The American Catholic Church is seeing a prolonged surge of conservative young priests, leaving the aging and far more liberal Vatican II generation with no replacements.
According to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America, of 3,500 priests ordained since 2020, “More than 80 percent of priests ordained since 2020 describe themselves as theologically ‘conservative/orthodox’ or ‘very conservative/orthodox.’” Foreign-born priests in the United States, a significant contingent due to the overall low number of ordinations in the U.S., were found to be significantly more liberal than their American counterparts.
However, perhaps most revealing, the study found that no priest ordained since 2020 described himself as “very progressive.” In addition, nearly all priests ordained in 2020 and afterward described themselves as politically moderate or conservative.
The findings represent an enormous shift in theological and political attitudes among the priesthood in the post-conciliar era. In the 1960s, nearly half of the priesthood that witnessed and oversaw the revolutionary changes in Vatican II aimed at “modernizing” the church described themselves as politically liberal—an even more significant percentage identified as theologically progressive.
As the Times puts it: “In the near future, in other words, the liberal Catholic priest could essentially be extinct in the United States. The shift toward more uniform conservatism puts the rising generations of priests increasingly at odds with secular culture, which has broadly moved to the left on questions of gender, sexuality, reproductive issues, and roles for women.”
Continue reading at Breitbart