• Catholics Concerned About Their Church Speak Out
    Awake!—1980 | September 22

    • Clerical Decrease

      Says L’Osservatore Romano of May 16, 1979: “We are faced with a sharp decrease in numbers [of seminary students in Italy]. The tendency began to manifest itself about 10 years ago and has maintained its trend up to the present. The phenomenon is part of a more general tendency characterizing the whole of Europe.”

      So for the past 10 years, according to the Vatican’s official newspaper, there has been a steady loss of candidates for the priesthood. Indeed, as the accompanying charts indicate, the decrease has been very great. In Italy only one third as many seminary students were enrolled in 1978 as in 1962! In France, ordinations of priests in 1974 were less than one third of what they had been in 1965!

      The Vatican paper points out: “The decrease in seminary attendance has caused a corresponding fall in the number of seminaries themselves. They numbered a total of 375 in 1970 against 259 in 1978. . . . From a peak of 918 [priests] ordained in 1966 [in Italy] we have reached a minimum of 384 new priests in 1978.”

      This situation is not confined to just a few European countries. According to the Italian newspaper La Stampa: “[World wide] it is ultimately calculated that between ’65 and ’75 at least forty thousand priests, including diocesan priests and those belonging to religious orders, abandoned the holy orders as well as twenty thousand nuns.”