I'm not sure about the supply-side argument for more people called to be priests = more religious people, just because priests don't always (or typically) come from the local community. There were probably more home-grown priests in the past (i.e., in the 1950s), but certainly there were lots of transplant priests then, too. I mean, the whole premise of the Jesuits is that they should be sent hither and yon to found churches and schools.
For instance, I live on the Caribbean island of Saba, and our priest is from Poland. The priest before him was from the Philippines. Oh, by the way, Saba currently has a population of 2035, of which 50% are Catholic. So we've got one priest per about 1018 Catholics.
Living on Saba as I do, I wanted to see what Catholic-Hierarchy.org had to say about priests in the Dutch Caribbean. Alas, this is not possible, since this website clusters a ton of very disparate islands, from the Bahamas to the Virgins, as "antilles," of which the Dutch Caribbean (n.b., "Netherlands Antilles" is a defunct category, having been dissolved in 2010) is one part. So I did my own investigating.
The most recent photo showing all the priests in the Diocese of Willemstad, the diocese that includes all the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten is from 2016, and shows 38 priests (see here: https://diocesewillemstad.com/priest/ )
Saba: 1900 people, 42% Catholic (yes, the population of Catholics on Saba has increased in recent years) = 798 Catholics
St. Eustatius: 3200 people, 24% Catholic = 768 Catholics
St. Maarten: 39,000 people, 33% Catholics = 12,870 Catholics
In 2016, therefore, we have a total of 223,178 Catholics and 38 priests, for a parishioner-to-priest ratio of 5873:1--not the lowest ratio, but not the highest. If there were a pixel for the tiny island of Saba on your map, it would be the darkest of dark blue, though.
I think this is interesting, because, per your Canaries hypothesis, the Dutch Caribbean's colonizing country, the Netherlands, is one of the least religious countries ever--both now, and at the time of conquest. And insofar as the Netherlands is religious, the official religion is Dutch protestant. In 2017, 51% of the Dutch were not religious. About 15% of the total population is some variety of Dutch protestant, and 24% is Catholic. (Data here: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/43/over-half-of-the-dutch-population-are-not-religious) So, for the Caribbean Netherlands, it's not like the colonizing country is a Catholic powerhouse.
I agree that the arrival of priests from outside the diocese should distort the Catholics per priest ratio somewhat. But, assuming the Catholic church (and religious orders in particular) wish to serve every Catholic community with an adequate number of priests, the distortion should mean that dioceses with a high CPP would had an even higher CPP if not for transplant priests (net importers), while dioceses with a relatively low CPP would had an even lower CPP if not for transplant priests (net exporters). So the differences between high and low CPP regions/countries should be even more pronounced.
I think this might be apparent (just speculating here!) in the ratio of diocesan priests to religious orders priests, assuming that most transplant priests belong to religious orders (Jesuits as you mention, etc) because missionary work is one of the main goals of many orders. I'll try to check this hypothesis if/when I have some time.
I'm not so sure about the Netherlands being irreligious, at least not in the sense (which is maybe not "religiosity" as we understand now) measured by the CPP ratio:
- Despite living in a Protestant country (not much social/status motivation for being a Catholic), Dutch Catholics managed to hold fast to their faith for centuries, and kept their numbers at a very high level.
- I calculated the CPP for the Netherlands, and it's even lower than Spain's in 1950 (714 Catholics per priest), while being higher than Spain yet lower than France in 2020 (2981 Catholics per priest). This is significantly lower than the diocese of Willemstad in both years.
"Despite living in a Protestant country (not much social/status motivation for being a Catholic), Dutch Catholics managed to hold fast to their faith for centuries, and kept their numbers at a very high level." Interesting point. Especially in the context that the "state" religion of Calvinist Protestantism now represents a smaller fraction of Dutch adults than Catholicism does. Though it does look like the Protestants are more likely to actually go to church in the Netherlands, so I'm not sure what that means about keeping the Catholic faith.
Correction: I didn't have to do so much math. I just had to click through more tabs on the Catholic-Hierarchy.org page. They're reporting a 2017 parishioners-to-priests ratio for the Diocese of Willemstad of 4326--no so far off of my back-of-the-envelope calculation. (And 4756 Catholics per priest in the Dutch Caribbean in 2022.)
Your CCP ratio interpretation is radically WRONG. Northern Spain and very especially the Basque Country and Catalonia are extremely atheist/agnostic areas, probably even more than France. I'm Basque an most people is totally non-religious or even strongly anti-religious over here (and I know for a fact that only Catalans are in the same anti-religion page as we are in all the State of Spain). Andalusians on the contrary are famous for being hyper-religious and going totally nuts about Easter processions, for example.
The CCP ratio may have various interpretations but the most obvious one is that every parish gets one priest (maybe more but at least one) no matter how many Christians there are left, so higher CCP ratio surely tends to represent greater religiosity, not less.
"The CCP ratio may have various interpretations" => Yes. As I mentioned in the post, I'm more interested in the fact that it seems to be a consistent metric, than whether it's a measure of religiosity or the opposite.
Higher CPP (Catholics per priest) ratio means more Catholics/parishioners for every priest, which is equivalent to lower priests for each Catholic person. It's just easier to express the ratio as CPP because a "Priests per Catholics" ratio would always be much lower than 1.
UPDATE: I decided to check France, and it turns out that the diocese of Bayonne, which encompasses the French Basque Country, has the fifth lowest CPP among French dioceses (year 2020; more than 90 dioceses in total). The diocese of Tarbes, right next to the French Basque country, has an even lower CPP than Bayonne, and most other very low CPP dioceses are located in and around the Cévennes region of France.
And I just checked out the super-irreligious Netherlands, where each diocese also has a parishioner-to-priest ratio of <3000. As noted in my comments above, over half of Dutch adults identify as "no religion," and this is predominantly atheist and agnostic. 24% self-identify as Catholic, but among that group, 69% say they attend services "rarely or never." (Source: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/43/over-half-of-the-dutch-population-are-not-religious)
So, fewer religious people = lower ratio of churchgoers to church leaders, as long as you're staffing churches at all. (I'll note that on Saba, the Anglican church does not have a priest; parishioner numbers were low enough that the Anglican Church in the Province of the West Indies stopped funding that position.) The Catholic church is a big and well-funded enough institution that it can continue to staff parishes on tiny islands or in atheist Holland or Catalonia, even as church membership falls. This then would result in a low parishioner-to-priest ratio.
Related observation: I used to work for a small private school in the USA. We had rapidly declining enrollment. However, as our enrollment numbers crashed, we did in fact brag more in our marketing materials about our low student-to-faculty ratio--which was true. I think this is the same phenomenon that's being speculated upon here?
Maybe what the CPP measures is the capacity/disposition to participate in religious institutions?
About the reliability of the ratios considering the declining "enrollment", there might be some of that going on. Percentages of Catholics in the Netherlands seem believable (only diocese with a high % of Catholics is Roermond. Other dioceses have percentages as low as 6%, 15%), but percentages in Spain seem higher than I would expect based on other sources/surveys (for the diocese of Barcelona it says 80%, while other - maybe more objective - sources mention 50%-60%).
That being said, now (last few decades) that people have so many new options to fill their spiritual needs it seems only natural that all CPP ratios will become higher. But the relative positions among countries/regions seem to mostly hold. Relatively higher countries/regions are still high, and relatively lower countries/regions are still low.
Hi, Javiero. Interesting analysis.
I'm not sure about the supply-side argument for more people called to be priests = more religious people, just because priests don't always (or typically) come from the local community. There were probably more home-grown priests in the past (i.e., in the 1950s), but certainly there were lots of transplant priests then, too. I mean, the whole premise of the Jesuits is that they should be sent hither and yon to found churches and schools.
For instance, I live on the Caribbean island of Saba, and our priest is from Poland. The priest before him was from the Philippines. Oh, by the way, Saba currently has a population of 2035, of which 50% are Catholic. So we've got one priest per about 1018 Catholics.
Living on Saba as I do, I wanted to see what Catholic-Hierarchy.org had to say about priests in the Dutch Caribbean. Alas, this is not possible, since this website clusters a ton of very disparate islands, from the Bahamas to the Virgins, as "antilles," of which the Dutch Caribbean (n.b., "Netherlands Antilles" is a defunct category, having been dissolved in 2010) is one part. So I did my own investigating.
The most recent photo showing all the priests in the Diocese of Willemstad, the diocese that includes all the Dutch islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten is from 2016, and shows 38 priests (see here: https://diocesewillemstad.com/priest/ )
In 2016, there were on each island (see here for data on BES islands: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/publication/2016/44/trends-in-the-caribbean-netherlands-2016):
Aruba: 105,000 people, 75% Catholic = 78750 Catholics
Bonaire: 19400 people, 68% Catholic = 13192 Catholics
Curacao: 160,000 people, 73% Catholic = 116,800 Catholics
Saba: 1900 people, 42% Catholic (yes, the population of Catholics on Saba has increased in recent years) = 798 Catholics
St. Eustatius: 3200 people, 24% Catholic = 768 Catholics
St. Maarten: 39,000 people, 33% Catholics = 12,870 Catholics
In 2016, therefore, we have a total of 223,178 Catholics and 38 priests, for a parishioner-to-priest ratio of 5873:1--not the lowest ratio, but not the highest. If there were a pixel for the tiny island of Saba on your map, it would be the darkest of dark blue, though.
I think this is interesting, because, per your Canaries hypothesis, the Dutch Caribbean's colonizing country, the Netherlands, is one of the least religious countries ever--both now, and at the time of conquest. And insofar as the Netherlands is religious, the official religion is Dutch protestant. In 2017, 51% of the Dutch were not religious. About 15% of the total population is some variety of Dutch protestant, and 24% is Catholic. (Data here: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/43/over-half-of-the-dutch-population-are-not-religious) So, for the Caribbean Netherlands, it's not like the colonizing country is a Catholic powerhouse.
I agree that the arrival of priests from outside the diocese should distort the Catholics per priest ratio somewhat. But, assuming the Catholic church (and religious orders in particular) wish to serve every Catholic community with an adequate number of priests, the distortion should mean that dioceses with a high CPP would had an even higher CPP if not for transplant priests (net importers), while dioceses with a relatively low CPP would had an even lower CPP if not for transplant priests (net exporters). So the differences between high and low CPP regions/countries should be even more pronounced.
I think this might be apparent (just speculating here!) in the ratio of diocesan priests to religious orders priests, assuming that most transplant priests belong to religious orders (Jesuits as you mention, etc) because missionary work is one of the main goals of many orders. I'll try to check this hypothesis if/when I have some time.
I'm not so sure about the Netherlands being irreligious, at least not in the sense (which is maybe not "religiosity" as we understand now) measured by the CPP ratio:
- Despite living in a Protestant country (not much social/status motivation for being a Catholic), Dutch Catholics managed to hold fast to their faith for centuries, and kept their numbers at a very high level.
- I calculated the CPP for the Netherlands, and it's even lower than Spain's in 1950 (714 Catholics per priest), while being higher than Spain yet lower than France in 2020 (2981 Catholics per priest). This is significantly lower than the diocese of Willemstad in both years.
"Despite living in a Protestant country (not much social/status motivation for being a Catholic), Dutch Catholics managed to hold fast to their faith for centuries, and kept their numbers at a very high level." Interesting point. Especially in the context that the "state" religion of Calvinist Protestantism now represents a smaller fraction of Dutch adults than Catholicism does. Though it does look like the Protestants are more likely to actually go to church in the Netherlands, so I'm not sure what that means about keeping the Catholic faith.
Correction: I didn't have to do so much math. I just had to click through more tabs on the Catholic-Hierarchy.org page. They're reporting a 2017 parishioners-to-priests ratio for the Diocese of Willemstad of 4326--no so far off of my back-of-the-envelope calculation. (And 4756 Catholics per priest in the Dutch Caribbean in 2022.)
Here's the page for the Dutch Caribbean: https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dwill.html
Your CCP ratio interpretation is radically WRONG. Northern Spain and very especially the Basque Country and Catalonia are extremely atheist/agnostic areas, probably even more than France. I'm Basque an most people is totally non-religious or even strongly anti-religious over here (and I know for a fact that only Catalans are in the same anti-religion page as we are in all the State of Spain). Andalusians on the contrary are famous for being hyper-religious and going totally nuts about Easter processions, for example.
The CCP ratio may have various interpretations but the most obvious one is that every parish gets one priest (maybe more but at least one) no matter how many Christians there are left, so higher CCP ratio surely tends to represent greater religiosity, not less.
"The CCP ratio may have various interpretations" => Yes. As I mentioned in the post, I'm more interested in the fact that it seems to be a consistent metric, than whether it's a measure of religiosity or the opposite.
Higher CPP (Catholics per priest) ratio means more Catholics/parishioners for every priest, which is equivalent to lower priests for each Catholic person. It's just easier to express the ratio as CPP because a "Priests per Catholics" ratio would always be much lower than 1.
UPDATE: I decided to check France, and it turns out that the diocese of Bayonne, which encompasses the French Basque Country, has the fifth lowest CPP among French dioceses (year 2020; more than 90 dioceses in total). The diocese of Tarbes, right next to the French Basque country, has an even lower CPP than Bayonne, and most other very low CPP dioceses are located in and around the Cévennes region of France.
And I just checked out the super-irreligious Netherlands, where each diocese also has a parishioner-to-priest ratio of <3000. As noted in my comments above, over half of Dutch adults identify as "no religion," and this is predominantly atheist and agnostic. 24% self-identify as Catholic, but among that group, 69% say they attend services "rarely or never." (Source: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2018/43/over-half-of-the-dutch-population-are-not-religious)
So, fewer religious people = lower ratio of churchgoers to church leaders, as long as you're staffing churches at all. (I'll note that on Saba, the Anglican church does not have a priest; parishioner numbers were low enough that the Anglican Church in the Province of the West Indies stopped funding that position.) The Catholic church is a big and well-funded enough institution that it can continue to staff parishes on tiny islands or in atheist Holland or Catalonia, even as church membership falls. This then would result in a low parishioner-to-priest ratio.
Related observation: I used to work for a small private school in the USA. We had rapidly declining enrollment. However, as our enrollment numbers crashed, we did in fact brag more in our marketing materials about our low student-to-faculty ratio--which was true. I think this is the same phenomenon that's being speculated upon here?
Maybe what the CPP measures is the capacity/disposition to participate in religious institutions?
About the reliability of the ratios considering the declining "enrollment", there might be some of that going on. Percentages of Catholics in the Netherlands seem believable (only diocese with a high % of Catholics is Roermond. Other dioceses have percentages as low as 6%, 15%), but percentages in Spain seem higher than I would expect based on other sources/surveys (for the diocese of Barcelona it says 80%, while other - maybe more objective - sources mention 50%-60%).
That being said, now (last few decades) that people have so many new options to fill their spiritual needs it seems only natural that all CPP ratios will become higher. But the relative positions among countries/regions seem to mostly hold. Relatively higher countries/regions are still high, and relatively lower countries/regions are still low.