Graphic | Seminarians Preparing for Ordination | Ratio and Ranking

The following table (in three pages) ranks the dioceses of the United States on the basis of how many seminarians are preparing for ordination for the dioceses compared to the total number of Catholics in that diocese. The seminarian/ Catholic ratio balances out differences in size among dioceses and allows a more accurate comparison of the number of vocations between large and small dioceses.






The numbers of Catholics and diocesan seminarians are taken from the 2004 edition of The Official Catholic Directory (New Providence, NJ: P. J. Kenedy & Sons), with the following exceptions:

According to the 2004 Directory, the Archdiocese of Denver has 36 diocesan seminarians and 41 religious seminarians (compared to 78 diocesan seminarians in 2003). Vocation director Father Jeffery Wilborn says that the 2004 statistics are inaccurate: the Neocatechumenal Way seminarians, who are archdiocesan seminarians and will be ordained for the archdiocese, were likely misclassified as religious seminarians by the archdiocesan officials who reported the data to the Directory.

The 2004 Directory does not list complete diocesan seminarian data for the Dioceses of Des Moines, Juneau, Lake Charles, and Santa Rosa. Officials of these dioceses supplied the data that appears in this table.

The 2003 rankings are based upon statistics published in the 2003 edition of the Directory, with the exception of the Dioceses of Juneau, Lake Charles, and Spokane, for which the Directory printed incomplete or apparently contradictory seminarian data. Diocesan officials supplied the numbers of seminarians for these dioceses. Such errors may be the fault of the diocesan officials who submitted data to the Directory, and not the fault of the Directory’s publisher.

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"Priestly Vocations in America" | Part One | Part Two

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