Where Did All the Catholics Go?
“The Christian family, which is truly a ‘domestic Church,’ has always offered and continues to offer favorable conditions for the birth of vocations. Since the reality of the Christian family is endangered nowadays, much importance should be given to pastoral work on behalf of the family, in order that the families themselves, generously accepting the gift of human life, may be ‘as it were, a first seminary’ in which children can acquire from the beginning an awareness of piety and prayer and love for the Church.”
― Pope St. John Paul II, Pastores Dabo Vobis, 1992
How does a diocese survive, when it is burying more people than it baptizes?
That’s the question raised in a sobering piece of data journalism published by The Pillar last week. As The Pillar reports, the Archdiocese of Detroit is preparing to close and merge parishes. As part of that process, it has published a detailed data workbook for every parish it operates. Analyst Brendan Hodge read through the numbers. They tell a stark story.
In 2019, the Archdiocese of Detroit recorded 1.2 funerals for every infant baptism. Of its 209 parishes, only 75 baptized more people than they buried. Forty-seven parishes have more than three funerals for every baptism. Seven parishes recorded no baptisms whatsoever. As the archdiocese’s own documents concede, “our diocese is growing older, not younger.”
As The Pillar notes, it would be easy to blame all this on Rust Belt decline – on shuttered factories, and families decamping for other states. The data say otherwise. The population within the archdiocese’s boundaries grew slightly between 2000 and 2024, from 4.3 million to 4.4 million. However, over the same period, the number of registered Catholics collapsed from 1.4 million to roughly 900,000.
On an average Sunday, about 139,000 Catholics attend Holy Mass in an archdiocese whose churches could seat nearly half a million – and attendance is falling by four percent a year.
Surveys generally report that 30 percent of American Catholics attend weekly Mass. Detroit’s actual headcounts put the figure at 14 to 17 percent of registered Catholics. Meanwhile, the archdiocese has averaged just four priestly ordinations per year since 2010. Barely half of its active priests are under 60, and it projects that the number of priests will shrink from 224 priests to 134 by 2034.
Detroit’s priests already celebrate nearly three Masses each per weekend. On current trends, that number heads toward five.
The financial arithmetic is no kinder. The average archdiocesan parish with fewer than 250 weekly Mass-goers ran a deficit last fiscal year, despite the fact that the faithful remnant in small parishes give considerably more per person than their counterparts in large ones.
Not Just the Archdiocese of Detroit
Unfortunately, this is not just a Detroit story.
Funerals now outnumber infant baptisms in 58 American dioceses. The Archdiocese of Detroit is simply the one that published its workbooks.
This spring, the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota, announced plans to merge its 131 parishes into just 48 parish groupings – a reduction of nearly two-thirds, unprecedented in Minnesota. The reason is familiar: St. Cloud’s Catholic population has fallen from a peak of 154,000 to about 110,000, and the number of priests fell from 189 in the 1960s to 81 today.
Dioceses from Pittsburgh to St. Louis have undergone wrenching restructurings of their own.
And in many of these dioceses, there are fewer and fewer priests to offer the sacraments. This year, 36 American dioceses did not have a single man scheduled for ordination to the priesthood. Not one.
Church leaders respond to all this with mergers, “right-sizing,” and strategic plans. Some of that is unavoidable. You cannot heat empty buildings with good intentions.
The Pillar summarized the task now facing dioceses across the Northeast and Midwest: “evangelizing the 85% of Catholics not typically attending Sunday Mass, and doing so with less: fewer church buildings, fewer priests, and less money.”
But the planning documents never quite get around to the fundamental question: where did all the Catholics go?
The answer, in large part, is painfully simple. They were never born.
Vocations Are Born in Intact Homes
Which brings me to the second document I want to draw your attention to this week: the annual report on the ordination class of 2026, prepared for the U.S. bishops by Georgetown’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Every year, CARA surveys the men about to be ordained to the priesthood. This year’s report contains findings that should be read in every chancery in America.
First: 88 percent of this year’s ordinands were raised by their married mother and father, living together. Ninety-seven percent were raised by their biological parents. Only 5 percent came from homes broken by separation or divorce. This is in a country where family breakdown has become epidemic.
Second, and even more striking: the average ordinand has three brothers and sisters. The typical American priest ordained this year, in other words, grew up in a family of four children, in a nation whose fertility rate has fallen to 1.57. One in ten ordinands came from a family of six or more children.
Over the past fifteen years, such large families have typically supplied about a fifth of all ordinands. This year it was one in ten. As the big Catholic family disappears, the pipeline that has quietly sustained the priesthood narrows with it.
The takeaway couldn’t be clearer. Vocations are born in homes where marriage is stable, prayer is normal, and children are welcomed in abundance. Fewer marriages and smaller families mean fewer priests. Fewer priests and fewer baptisms mean closed parishes. The Church’s future is being carried, disproportionately, by precisely the kind of family that our culture discourages and dismisses.
The Encyclical We Refused to Hear
It is fitting that we review these two documents this week, as we recently celebrated the anniversary of one of the most reviled, and important, encyclicals of the 20th century. July 25 marked 58 years since Pope St. Paul VI published Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the Church’s constant teaching on marriage and the transmission of life and warning, with astonishing precision, what would follow if the world embraced contraception.
In the concluding paragraphs of that encyclical, Pope St. Paul VI exhorted his fellow bishops:
We implore you, to give a lead to your priests who assist you in the sacred ministry, and to the faithful of your dioceses, and to devote yourselves with all zeal and without delay to safeguarding the holiness of marriage, in order to guide married life to its full human and Christian perfection. Consider this mission as one of your most urgent responsibilities at the present time (no. 30).
For nearly six decades, with heroic exceptions, the Holy Father’s exhortation has largely been ignored. The result is well known: Catholics contracept at nearly the same rate as their neighbors, and many have never once heard the Church’s teaching explained from the pulpit, much less proposed as a path to joy.
Pope St. John Paul II showed what such preaching sounds like. Speaking in Limerick during his 1979 pilgrimage to Ireland, he made the appeal directly:
Marriage must include openness to the gift of children. Generous openness to accept children from God as the gift to their love is the mark of the Christian couple. Respect the God-given cycle of life, for this respect is part of our respect for God himself, who created male and female, who created them in his own image, reflecting his own life-giving love in the patterns of their sexual being.
When Pope St. John Paul II spoke those words, upwards of ninety percent of Irish Catholics attended Sunday Mass – among the highest rates in the world. Ireland did not listen. Today, weekly attendance there has collapsed to roughly a third, the seminaries stand nearly empty, four dioceses have been amalgamated, with more anticipated, and Ireland has voted abortion and same-sex marriage into its constitution by referendum.
The Archdiocese of Detroit’s deserted pews are what it looks like, two generations on, when the message of Humanae vitae goes unpreached and unheeded.
Marriage & Family: The Wonderful Adventure
What the Church needs, far more than a better consolidation strategy, is a renewed, joyful, unembarrassed proclamation of the beauty of marriage and family life.
Sexuality, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death” (no. 2361). That total gift of self is naturally life-giving, and the homes built upon it are the “domestic church” – what the Church calls the “first and vital cell” of society, and the seedbed from which every other vocation springs.
Pope St. John Paul II compressed the whole matter into a single sentence in Familiaris Consortio: “The future of humanity passes by way of the family” (no. 86). So, we might add, does the future of the Church.
Pope Leo XIV understands this well. He has called the family “the cradle of the future of humanity.” And at a general audience last November he praised the “wonderful adventure” of motherhood and fatherhood, urging couples: “Do not be afraid to welcome and defend every child conceived. Proclaim and serve the Gospel of life. God is the lover of life. Therefore, always protect it with care and love.”
Dear Brother Priests: Preach Humanae Vitae
So let me say a word to my brother priests: preach Humanae Vitae. Preach it with confidence and compassion and trust your people with the whole truth. Pope St. Paul VI himself supplied the reason: “it is an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of Christ” (no. 29).
Renewal will also require marriage preparation that actually presents the Church’s teaching on contraception and the gift of natural family planning, rather than tiptoeing past it; homilies that treat Humanae Vitae as good news rather than an embarrassment; and pastors who publicly celebrate every new life and baptism. This, incidentally, is the work to which HLI has been dedicated for over fifty years, in more than one hundred countries: defending life by rebuilding the family.
And to every married couple reading this: the numbers from Detroit are grim, but you are the answer to them. Welcome life generously. Teach your children to pray, and do not be surprised when God calls one of them to His altar.
Let us pray, then, for the Archdiocese of Detroit and every diocese walking the hard road of consolidation – and let us pray still harder for a springtime of Catholic family life, so that the next generation of planners will face a very different problem: where to put all the children.
Empty cradles made the empty pews. With God’s grace, full cradles will fill them.
Human Life International
As president of Human Life International, Fr. Boquet is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having journeyed to nearly 90 countries on pro-life missions over the last decade. Father Boquet works with pro-life and family leaders in 116 counties that partner with HLI to proclaim and advance the Gospel of Life. Read his full bio here.
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