Numbers of Religious Sisters in the U.S., Deb Burr, 13 April 2016Motivation and BackgroundCatholics in the pews often hear about the declining number of priests and religious in the United States.Recently, though, the issue rose to the forefront of my mind, when a priest friend of mine talked in detailabout various communities of sisters being combined due to their declining numbers, in order to poolresources.The main purpose of this report is to compare trends in overall numbers of priests and religious sisters inthe United States since 1965. For sisters, some comparisons will also be made among religious orders andacross some geographical locations where data was available. My original question about time trend waswhether Vatican II had an impact on the decline in number of religious sisters. The Vatican II Councilfrom 1962–1965 changed the way the Church views the world, and the way the world views the Church.Among other things, council documents stressed the interrelated roles of all members of the Church, laityas well as religious. Perhaps this new teaching caused fewer people to become sisters. Or, perhaps,changes in attitude that were occurring in the early 1960s led to both Vatican II and to decline of religiouscongregations. Although the observational data I report does not enable any conclusion about effect ofVatican II, I did find some research pointing to some real effects of the Council on particular religiouscommunities, which I will include in this report.Aims1 Compare numbers of priests and numbers of religious sisters in the US over time starting in 1965.2 Compare change over time in numbers of religious sisters for at least two different orders of sisters.3 Compare change over time in numbers of religious sisters for two or more cities or dioceses in theUS.Data SourcesAim 1:The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington, D.C. was started in response to statementsfrom the ecumenical council (Vatican II) (Gannon, 2014). The page, “Frequently Requested ChurchStatistics,” at cara.georgetown.edu/services site has two data links, one for United States DataOver Time and the other for World Data Over Time. The US data page has counts of priests and religioussisters (and more), every five years from 1965 to 2015. According to the FAQ at the CARA web site,the sources for the data are The Official Catholic Directory (OCD), the Vatican’s Annuarium StatisticumEcclesiae (ASE), and other CARA research and databases. The data for the U.S. includes only figuresfor the 195 dioceses or eparchies who belong to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Thisincludes the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and all U.S. military personnelstationed overseas.Data was entered from this web page manually into a spreadsheet for the eleven years with recorded datasince 1965, on the following variables: Year priests.dio number of diocesan priests per.active percent of diocesan priests who are active in ministry priests.rel number priests in religious orders1 sisters number of religious sisters parishes number of parishes pop.parish parish population, in millions, from survey pop.si self-identified Catholics, in millionsAims 2 and 3 I found data in a CARA Special Report Population Trends Among Religious Institutes ofWomen (Berrelleza et. al., 2014).Data AnalysisThe data is observational. The data for each year represented is a census count, not from a random sample.Therefore it isn’t necessary or appropriate to do inference from this data. A graph with two lines (or morelines, depending on how much data can be found on the subgroups of interest) over the years 1965 to2015 will be the main part of the analysis. Log transform may be used to make a better comparison, sincenumber of sisters was initially much higher than number of priests.The data file was read into R:> catholic > catholic> catholicYear priests.dio per.active priests.rel sisters parishes pop.parish pop.si1 1965 35925 94 22707 179954 17637 46.3 48.52 1970 37272 90 21920 160931 18224 47.9 51.03 1975 36005 88 22904 135225 18515 48.7 54.54 1980 35627 85 22771 126517 18794 50.5 56.85 1985 35052 84 22265 115386 19244 52.3 59.56 1990 34114 80 18010 102504 19620 55.7 62.47 1995 32349 76 16705 90809 19331 57.4 65.78 2000 30607 74 15092 79814 19236 59.9 71.79 2005 28094 70 13305 68634 18891 64.8 74.010 2010 27182 68 12811 57544 17958 65.6 74.611 2015 25868 66 11701 48546 17337 68.1 81.6Total number of priests (diocesan plus religious) is compared to number of religious sisters in a graph, asa count and also as log(count), the latter because the large difference in numbers of priest and religiousmade comparison of trend difficult on the original scale. Natural log was used because small changes ofbetween .25 and .25 in log base e correspond to percentage change in the original value; that is, a dropof .25 in the natural log of the count corresponds to a 25% decrease in the count.> priests.tot > y.limits > plot(Year,priests.tot,ylim=c(37000,180000),pch=1,ylab=)> lines(Year,sisters,ylim=c(37000,180000),pch=2,ylab=)> legend(2000,160000,c(priests,sisters),pch=1:2)> plot(Year,log(priests.tot),ylim=c(10,12.5),type=b,pch=2,ylab=log count)> lines(Year,log(sisters),ylim=c(10,12.5),type=b,pch=1,ylab=)> legend(2005,12.3,c(sisters,priests),pch=1:2)21970 1980 1990 2000 201050000 100000 150000YearNumbers of priests and religious sisters in the U.S.● sisterspriests1970 1980 1990 2000 201010.0 10.5 11.0 11.5 12.0 12.5Yearlog count● sisterspriestsThe change in the number of sisters is dramatic (from about 180,000 in 1965 to 48,500 in 2015) and dwarfsthe decrease in number of priests (from 58,600 to 38,000 in the same time period). The graph on the logscale shows a fairly constant 25% drop in number of sisters over each decade since 1965.3Discussion points In a follow-up discussion, my priest friend who originally motivated me to look at this data toldme that historically, there were a number of factors contributing to the peak in number of religioussisters in the 1950s and 1960s. In the U.S., many bishops recruited sisters from Europe and otherareas of the world during the early 1900s, going along with waves of immigration to the U.S. Womendidn’t have much role in the church outside of religious life, before the 1960s, and that has changedtremendously. The Berrellezza reference discusses effects of Vatican II on decline of a particular community whichtried to make changes in keeping with Vatican II but ran into conflict because of the attempt to get“up to date.” This reference gives a number of illustrations of particular communities which followedthe general pattern of decline, and also some communities which did not experience decline.ReferencesBerrelleza, Erick, Gautier, Mary L., and Gray, Mark M. (2014). Population Trends Among ReligiousInstitutes of Women, CARA Special Report, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. http://cara.georgetown.edu/Publications/WomenReligious.pdfGannon, Francis X. (2014). Bridging the Research Gap: CARA, Response to Vatican II. 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