Only five priests were ordained in Belgium this year. In the once predominantly Catholic country, the number of newly ordained priests has ranged between three and eight over the last few years.
A new study out of by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) found that Belgium has the worst ratio of newly-ordained priests per Catholic head of the population, ranking it 108th in the world.
CARA based the rankings on the most recent figures for priestly ordinations (for 2015, 2016 and 2017) and Catholic population data for 2017 from the Vatican’s Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae. In order to avoid skewed results, researchers only included countries that had at least 100,000 Catholics, at least nine ordinations in 2015-2017 and a minimum of one ordination in each of the three years studied.
It found that Belgium had just 19 ordinations from 2015 – 2017, giving a ratio of one ordination for every 431,158 people in its population of 8,192,000 Catholics.
