Word: schoenherr
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fewer and fewer men, says Richard Schoenherr, a former priest, now married and a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Last year he coauthored a book called Full Pews and Empty Altars. By his projections, the number of active diocesan priests in the U.S., which stood at 35,000 in 1966, will have dropped 40%, to 21,000, 10 years from now. Schoenherr blames the shortage on mandatory celibacy, a long-standing discipline within church law that John Paul has refused to reconsider. After surveying male Catholic students in 1985, Dean Hoge, a sociology professor...
...Richard Schoenherr, of the University of Wisconsin, and his former student Lawrence Young, now at Brigham Young University, released the results of a six-year study of the trends for clergy in 86 dioceses. The 163-page report, titled The Catholic Priest in the U.S., which was prepared for the U.S. bishops' conference, makes a gloomy assessment: if current directions are not reversed, by the year 2005 there will be 74 million Catholics and fewer than 34,000 priests, or one priest for every 2,200 parishioners. The causes for the continued decline: fewer and fewer men are finding...
...hierarchy has been appointing lay people, nuns and ordained deacons to take charge of parishes that lack priests. And last November Catholic bishops approved rites for Sunday worship that can be led by nonordained parish leaders in priestless congregations. To Schoenherr, a former priest, such measures are no more than stopgaps. As he sees it, the chief problem is celibacy. Eventually, he maintains, the church "will have to accept the ordination of married men in order to recruit and retain." But that is not likely to happen any time soon. Although a majority of American Catholics believe that priests ought...