Catholic Priests in the United States: Increasingly Conservative and More Pessimistic

Brad Vermurlen at Public Discourse.

"The new Survey of American Catholic Priests was largely modeled after the 2002 [Los Angeles Times] survey. Replicating its questions verbatim allows researchers to assess changes over the intervening years. The survey was first fielded in late 2020 to an email list of priests derived from the Official Catholic Directory, and it was disseminated again in early 2021 to a different email list from a Catholic non-profit organization. Priests from the two email lists reveal findings that are reassuringly similar. The two sampling frames essentially provide a statistical validity check on each other. We therefore combined responding priests from the two email lists into a single dataset, producing a final sample size of 1,036 Catholic priests, including both diocesan and religious."

It does seem that as the years go by I can get an ever closer parking space for Sunday Mass.