They interviewed more than a thousand priests.

It doesn't appear they got anyone saying that they were extremely liberal.

There is this sea change of orthodoxy coupled with compassion.

But that's the good news.

Let's talk about the bad news.

The bad news is young priests are burning out.

Welcome back to James Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmire.

And today I want to briefly share the good, the bad, and the ugly about the future of the priesthood and the Catholic Church in America. And I'm going to be looking at the 2025 report by the Catholic Project. If you're not familiar, this is a group out of CUA, Catholic University of America, where they did a massive study looking at Catholic priests. They, in 2022, did a large survey of several or a few thousand priests, and then they were able

to get follow-up more in-depth survey results in 2025 with 1,164 of those original priests.

So this let them go a little deeper. You may remember I did an episode

earlier looking at young priests at a very broad level, showing younger and newly ordained priests are

way more politically conservative and way more theologically orthodox in older priests.

But here they went a little more in depth. So let's us get a better

view of what that concretely means because terms like Orthodox and conservative can mean a lot of

things to a lot of people. And so we now have a, I think a fuller, more nuanced picture. So I want to

do something of a follow-up episode and then I'll link to the original episode at the end of this one.

Just exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly, because I think there are some really good signs, but I think

we would be lying if there weren't some things that are also alarming about the picture-facing

young priests, and I think the silver lining from that is there are things you and I can concretely

do.

So with that said, let's start with the good.

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