Alison Girone
CV NEWS FEED // The New York Times this week published an article exploring trends in the younger generations of U.S. Catholic priests, who the article describes as “overwhelmingly conservative in their theology, their liturgical tastes and their politics.”
“Today’s young priests don’t see themselves as a conservative insurgency, but as part of a new generation who embrace difficult church teachings rather than soft-pedaling them in what they see as the misguided pursuit of big-tent evangelism,” wrote Times reporter Ruth Graham in the July 10 article.
Graham wrote that Fr. Zachary Galante, who was ordained a priest in May in Milwaukee, explained that priests in the 1970’s and 1980’s attempted to make the Church more approachable by softening expectations on morality and standards when attending Mass, for example.
Their approach, Graham continued, was to “[soften] expectations around everything from regular prayer to cohabitation before marriage to dressing nicely for Sunday Mass.” Fr. Galante pointed out that this approach did not yield the results initially hoped.
However, since the 1980s, every generation of U.S. priests “is noticeably more conservative than the one before it,” according to assistant professor of sociology Brad Vermulen, Graham wrote. Vermulen teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas, and has been researching these trends with his colleagues.
Graham highlighted that the Catholic Project, an initiative of Catholic University of America, surveyed 3,500 U.S.-born priests ordained since 2020, and found that more than 80% of them described themselves as theologically “conservative/orthodox” or “very conservative/orthodox.”
Graham added, “not a single surveyed priest who was ordained after 2020 described himself as ‘very progressive.’” Politically, the trends are about the same, she noted.
She also posited that liberal Catholic priests “could essentially be extinct in the United States” within a short amount of time.
CatholicVote reported on this possibility in November, after the Catholic Project published a report on the shrinking number of Catholic priests in the U.S. who consider themselves liberal.
Graham wrote, “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.”
The rise in U.S. priests’ conservatism will also cause shifts within the global and local Church, Graham wrote.
“Changing attitudes will reshape parish life, where priests choose topics for homilies and have discretion over matters like whether girls can volunteer as altar servers and lay people can assist in the distribution of Communion,” Graham wrote:
It will also influence the leadership ranks of the American church, which already has a global reputation for conservatism, and antagonism to Pope Francis’s more pastoral tone in leadership. That gap is poised to harden as current bishops retire and die.
Graham’s article for the Times comes about two months after another major news outlet, the Associated Press, published a similar, broader article about the increasing number of young Catholics in the U.S. who are following Church teaching and are drawn to traditional Catholicism.
