If you haven’t heard of Substack before now, let me remedy that. It’s an independent writers’ online platform that’s replaced blogs and vlogs from the olden days.
It hosts some excellent Catholic opinion writers who share their work for free or for a modest fee. I recently read an article called ‘We Must Build: recovering Catholic geography’ by Andrew Warfield. It’s about the demographic collapse of the church in the US, based on hard numbers.
Numbers and hard data really matter. That’s why the work of our National Centre for Pastoral Research is so important. Otherwise, we risk making stupid decisions about the future of the church that are based on anecdotes and whoever has the loudest voice in the room.
Warfield found what I had already found in the Catholics in Australia 2022 study and published in my book Witness: the Future Catholic Church in Australia (2025). Bottom line? There is no vocations crisis. Ordination rates have simply fallen at the same time as the Mass-going Catholic rate.
Warfield found that in the US, the ratio of priests to Mass-going Catholics is around one priest for every 860 Mass-goers. This is just two well-attended Sunday Masses.
In Australia it’s more like one priest for every 180 Mass-goers. We know – or at least we should know by now – that it’s not a clergy numbers problem, but a clergy distribution problem.
And in Australia, we’ve been really lucky because clergy numbers here have fallen much less sharply than our number of Mass-goers.
Ordination numbers are also rallying in Australia, even though the Mass-going Catholic numbers aren’t as responsive yet. We still need to wait for the 2026 National Count of Attendance data.
Warfield points out that the US has fewer ordinations than it used to because the seedbed of priestly vocations is the Mass-going Catholic family. Fewer Mass-going families is always going to equal fewer priests. But there is a notable exception to this.
It’s when you have a courageous bishop who openly promotes priestly vocations through a high-standard, rigorous and theologically conservative seminary formation program. Men will travel from all over the country to serve in that diocese.
These men would rather be well-formed priests in a diocese where they believe they will be actively supported by the bishop than priests closer to home where they suspect they won’t be.
This happened in Australia in the 1990s with Vianney College in Wagga, followed by reformed seminary programs in both Melbourne and Sydney.
It’s also happening all over the US right now. The darndest places with small Catholic populations are getting big seminary numbers. For example, there are 35 men in formation in the Diocese of Nashville, which has a Catholic population of under 100,000.
There are 68 men in formation for the Archdiocese of Atlanta, where Catholics make up just 16 per cent of the population. The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston in Texas has a Catholic population of around 1.7 million people and 62 seminarians. And the Diocese of Milwaukee, where Catholics make up 28 per cent of the population, has 85 men in formation.
In Australia today, the numbers are where you would expect to find them. The dioceses with the biggest Catholic populations – and highest rates of Mass attendance – have the most men in formation for the priesthood.
The Archdiocese of Sydney had 46 men in formation at the beginning of 2025, while Melbourne seems to have around 30 men in formation right now.
Perth punches above its weight because it counts the Neo-Catechumenate Way seminarians in its total, taking it up to around 20. But Warfield also found something I didn’t know, which was a decline in ordination numbers in the US before Vatican II.
Ordination rates lag behind Mass attendance rates. That’s because a Mass-going family raises a young man who then becomes a priest many years later.
The family may lapse later on, while he continues as a priest. He remains in the statistics, but they disappear. Or, as Warfield puts it, “As goes the ordination class of today, so went the laity nearly a decade ago.”
It looks like Mass attendance numbers in the US were also starting to fall before Vatican II. I struggled to find reliable Australian Mass attendance data before 1996, as it was mostly guesstimates.
However, the few bits of published data I found also showed low Mass attendance rates before Vatican II, which surprised me.
As I say, numbers matter. They mean that we may also need to revise some of our perceptions of the church in the West before Vatican II.
