There is a crisis of vocations in the Church.
We’re not talking about the crisis of priestly vocations, but the crisis of husbands and fathers in the vocation of marriage. And as this Sunday is Father’s Day in the United States and ninety-one other countries, what better time to address all the missing fathers?
Men are increasingly missing in all churches and across both single and married populations.
The Communio Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships conducted a nationwide survey of 19,000 Sunday church attendees in 112 Evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic congregations in 13 different states. They found that women make up 62 percent of Sunday church attendees. Among single divorced church goers, the gender gap is 77 percent women to 23 percent men. And among those who never married, there are 42 percent more women than men sitting inside of churches on Sunday.
And this matters.
It matters because the two biggest variables as to whether children will remain in the Church is whether their parents stay married, and whether their fathers are there in church alongside them.
Both of these categories are on the decline. More than 60 percent of churchgoers are women, and "over the last decade, less than half of all 17-year-olds reached their birthday with two, continuously married, biological parents in the home," according to another study.
The Communio study concluded that “the sharp and culturally disruptive decline in married fathers over the past 60 years appears to be driving the decline in active church participation.”
Other studies support these claims. A four-decade long study of 350 families and over 3,000 people across multiple generations led by sociologist Vern L. Bengtson of the University of Southern California set out to understand how religious practice was transmitted across generations. They found that:
“…for religious transmissions, having a close bond with one’s father matters even more than a close relationship with the mother. Clearly the quality of the child’s relationship with his or her father is important for the internalization of the parent’s religious tradition, beliefs, and practices.”
Further,
“Closeness to fathers matters more than closeness to mothers in religious transmission. Among Evangelical fathers, there is a 25-point difference in [the professed faith] similarity [between parent- child] for children who feel emotionally close to fathers compared to those who are not close; for Evangelical mothers the difference is just 1 percentage point. A similar pattern exists for Mainline and Catholics.”
This means that the quality of family life also matters. The stronger the family bonds the more likely the children are to remain in the Church throughout their lives.
We appreciate that all over the world, Catholic parishes offer pre-Cana counseling, workshops, or classes that are required of couples before they get married. The Church wants to make sure that young couples understand what they are getting into: not just a lifelong commitment to companionship come hell or high water, but a new kind of relationship with God.
But churches must also find ways to nurture healthy relationships within married life, and help foster healthy families. Pastors and church leaders must find effective tools to increase the health of marriages and families within the Church. Research by behavioral scientists has shown that as little as 8 hours of relationship skills education put into practice over the course of a year leads to lower divorce rates and better relationship satisfaction.
This need for relationship skills is one of the reasons we wrote Climbing the Seven Story Mountain and began this web site. We are trying to build on the skill set Dawna developed through years of education and training, and more than thirty years experience as a marriage and family counselor. But we are also focused on Catholic teachings about marriage because these are the ideas and concepts that served as guides and signposts (and sometimes flashing warning signals) in our own marriage, which as of this writing has lasted for over forty years.
And yes, there is also a crisis of priests in the US. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, released a report in June 2023, describing “a continuation of relatively slow long-term decline” in priestly vocations at the pre-theology and theology levels, falling from over 6,400 men in 1970 to 2,759 in the 2022-2023 academic year. That's a 43 percent decline.
But the same report showed that number of Catholic marriages declined by 70 percent, from 426,000 in 1970 to 132,000 in 2022. Meanwhile, the overall number of Catholics increased by over 20 million.
The crisis of priests is thus preceded by the crisis of husbands and fathers. The data is clear: Fewer fathers in the pews means fewer fathers celebrating at the altar.
Photo by cottonbro studio.
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