代写Motivation留学生、Java/c++编程语言代写、代做Python设计

日期：2019-04-25 10:53

Numbers of Religious Sisters in the U.S., Deb Burr, 13 April 2016

Motivation and Background

Catholics in the pews often hear about the declining number of priests and religious in the United States.

Recently, though, the issue rose to the forefront of my mind, when a priest friend of mine talked in detail

about various communities of sisters being combined due to their declining numbers, in order to pool

resources.

The main purpose of this report is to compare trends in overall numbers of priests and religious sisters in

the United States since 1965. For sisters, some comparisons will also be made among religious orders and

across some geographical locations where data was available. My original question about time trend was

whether Vatican II had an impact on the decline in number of religious sisters. The Vatican II Council

from 1962–1965 changed the way the Church views the world, and the way the world views the Church.

Among other things, council documents stressed the interrelated roles of all members of the Church, laity

as well as religious. Perhaps this new teaching caused fewer people to become sisters. Or, perhaps,

changes in attitude that were occurring in the early 1960s led to both Vatican II and to decline of religious

congregations. Although the observational data I report does not enable any conclusion about effect of

Vatican II, I did find some research pointing to some real effects of the Council on particular religious

communities, which I will include in this report.

Aims

1 Compare numbers of priests and numbers of religious sisters in the US over time starting in 1965.

2 Compare change over time in numbers of religious sisters for at least two different orders of sisters.

3 Compare change over time in numbers of religious sisters for two or more cities or dioceses in the

US.

Data Sources

Aim 1:

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate in Washington, D.C. was started in response to statements

from the ecumenical council (Vatican II) (Gannon, 2014). The page, “Frequently Requested Church

Statistics,” at cara.georgetown.edu/services site has two data links, one for United States Data

Over Time and the other for World Data Over Time. The US data page has counts of priests and religious

sisters (and more), every five years from 1965 to 2015. According to the FAQ at the CARA web site,

the sources for the data are The Official Catholic Directory (OCD), the Vatican’s Annuarium Statisticum

Ecclesiae (ASE), and other CARA research and databases. The data for the U.S. includes only figures

for the 195 dioceses or eparchies who belong to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This

includes the 50 states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and all U.S. military personnel

stationed overseas.

Data was entered from this web page manually into a spreadsheet for the eleven years with recorded data

since 1965, on the following variables:

Year

priests.dio number of diocesan priests

per.active percent of diocesan priests who are active in ministry

priests.rel number priests in religious orders

1

sisters number of religious sisters

parishes number of parishes

pop.parish parish population, in millions, from survey

pop.si self-identified Catholics, in millions

Aims 2 and 3 I found data in a CARA Special Report Population Trends Among Religious Institutes of

Women (Berrelleza et. al., 2014).

Data Analysis

The data is observational. The data for each year represented is a census count, not from a random sample.

Therefore it isn’t necessary or appropriate to do inference from this data. A graph with two lines (or more

lines, depending on how much data can be found on the subgroups of interest) over the years 1965 to

2015 will be the main part of the analysis. Log transform may be used to make a better comparison, since

number of sisters was initially much higher than number of priests.

The data file was read into R:

> catholic <- read.csv("CatholicData.csv",header=TRUE)

> catholic

> catholic

Year priests.dio per.active priests.rel sisters parishes pop.parish pop.si

1 1965 35925 94 22707 179954 17637 46.3 48.5

2 1970 37272 90 21920 160931 18224 47.9 51.0

3 1975 36005 88 22904 135225 18515 48.7 54.5

4 1980 35627 85 22771 126517 18794 50.5 56.8

5 1985 35052 84 22265 115386 19244 52.3 59.5

6 1990 34114 80 18010 102504 19620 55.7 62.4

7 1995 32349 76 16705 90809 19331 57.4 65.7

8 2000 30607 74 15092 79814 19236 59.9 71.7

9 2005 28094 70 13305 68634 18891 64.8 74.0

10 2010 27182 68 12811 57544 17958 65.6 74.6

11 2015 25868 66 11701 48546 17337 68.1 81.6

Total number of priests (diocesan plus religious) is compared to number of religious sisters in a graph, as

a count and also as log(count), the latter because the large difference in numbers of priest and religious

made comparison of trend difficult on the original scale. Natural log was used because small changes of

between .25 and .25 in log base e correspond to percentage change in the original value; that is, a drop

of .25 in the natural log of the count corresponds to a 25% decrease in the count.

> priests.tot <- priests.dio+priests.rel

> y.limits <- range(c(priests.tot,sisters)); y.limits #37569 179954

> plot(Year,priests.tot,ylim=c(37000,180000),pch=1,ylab="")

> lines(Year,sisters,ylim=c(37000,180000),pch=2,ylab="")

> legend(2000,160000,c("priests","sisters"),pch=1:2)

> plot(Year,log(priests.tot),ylim=c(10,12.5),type="b",pch=2,ylab="log count")

> lines(Year,log(sisters),ylim=c(10,12.5),type="b",pch=1,ylab="")

> legend(2005,12.3,c("sisters","priests"),pch=1:2)

2

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

50000 100000 150000

Year

Numbers of priests and religious sisters in the U.S.

● sisters

priests

1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

10.0 10.5 11.0 11.5 12.0 12.5

Year

log count

● sisters

priests

The change in the number of sisters is dramatic (from about 180,000 in 1965 to 48,500 in 2015) and dwarfs

the decrease in number of priests (from 58,600 to 38,000 in the same time period). The graph on the log

scale shows a fairly constant 25% drop in number of sisters over each decade since 1965.

3

Discussion points

In a follow-up discussion, my priest friend who originally motivated me to look at this data told

me that historically, there were a number of factors contributing to the peak in number of religious

sisters in the 1950s and 1960s. In the U.S., many bishops recruited sisters from Europe and other

areas of the world during the early 1900s, going along with waves of immigration to the U.S. Women

didn’t have much role in the church outside of religious life, before the 1960s, and that has changed

tremendously.

The Berrellezza reference discusses effects of Vatican II on decline of a particular community which

tried to make changes in keeping with Vatican II but ran into conflict because of the attempt to get

“up to date.” This reference gives a number of illustrations of particular communities which followed

the general pattern of decline, and also some communities which did not experience decline.

References

Berrelleza, Erick, Gautier, Mary L., and Gray, Mark M. (2014). Population Trends Among Religious

Institutes of Women, CARA Special Report, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. http://cara.

georgetown.edu/Publications/WomenReligious.pdf

Gannon, Francis X. (2014). Bridging the Research Gap: CARA, Response to Vatican II. Washington, D.C.

CARA.

4