In obedience to St. Paul’s admonition to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), we note that FutureChurch.org has an interesting and potentially helpful statistics utility available on its site.
The data comes from the Official Catholic Directory and is a subset of what one would find in its annual issues. This limited data is available for every diocese, archdiocese and eparchy in the United States, but only for the years 1976, 1991, 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2009.
A couple of examples follow …
The utility may be found here.
Tags: Catholic Stats
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Lincoln had 109 seminarians in 2009?! If you count every DoR seminarian since Bishop Clark began in 1979, would this number even come close to 109?
Dr. K.,
66 of those seminarians are religious as opposed to diocesan. Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary (Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter) is located in the Diocese of Lincoln.
Still, 43 diocesan seminarians is nothing to sneeze at.
he’s given his explanation here. Whether that’s valid or not – you decide.
Well said, Anon. Well said.
It’s a recipe for failure that the Diocese of Rochester has perfected.
Is there a mis-print on the deacon stats in Rochester? 132 in 2001 to 5 in 2004? Then back up to 136 in 2006?
Interesting that Lincoln only has 3 permanent deacons versus Rochester’s 125+.
Good catch, BigE! I just checked my copy of the OCD and DOR had 134 Permanent Deacons in 2004.
AFAIK, OCD data is not available from the publisher in electronic format, meaning that anyone building a database like this needs to sit at a keyboard and transcribe the data by hand – a process that almost certainly guarantees errors will creep in.
Re Deacons: Lincoln does not have a permanent diaconate program, but I’ve never seen an explanation why this is so. (FWIW, DOL also has zero lay people running parishes.) Perhaps Bishop Bruskewitz (appointed in 1992) and his predecessor, Bishop Flavin (1967 – 1992), believe the diocese has enough priests to handle things.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the few PD’s Lincoln does have moved there from other dioceses.
@ Mike
From a number of blogs I’ve read it sounds like the Bishop there doesn’t endorse Permanent Deacons because:
1) He feels they have enough priests and thus don’t need any permanent deacons.
2) That having Permanent Deacons hurts the call to the Priesthood
A bit of a mis-guided understanding oround the theology of the Permanent Diaconate.
Here’s an interesting discussion: http://blog.beliefnet.com/deaconsbench/2008/10/The-leadership-of-our-diocese-is-not-supportive-of-the-permanent-diaconate.html
I actually am with Bp. Bruskewitz on this one. I’m not a huge fan of the permanent diaconate. The US has some absurdly high percentage of the world’s permanent deacons, which should tell us something.