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Joe unpacks a new article that evaluated the “spiritual fruitfulness” of all the dioceses in the US. The results will surprise you!
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to take a deep dive in the numbers to see where we find America’s most fruitful diocese, where we find America’s least fruitful diocese and why? Now, if you know me, you might’ve noticed by now on Thursdays, I like to do a longer episode, and I often like to do a little bit of a deep dive. Sometimes it’s on the Bible or theology or philosophy or spirituality, and sometimes it’s just on data.
And I like seeing how the numbers play out. I think everybody has kind of a vibe for what works and what doesn’t work in the church. And it’s easy to assume your anecdotal experience of like, man, we did this thing in my parish and it was amazing, or we did that and it really annoyed me and to kind of universalize that. And so to check my own biases and hopefully yours as well, I like to occasionally step back and to say, okay, but what do we know about the big picture? What do we know about the numbers? And so to that end, I’m really pleased that recently JJ Ziegler and Catholic World Report came out with a thing that just crunches the numbers. So there’s something called the official Catholic directory, and it reports things like number of baptism, number of weddings, number of seminarians, that sort of thing. So Ziegler compiles all of that and then reaches out to the diocese that didn’t have complete data and then puts together a chart measuring how spiritually fruitful each diocese is. Now, obviously, what do we mean by spiritually fruitful? How does one measure that in the ultimate sense, we’re not going to be able to measure it perfectly because the best kind of fruit is somewhat invisible.
It would be wonderful to have a chart that just said, here are the number of saints per capita being produced by every diocese. Here’s the percentage of the Catholics in this diocese that are going to heaven, and here are those who are saints because of the diocesan culture compared to these other ones that maybe are saints in spite of the diocesan culture. Here are the initiatives that help get people to heaven. Here are the ones that don’t, but unfortunately this side of heaven, we just don’t have that data set. And so we have to make our best guesses. We have to do our best to figure out how effective different programs are, how effective different ministries are, how effective different diocesan cultures are. So to that end, Ziegler points to four stats which are weighted equally for these purposes, you could decide for yourself, you think one of these is more important than the other three, but in terms of just the ranking of the different diocese in the us, the following four are rated.
So per capita based on the Catholic population, not the overall population of your diocese. Maybe you’ve got a diocese of a million people, of which 200,000 are Catholics. It would just be out of that 200,000, how many seminarians, how many Catholic weddings, how many babies getting baptized, and how many other people are being brought into the church? That’s going to be conversions. That number’s also going to technically include kids who aren’t babies who are brought into the church later. So if you’ve got RCIC or OCIC where it’s RCIA, but for kids, anything like that, that’s all going to be in that fourth category. But the basic idea is do you have a culture where it’s producing priests and seminarians where people are getting married in the church and having babies and baptizing those babies and converting other people and bringing them into the church? If you can say yes to those things, that sounds pretty spiritually healthy if you’re saying no to those things, that doesn’t sound spiritually healthy.
In fact, for three of these, I think it’s pretty obvious that these are kind of fatal. If you can’t say yes, if you’re not converting people, if you’re not baptizing your kids, if you’re not even getting married in the church, then there’s no future of the church. This is also true in maybe a somewhat less obvious way in terms of priests and seminarians, but as Benedict the 16th warned the American bishops back in 2008, let us be quite frank, the ability to cultivate vocations to the priesthood and the religious life is a sure sign of the health of a local church. There’s no room for complacency in this regard. So at diocese that even if you have weddings and baptisms, if you are not also producing vocations to the priesthood and you’re just constantly relying on people outside the diocese to take care of your diocese, that’s a sign that there’s something spiritually going wrong.
There’s a deficiency there that needs to be addressed. So when you look at those four things, when you look at the ratio of seminarians of Catholic weddings, of infant baptisms and non infant baptisms and people coming into the church, what we find are honestly kind of shocking levels of variation, and I think this is worth pointing out for a really simple reason. Well, two reasons. One, because when we talk about the state of the American church, some people are way more optimistic than others. Some people are way more pessimistic, but when you actually look at the numbers and you’re like, oh yeah, some of you’re living in much better diocese than other people, it kind of makes sense. I am very white pilled about the future of the church, but as I’m looking at the numbers, I’m like, my diocese is doing a lot of things right, and the diocese I’m near are also doing a lot of things right, and they’re bearing a lot of spiritual fruit.
So of course I’m like, this doesn’t look that bad you guys. But other people, sometimes the people commenting are in places where the situation is way more dire and they don’t have the act together and they don’t have any kind of plan to bear any serious spiritual fruit. And so this could be one of those things where based on where you are, you’re going to see some things that impact how you imagine the church globally or nationally, and it’s maybe just more like the church in your region positively or negatively. But second, the second reason I think this regional variations matter is when you see the variations this big, this should cause us to pay attention. This should cause us to say, hold up. What’s going on? What is diocese A doing? Well, the diocese B is not, what do we need to learn from all this? Because if you had two different businesses in the same field and one of them is producing 30 times the revenue or 30 times the profit as another one delivering the same product, you would say, okay, A has cracked the code in a way that B hasn’t. So when we look at the diocese, what do we see? Well, let’s start with the ratio of ton seminarians into Catholic. What percentage of your Catholics are entering diocese in seminary?
In the diocese of Rapid City, which ranked first, you have a diocesan seminarian for every 1900 Catholics. Now, obviously, not all of those guys are going to go on to become priests, but that by itself is a pretty cozy ratio. You could have a situation where God forbid there’s some kind of horrible accident that wipes out all of the priests in Rapid City and just the bishops remained and he confirms ordains all of his seminarians. He would still not be in a horrible situation in terms of the sheer ratio of priests to Catholics because one priest in 1900 Catholics is what many parishes deal with on a regular basis. So this would be, if you think about it this way, if you think about an ordinary, I don’t know the exact, I got to be very clear. I don’t know the exact size of an ordinary parish around these parts.
The idea of having 2000 people in a parish is not insane. So this would be one seminarian for every 2000 person parish basically. In contrast, the diocese of Fairbanks is in Alaska and has no seminarians. I think that’s pretty forgivable. It’s not a huge or super populated diocese or I guess it is huge, but it’s not super populated. But the Diocese of Brownsville, which we’re going to take a closer look at, has only one seminarian for every 169,933 Catholics. Now, you can survive with a newly ordained priest for every 1900 Catholics. You can be doing pretty well, particularly since there’s no media striking all the priests. And so that’s a pretty extremely manageable ratio. But one seminarian for every 169,933 Catholics, that’s not manageable at all. And so it means several things. Number one, that a Catholic in rapid city is 89 times, excuse me, more likely to become a octan seminarian than a Catholic in the Diocese of Brownsville. And we’re going to want to take a closer look and say, why? What’s going on there?
Obviously, some of that can have to do with things like demographics because not everyone can become a dialysis seminar, and it’s only men, realistically, it’s men of a certain age. So you can have a few things that are confounding factor slightly, but not an 89 times kind of slightly. That’s a huge difference that we’re going to have to take a careful look at. That’s what I mean when I say these are some enormous differences, and you might just imagine, oh, this is a fluke. There’s only a handful of seminarians and a small diocese, and so you gain one one year, you lose one that’s going to throw off the numbers in terms of a per capita ratio. I hear all of that. That’s not going to come close to being an adequate explanation of the variations we find or how predictable these variations are. You can map ’em and figure out where you’re going to find healthy and unhealthy diocese.
So that’s the first thing. Diocese and seminarians, the second infant baptism in Nashville, which we’re also going to take a closer look at. You’ve got one baby being baptized for every 48 Catholics every year. This is fantastic. And contrast diocese of Lubbock, another Texas diocese, we’ll talk about it a little bit. You have only one infant baptism for every 603 Catholics, so that’s a red flag because it means that there’s more than 12 times more infant baptisms per capita in Nashville. Some of that, again, you can say maybe demographically different parts of the country, people have more kids, they get married younger, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But as Ziegler points out, you can’t actually explain away these differences that easily because the differences in infant baptism rates are actually much bigger than the differences in things like birth rates. So the obvious takeaway is babies being born in some parts of the country, two Catholic families are way less likely to get baptized than babies born to Catholic families in other parts of the country. This points to something pretty important about how different Catholic cultures in the US are doing The third criterion still un baptism. What about non infants entering the church, kids getting baptized, people getting confirmed, et cetera?
Diocese of Raleigh has one convert defined this way for every 71 Catholics, Newark, New Jersey, one convert for every 2,448 Catholics. So if you’ve got a parish of roughly 2,500 people, you could expect if you’re in Newark, to have one person being received into the church at Easter, that same church, 2,500 people, if it’s in Raleigh, you can expect 34, 35 people to be received into the church at Easter. It’s an enormous difference. I mean, if you went to those two Easter vigils, you would immediately come away thinking like, okay, one of these places is doing a lot better than the other one is because that is a huge glaring stat, and that’s not some weird fluke. That’s their overall average. It isn’t like, oh, that’s the one weird parish. It’s like, no, no, that’s their actual rate. The rates are that far apart.
What about marriage? Solan, Kansas? There is one wedding for every 178 Catholics. That’s 15 times better than in the diocese of Lubbock where there’s one Catholic wedding for every 2,722 Catholics. Now, if you think about how many people are getting married, that suggests that a ton of people are getting married every year without even bothering to have a wedding in the church. That shows a very stark institutional, if you think about the whole cycle of how people join the church or become lukewarm or leave the church, there’s a lot of people who aren’t practicing in the full sense. They’re not regular mass goers. They don’t believe everything the church believes. They don’t follow church teaching, but they have enough of a connection that they still want get married in the Catholic church. They still want to baptize their kids maybe to have a place like what Lubbock apparently has, where there’s one wedding for every 2,722 Catholics suggests that you have a lot of people who aren’t even that lukewarm. They’re not even that connected. That’s a problem.
And once again, you can’t reduce that to the fact that some populations are younger, you have higher marriage rates. That’s all true state by state. You’re going to find differences and the age people get married at how frequently people get married, all of that stuff. All that’s true. That doesn’t come close to accounting for the level of difference between these. Okay, so I’ve mentioned that there are some regional patterns that jump out. So let’s look at, excuse me, the 20th healthiest diocese, and then we’ll look at the 20th, the 20 least healthy Diocese. Ziegler points out that there are several Midwestern and southern states where every diocese in the state has above average fruitfulness. And sure enough, as you go through the list, I just made a chart looking at a map of all of the different diocese in the US and I highlighted in yellow the top 20.
You’ve got the Diocese of Nashville and Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Wichita, Kansas, Savannah, Georgia, Knoxville, Tennessee. Let’s see, Eastern Tennessee, diocese, Birmingham, Alabama, grand Island, Nebraska, Salina, Kansas, Indianapolis, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee. My own Kansas City, St. Joseph. That’s where I’m recording this right now. Rapid City, South Dakota, that’s the western half of South Dakota, Lexington, that is Kentucky, the eastern edge of Kentucky, Jefferson City, Missouri, Evansville, Indiana, Jackson, Mississippi, Amarillo, Texas, Kansas City, and Kansas, which is the diocese next door to me, Fort Wayne, south Bend, Indiana, and then Bismarck, North Dakota. Now, a couple things jumped out to me. First is if you look at the map, there’s a pretty strict western wall. There’s nothing to the west of Nebraska in terms of the most spiritually healthy diocese. There’s nothing northeast of Kentucky. So you see some obvious places where you don’t find the greatest spiritual growth. It’s rather clustered around the Midwest and the South.
To put it another way, almost all of those diocese are in the central time zone. In fact, I believe every diocese is either entirely or partially in central time zone. A couple of the diocese like in Western South Dakota and Western Nebraska are split. They have, and actually Western Kansas Salina is like this as well, where you have counties that are in mountain time, but all of them are at least partially either in central time or completely in central time, or at least are a diocese away from central time zone. I believe that’s true of all of them. The only one I’m not a hundred percent sure of is in the case of Eastern Kentucky. But either way, that says a lot, only about a quarter of the US population lives in central time zone, so that a hundred percent of the spiritually healthy diocese are in or very close to central time zone seems very significant.
What about the least healthy diocese? So this is going to go from worst to least worst. So the worst in terms of the most spiritually unhealthy. And I want to be very clear as I’m doing this, my goal is not to attack any of these diocese as I think we’re going to see. A lot of these diocese are in tough for reasons nobody can easily control, including the bishop. And in fact, the bishop of the worst performing diocese, Brownsville Bishop Flores, just became the vice president of the U-S-C-C-B because he is by seemingly all accounts a very good bishop. He’s just been dealt a very difficult hand. So in terms of the diocese that we might just say are in the most trouble, Brownsville, the very bottom tip of Texas is in the worst spot, followed by El Paso, which is the western tip of Texas, followed by Norwich.
I probably am pronouncing that too much like a non-kin Connecticut tour. Las Vegas is the fourth worst. San Diego is fifth worst. Then Lubbock, Texas, Portland and Maine, New York, New York, Laredo, another of these Texas border diocese, Sacramento, California, Buffalo, New York, Providence, Rhode Island, San Antonio, Texas, Fort Worth, Texas, Rochester, New York, Erie, Pennsylvania, Uchin, New Jersey, Phoenix, Arizona, Gallup, New Mexico, and Corpus Christi, Texas. So all of these diocese that are struggling are ones that are either in the northeast or the southwest or Texas. And so it’s actually kind of striking that Amarillo is one of the healthiest diocese when so many of the other Texas diocese seem to be very clearly struggling. Emory is not just the top half, it’s in the top 20 of 175 diocese, so it’s basically 90th percentile. That’s pretty remarkable given that most of the diocese in Texas don’t seem to be having anything like that spiritual health, and several of them are in that, the bottom 10, 15% or so.
So what can we say about this? Well, as Ziegler says, all of the diocese in the Northeast and all of the diocese in Southern California have below average fruitfulness that whatever else may be true. There are some things that are much bigger problems than an individual bishop or individual diocese seems to be able to solve because we have these things where if it was just a matter of different Episcopal styles, you might imagine a really healthy diocese and expert to really unhealthy diocese, and we find all of New England, that eastern end of the Rust Belt, all of southern California, we find a lot of struggles. We also find a lot of struggles along the US Mexico border, and I think we’re going to get into maybe why that is in some ways, but I think you’re going to have all sorts of issues that might impact how effectively bishops can administer their diocese and minister to the people of those diocese.
But those are the situations that we find. Now, I want to compare two of these diocese. I want to compare Nashville, which is the middle diocese in Tennessee to Brownsville, which as I said is the southern tip of Texas. So let’s compare these two vs because Brownsville was the worst rated in terms of overall spiritual fruitfulness. Nashville is the best rated in terms of overall spiritual fruitfulness. And I think this is helpful to see because earlier when we were talking about you take the best in baptism, you take the best in weddings, et cetera, et cetera, it’s going to be a lot better than the worst in baptisms, the worst in weddings, et cetera, et cetera. That looks like you’re just cherry picking stats. You’re saying, look, on this one stat, this one diocese is doing way better than this other diocese. But if you compare Brownsville and Nashville as kind of the outliers, the two extremes, it’s not just one stat.
It’s a strong indication of two very different diocesan cultures. So Brownsville on his website said it said it has 72 parishes, 88 deaths and priests, and 11 Catholic schools serving a population of 1,189,529 people. Now significantly, Catholics make up about 85% of the population in Brownsville, which is the bottom four counties in Texas. It is extremely Catholic on the books. The only diocese that has a higher percentage of Catholics in the US is in Laredo, which is actually also ninth least spiritually fruitful. We mentioned that a moment ago. So we have these places that are down by the US Mexico border that are full of a lot of Catholics on paper, maybe they’re baptized Catholics, but you have every sign that they’re not effectively integrated into the Catholic life in a spiritually fruitful kind of way. So that’s what we find within the diocese of Brownsville.
They have five seminarians that’s at all levels of formation. Their poster looks like they have nine, but that’s the bishop, the auxiliary bishop, two vocation directors, and then five seminarians for a population over a million. In contrast, the diocese, Nashville has only about 90,000 Catholics. Now, Nashville is pretty big, but Catholics only make up about 3% of the population and vocation wise, instead of five people, they’ve got 35. But it’s not just vocations, I mean because just in terms of vocation, they’d be on par with something like Chicago. I think they have, if not the same, at least within one or two of a much bigger, one of the major monolithic behemoth kind of Catholic diocese. But it’s not just seminarians, it’s all sorts of things. So Brownsville, we already saw that it had 72 parishes. Nashville’s not that far behind. It’s got 53 parishes.
It also has three parish missions. I’m going to call it 56 for those purposes. It has 33. I know there’s a lot of numbers here. I’ll unpack all this in a minute. There’s 33 di in priests. Now, that’s actually a little misleading because there’s a lot of priests working in the diocese who aren’t diocesan. They’ve got 19 religious order priests and then they have another 12 priests who are on loan from outside the diocese, although they absolutely don’t need it compared to the rest of the country. They also have 23 Catholic schools. Remember, Brownsville is more than 13 times bigger and has 10, Nashville has 23, they’ve got 14 elementary schools. They’ve got two high schools listed on their website plus a Chesterton Academy that the diocese promotes on its website plus three independent Catholic schools, which the diocese also promotes on its website, plus they have a Catholic college, Aquinas College.
These numbers are stark, and maybe the easiest way to see how stark they are is just imagine for a minute a diocese called Nash Browns kind of like hash browns. You just combine Brownsville and Nashville and just say, okay, imagine for a minute they had a diocese the size of Brownsville. So 13.3 times larger, but the diocese has the same kind of spiritual fruitfulness of Nashville. And then I want to compare the imaginary diocese of Nash Browns to the real diocese of Brownsville, and what you’d see is Nash Browns would have 745 parishes instead of 72 to be at the level of intimacy of priest and parishioner to have that same level of not having super overcrowded parishes or parishes. Nobody goes to 745 parishes, but instead they have 72, you’d have 439 to Austin priests, but instead they’re 88. And again, remember that number is actually low because there’s way more priests working in Nashville because a lot of them are from outside the diocese or they’re religious order priests to be on par with the schools in Nashville.
Our imaginary diocese of Nash Browns would have to have 306 schools, but instead Brownsville has 10. And then in terms of seminarians, to have the same ratio of seminarians for Catholic population, Brownsville would need to have 466 seminarians and it only has five. Those are shocking disparities in my view. It’s not like they’re off by a handful here or there. So why are there these dramatic differences? That’s one of the things I want to explore. And again, one of the things that jumps out when you look at a map like this is, okay, these are places where you have a lot of historic Catholic populations that maybe aren’t super devoutly practicing the faith anymore. That’s going to be communities in New England where there used to be these big Catholic hubs and aren’t anymore. There’s also going to be some Latin American communities in the southwest.
I think all that’s true in a certain way. I think that’s maybe begging the question because the question is, well, why aren’t they? Another issue that struck me is places like Brownsville and Laredo, et cetera, these places down by the border that have a large portion of non-American born population. And in fact, this is one of the things Ziegler points out as well, that several of the nation’s least fruitful diocese are along the US Mexico border. But Ziegler points out that two border diocese, San Angelo and Las Cruces have above average fruitfulness. So it isn’t quite as simple as just saying, well, these are border diocese. They have poverty, they have a bunch of people they’re trying to minister to. But I mean, in fairness, I think that is one of the things that is going on here. If you have a situation where you have a migrant population or a transient population or people who didn’t grow up in the area, all of the things that make it harder to minister to people like that also make it less likely that you’re going to get a bunch of them to discern vocations to the priesthood or maybe even get their marriages regularized, et cetera, et cetera.
So there are a lot of pastoral challenges that I think the priest down there are dealing with and probably are just simply overwhelmed. Another factor I thought of but haven’t found any good evidence for is just like what is the overall political culture of the diocese? So I found a map showing the voting patterns of every Catholic majority county in the us. It did not seem clear to me in a very, just taking a look at the map kind of thing that there was any noticeable pattern in terms of voting Trump versus Harris, et cetera. And in fact, even as we’re talking about a diocese like Brownsville, Brownsville has switched on this. This is a fairly famous story for people who follow politics, but as I said, Brownsville is made up of four counties. Cameron Hildago, star and Willy and Star County is the most Latino or Hispanic county in the country, 97.7% of the population.
I mean, it is almost exclusive. I imagine there are parts of Mexico that are not that Hispanic 97.7%, and historically it had always voted solidly democratic. I mean going back more than 120 years, that changed in 2020 where Star County, which as recently as 2016 had voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, 79% to 19%, which as political points out is about the same margin. Trump lost Brooklyn. It’s that solidly democratic by 2024, they had flipped to vote for Trump, so they were a blue county. They’re now apparently a red county. I think they’re very worried about things like illegal immigration, and I don’t see any obvious signs that that’s doing anything in terms of vocational culture or overall sacramental culture. So again, I don’t want to say there’s no political connection at all or that the political environment or culture doesn’t have any bearing on the diocese.
I think that would be foolish to assume that. I don’t think you can draw a really simple map just saying, oh, it’s because of X or Y secular policies or the local politics or anything like that. I just don’t see that in the numbers. Maybe if you drill down far enough, you could find that. I would love to see more research on that, but I don’t see that. I do think there are a couple things we can take away. Number one is going to be to think small, and this is one of the things that Ziegler points out, and I want to kind of expand on this because Ziegler points out that some of the nation’s least fruitful diocese are based in large cities that a lot of large cities are really not doing great in terms of bearing spiritual fruit, whether it’s baptisms, weddings, vocations to the priesthood.
That’s not entirely true though because you have diocese in large cities like Indianapolis, which is in the 16th largest city in the us, Jacksonville’s in the 10th largest city. That’s part of the diocese of St. Augustine, which tied for 21st in terms of fruitfulness. I’m noticing as I say that that cutting the list off at 20 kept some East coast representation from making its way on there. So apologies to the oldest diocese in the country, diocese of St. Augustine and Florida, but that’s what we find that you have overall big Catholic cities are not doing well at all. There are big cities that aren’t big Catholic cities, though that distinction is important. We looked at Nashville, right? Nashville is not that small. The overall number of souls in Nashville is actually greater than Brownsville, but the Catholic population in Brownsville on paper is more than 13 times higher.
So you go from a place where Catholics are 3% of the population like Nashville to a place where they’re about 85% of the population like Brownsville. One of those can be called a Catholic area much more than the other one can. And you might assume if this is your first time interacting with a large Catholic diocese that a super Catholic place like Boston or Chicago or LA or something like that is going to be producing all this abundant spiritual fruit. And of course we find the exact opposite, and Ziegler says, some of the nation’s largest cities are located in fruitful diocese, but not a single diocese with more than 700,000 Catholics has above average fruitfulness. Think about that, that there is this strange paradox where once a city hits a certain threshold of the number of Catholics, they just don’t seem like they’re doing that well.
So there is a very confusing chart in Ziegler’s article. It took me a little bit to kind of parse out what all the dots meant, but it’s looking at the size of the diocese compared to the overall rank. So if you notice all of the dots that are above like a million or even above 700,000, although that is unfortunately not marked, they’re all on the right side. You want to be on the left side because the left side is the most spiritually fruitful. And you’ll notice everything on the left side are these small Catholic diocese. That doesn’t mean small like they’re in a rural area. It could be a large city that is only 5% Catholic, 3% Catholic, whatever else. But either way, this clearly seems to show we’re not doing a great job of managing the spiritual lives of hundreds of thousands of Catholics all at once.
As Ziegler points out, this is not that small diocese are universally doing well or something like that. There are diocese that are doing very well, diocese that are doing very poorly diocese that are doing very middle of the road among small diocese. So this isn’t really a story of small diocese at all. It’s rather a story that large diocese are in trouble. So if a large diocese is defined as having 700,000 Catholics or more, there are 24 diocese in the US that meet that criterion. None of them, not one is above average in spiritual fruitfulness. So we should be asking why. Now, Ziegler suggests it’s because the bishops and other Justin officials are inevitably more remote from individual Catholics than would be the case in a small or middle-sized diocese. I think that’s part of it, but I actually think there’s probably a whole series of things that are going on that are sort of a domino, because if you think about it in this way, it’s a lot harder to do anything that requires the approval of the bishop.
If you have to work through this process and you’re an anonymous person in a million Catholic diocese, there’s less oversight of the individual priest if there’s more priests and one bishop trying to manage everything. There’s just so many more ways an individual can slip through the cracks. One thing that I think we should have certainly taken away by now is that Catholics could learn a lot from Protestant churches. They often do a very good job, even if they have 20,000 people of saying, how do we make sure those people all feel connected? And the Catholic church simply has not matched this, has not figured out a way to make sure that in these large Catholic diocese that people feel connected to the institutional organizational church. This is what I mean when I say we need to think small. Now, there’s several ways you could do that.
One of the ways Ziegler kind of alludes to is you could break up large diocese that it sounds really cool to say you’re the bishop of a diocese of 2 million Catholics or whatever, but for the spiritual good of the people in your care, it would probably be better if there were several smaller diocese in that one metropolitan area. Now here, it might be instructive to compare the example of Italy to the us. Now, Italy is admittedly at the opposite extreme. Italy has 226 diocese. 41 of those are what are called in persona Episcopal, which just means that one bishop might oversee two different diocese, but nevertheless, 226 diocese, whereas the United States has only 194, and that I think includes the military archdiocese and the Eastern Red EP keys. And so maybe Italy has more diocese, and yet if you compare Italy and the US side by side, they are comically different where Italy is a small fraction of the size of the US and yet has more diocese, fewer Catholics, much smaller landmass, but way more diocese maybe an instructive comparison would just be to compare the similarly shaped California to Italy.
So California is about a third larger in terms of just geographic space. Italy has more Catholics, quite a few more. It has about four times as many. There’s about 48 million Italian Catholics. About 80% of Italians are Catholic, so about 48 million people in the country identify as Catholic compared to about 12 million people in California. So okay, smaller space, four times as many Catholics. You can imagine maybe it has four times as many diocese, but again, Italy has 226, California has 12. So that’s a pretty big difference. And it seems to me that one of the things that gets lost there, again, remember every Southern California diocese is struggling. If you are trying to oversee that many people and you have that many different issues and budgets and problems and everything else, it’s hard to manage those things well. And these are things that we believe in as Catholics.
We believe in principles like subsidiarity that problems get solved best the more local you are to the problem. But a lot of our diocese don’t look like that. They don’t look like we believe in subsidiarity. The whole reason we have diocese in the first place is we realized it would be a disaster if you had one bishop trying to run the entire church in America wouldn’t work at all. So one interesting solution is to break diocese up into smaller diocese. Now, most of you’re probably not the Pope. Most of you probably don’t have any say and whether to break diocese up. And in fact, even like the bishops in the US are more likely to talk about consolidating diocese and moving in exactly the opposite direction. But nevertheless, I think that there are ways of achieving that smaller, more intimate local feel to stop people from slipping through the cracks because I think that same thing that we find about the big diocese and the big all of that is also true even within the diocesan level.
Now, this I’m admittedly not going off of hard data. I’m going entirely off of anecdotal evidence and personal experience. When I was a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kansas City and Kansas, I was the, I’m 95% sure I was the only person in seminary for either the Missouri or Kansas side who had actually been born in the city of Kansas City, Missouri. Everyone else was from either outside of the diocese completely or much more likely from a suburb or a small town. And I think that there’s a lot that we can learn from that, that just as the large diocese may struggle to attract vocations, weddings, baptisms, and the small one has at least the chance to flourish within even the large diocese. You can form pockets of spiritual fruitfulness. You can have a parish or a community that’s really on fire. And paradoxically, even in some of the maybe worst run diocese, this can often be the case.
Here’s what I mean by that. Without naming any specific kind of Episcopal details or diocesan drama, there were certainly cases we’ll say in the past, either the 1970s and eighties where faithful priests would be basically exiled by their bishops to these small rural parishes where they wouldn’t have a large parish and the bishop wanted to limit the amount of damage father could do with his retrograde sort of theology or whatever else. And the great irony is faithful priests who gave themselves over to that rather than just being resentful or something who really said, this is a tremendous opportunity. We find places that are built up spiritually because of that, that even in a large diocese, you often have small parishes, you might have a big city, and the ton boundaries include all the surrounding suburbs and maybe some farmland and some rural parishes in the rest. In those places, you can often find real places of fruitfulness, and so you can build up a little bit of a Catholic renaissance on the ground, even in a large parish, in a large diocese, excuse me.
This is again, very much that pattern that we’re seeing that the Midwest and the South are doing very well. But I would suggest we could take a closer look because as we saw Catholic cities, cities that are overwhelmingly Catholic, those diocese are not doing well, but it’s not true that you don’t have some spiritually fruitful places that are just not overwhelmingly Catholic cities that are still large cities. So I’m switching articles here. This is the National Catholic Register looking at a different data set, but pointing to the same basic conclusion. They were just looking at ordinations to the priesthood here, so it’s less full, but it’s going to point us in the same direction. You’ll see a lot of the same colors in terms of places that are doing well, places that aren’t doing well. The top and bottom diocese sound very similar to the top and bottom diocese.
We saw the spiritual fruitfulness, but the very bottom of the chart is what I want to point out because there were five diocese that are in major metropolitan areas where the diocese is in an area where there’s a population over 2 million that still were doing very well in terms of ordination. Number one with Nashville, which we’ve already talked about. Number two, Kansas City, St. Joseph, my diocese number three, Kansas City, Kansas. That’s the diocese I was studying for, the priesthood for. I used to live there. Number four, Cincinnati, number five, Arlington, Virginia. I also used to live there. So in addition to the one we talked about, I’ve lived in three of the other four and can speak a little bit to some of the secret sauce. This isn’t going to be a perfect analysis by any stretch, but one thing that I’ve seen, because I travel across the country and I speak at a bunch of different places and I see how different diocese do things, one thing that I’ve observed pretty consistently is that the diocese that are doing the best typically have a way of connecting with their people in a very intentional sort of way, but not in a super bureaucratic sort of way.
So it’s not just the bishop’s going to try to meet with every individual Catholic or something like that. It’s that there is focused outreach where people get connected and involved, and particularly there’s a lot of ways where people can connect, like young adults can connect. Now, this is going to be really big for people getting to know their future spouse. It’s also going to be very big for so Catholic weddings and eventually the baptism of babies. It’s also going to be very big for connecting people who might be spiritually searching to a young and on fire Catholic community. So that’s going to help the adult convert numbers. It’s also going to be helpful for helping to form the kind of spiritual communities in which we find vocations flourishing, that as people get to connect with other young Catholic adults in roughly their same age range who are on fire for the Lord, that helps kindle the fire for themselves, and this bears spiritual fruit in all of the ways we’ve been looking at.
So here in Kansas City on the Missouri side, but now also on the Kansas side, there’s what’s called City on a hill, and they do things like this, no, every other month they get together at Boulevard Brewery and they have pizza and beer after mass. It’s that simple. There’s not a long talk. There’s not a big program. There’s not. It’s just pay 20 bucks and you can have pizza, you can have beer, you can get to meet some other people who are willing to go to mass, have pizza and beer. Pretty normal, pretty low level. You don’t have to be a theology major. A lot of this is people fresh out of college. You also have KC Underground. This is for people who maybe have more of a spiritual life already, and they can have prayer by candlelight with praise and worship music and confessions available.
They also have retreats and hiking trips and mission trips and men’s groups and women’s groups and a variety of different gatherings around the city for things like dinner and concerts and the like. And they also have several different sports leagues. They do dodgeball, kickball, softball, soccer, sand volleyball, flag football. Those are all leagues plus one-off events of bowling, cornhole, whiffle ball, indoor volleyball, and just a field day. I mean, they are having a field day. There’s so many things that they’re doing because look at what this might look very casual, and in one sense it is very casual. You don’t have to be super on fire or anything like this to be able to join. But that’s exactly the point. There’s a great level of intentionality of here are ways where people who might be new to town, who might be lukewarm in their faith, may not be practicing at all, can join up with some people where it’s like, well, sure, I like pizza, I like beer, I like playing dodgeball, whatever.
And they get connected with other people that has this incredible impact on their spiritual journey, whether they intend it to or not. The more you surround yourself with faithful people, the more likely it is you start to act in a faithful way. The same is true in reverse. Similarly, kind of diocese of Arlington has a lot of young adult kind of ministry stuff because look, Arlington, it’s just outside dc. You have a lot of young professionals who are working in the beltway or working in DC for a number of reasons, or any of the schools there in grad schools, et cetera. This is how I got connected there. I was in law school there and was end up living in Arlington, Virginia. And they do things like they’ve been doing theology on Tap for 25 years, and they do it at four different locations around the, and they bring in great speakers and they cover great topics, and they do all of this stuff.
And again, you’re in an Irish pub, you’re getting some food and some drink, you’re hearing a talk, but it’s pretty casual. And so I think about this in terms of just thinking small, that it’s very hard if you’re just saying, yeah, there’s 2 million Catholics in this diocese, and the vast majority of them are checked out and they don’t go to mass and they don’t baptize their babies and they’re not married in the church, and the problem is too big. But if you instead say, as a bishop, as a priest, as an individual Catholic, here’s this small community I can invest in or form and help it to bear some fruit, that’s where the problems start to get solved. That’s where you get these signs of spiritual fruit beginning to happen. Very last point, because I think it would be a shame not to at least mention it, this wasn’t in this data set, but I think if we’re going to tell the story about the spiritually fruitful and unfruitful diocese, we have to also think traditional that think small, think about community, think about bonding with people, think about connecting with the individual Catholics, but also there are several different things that seem to be helpful in terms of spiritual fruitfulness that should probably not be as controversial as they often are.
So Natalie Lindeman in Catholic Social Science Review had an article in 2024 pointing to the connection that we see with Eucharistic adoration, with parishes, genuflect, with access to the traditional Latin mass, people who go to Latin mass, people who lec, people who go to Eucharist, adoration, all this stuff. Unsurprisingly, these are connected with higher rates of believing in Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Now, that raises all kinds of causality questions, but in terms of just what you can do at the local level or the daan level, cultivating adoration, cultivating more liturgical tradition and reverence, and all of that does seem to support the kind of conditions in which that spiritual fruitfulness can happen. And I think it’s timely to at least mention the bishop of the Diocese of Charlotte just banned altar rails and banned, even freestanding kneeler so that people can’t kneel on a kneeler if they want to.
And yet, in the diocese of Charlotte, which prior to Bishop Martin’s arrival has actually done quite well, vocationally, et cetera, 75% of their current seminarians apparently this is from Brian Williams, 75% of their current seminarians come from parishes with altar rails. So again, just as you can look at the broad map and say, nationwide, what do we see in terms of the trajectories? It’s also probably helpful to look at the diocesan map and say, these parishes are consistently bearing spiritual fruit. These parishes maybe haven’t had a priestly vocation in 20 years. What’s the difference? What’s going on? And the more you dig into that, the more I think that you see a pretty clear picture emerge that promoting things like a traditional posture of reverence towards Christ and the Eucharist is really helpful, not only in getting people to believe in the Eucharist, but also in getting them to do things like want to join seminary.
And it has all of these red redoing effects in terms of spiritual fruitfulness. So I just think in terms of the big picture as we’re looking at this, we should think small, we should think traditionally. And the last thing I’d say for anyone listening is you can’t solve the problems in the global church. Maybe you’re in one of those churches in one of the local diocese where it’s really struggling, find a little patch a little corner that you can invest in and try to build that up. It’s great to do it online. I suggest that as well. But the more you can kind of find those places to help improve your local parish culture, your diocesan culture, you don’t have to solve everything. Well, the Teresa’s famous quote, well, ocean’s full of drops. Just be a drop. And that’s where the sea of change will happen. Alright, for Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.