The coming priest crunch

Comment: The Tablet is right: the bishops need to wake up to the problem. Their remedy: keep imbibing the liberal poison which has caused the problem - abolish clerical celibacy. But as the Pope has said, such solutions undermine the priesthood and make the problem worse.

From The Tablet, in part (2/5/09): There are expected to be 16 priests ordained for the dioceses of England and Wales this year. To sustain present numbers, there would need to be of the order of 70 priestly ordinations a year. Taking 19 as a recent annual average, and assuming

that they all move into parish ministry, the number of diocesan priests could drop from around 2,700 in 2005 to something like 650 35 years hence, a fall of more than 2,000 in the lifespan of an average priestly career. A Catholic Church in England and Wales with an average of 30 priests per diocese, which is what these figures would mean, is just not conceivable – unless of course the wholesale closure of parishes leads to a catastrophic drop in total Catholic numbers.