Last month I put up a couple of posts (here and here) regarding the surge in vocations in the Diocese of Wichita. This is borne out by the fact that this diocese of just 120,000 Catholics currently has 46 men studying for the priesthood.
This was preceded by a post last May reporting on a surge in ordinations in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, which presently has 120 men in formation.
Now a couple of hundred miles to the northeast of Wichita the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and the Diocese of Kansas City - St. Joseph are also reporting impressive upticks in their numbers of seminarians.
According to The Catholic Key the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, with 200,000 Catholics, has 21 men in formation while its neighbor, the Diocese of Kansas City - St. Joseph has 26 men out of its total Catholic population of 144,000 studying for the priesthood.
To put this in perspective, here in DOR we have about 350,000 Catholics and just 6 seminarians, 5 of whom entered formation last fall, a development Bishop Clark has called "encouraging."
Seminarians per 100,000 Catholics
Since these dioceses vary widely in their numbers of Catholics the only instructive way to compare them is by looking at their numbers of seminarians per 100,000 Catholics:
Perhaps before closing another parish due to a lack of priests, Bishop Clark would like to explain to his flock why DOR is doing so poorly relative to these dioceses in attracting men to the priesthood?
3 comments:
We're putting too much effort in trying to cope with the problem (closing churches, installing pastoral administrators, forming clusters) rather than trying to rectify the problem (encourage vocations).
~Dr. K
it's said that a sign of insanity is when you keep doing the same thing that doesn't work over and over again. I think that isn't too far off from what we have seen in the DOR.
CPT Tom,
Unless of Bishop Clark's goal is to re-invent and re-imagine his diocese into his own disordered image. In that case doing the same thing over and over is working just fine.
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