? That’s still not a majority, but it’s at least in the realm of possibility.
In statistical terms, that would be like tossing seven coins and having them all land heads — odds of about 1 in 128. Far more likely than 1 in 3,000.
If we applied this across a parish or diocese, the numbers look very different:
- Assume people live about 83 years, or roughly 1,000 months.
- That means people are born and die at about the same rate: one born, one die, per 1,000 people each month.
- If a priest’s ministry spans half his life, then at any given time there whould be 1 priest for every 200 men.
- With half the Church being women, that would mean 1 priest for every 400 Catholics.
- There would be every year 1 new priest for every 16,000 Catholics.
Take a parish of 2,000 families — say 5,2000 parishioners. By this ratio, we should have 12 to 13 priests in that one parish. And it would produce roughly 1 new priest vocation every 3. years. (16,000 / 5,000)
Take my diocese, with about 1.6 million Catholics. By this measure, we should have 4,000 priests. And we should have about 100 men becoming new priests every year.
The reality, of course, is nowhere near that.
A Sobering Comparison
We treat marriage very differently. Even with falling rates, still around half of people marry. When it drops, we call it a tragedy.
But imagine if marriage happened at the same rate as priesthood — once in 3,000. Would we even call it a “vocation,” or just a statistical accident?
That is the dilemma with vocations today. By the numbers, the priesthood no longer looks like a reasonable life option for Catholic men. It looks like winning the lottery.
And yet, the Church depends on it.
To be continued: In the next reflection, I’ll share how I asked myself: what if we replaced the seven coin tosses with seven questions? If a man could answer “yes” to all seven, maybe he should seriously consider a consecrated vocation.
Seized by Christ 