The Collapse in Vocations to the Catholic Priesthood

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Why have vocations to the Catholic priesthood collapsed across the West? There are plenty of theories. Traditionalists blame Vatican II and liturgical liberalism; progressives blame celibacy, clericalism and attitudes to sex; others point to the abuse scandals, poor bishops, weak catechesis or simply dreadful recruitment. And who could deny that all these things are relevant?

But none of them gets to the root of it.

To become a priest you have to believe in dogmatic Christianity rather strongly. It is not enough to reframe Christianity as heritage, ethics, community or a higher-brow cultural accompaniment to Christmas*.

A priest has to believe that God actually exists as a personal reality; that Christ actually died and rose again, inaugurating the New Covenant between God and humanity; that the sacraments actually mediate supernatural realities; that God might actually call you to spend your one life serving Him; and that celibacy, obedience and the surrender of an ordinary family life might therefore make perfect sense.

In former centuries it did not seem nearly so extraordinary because the world itself was enchanted. Parents believed, teachers believed, priests, neighbours and politicians inhabited a broadly Christian reality. The church stood in the middle of the town. The calendar was Christian. Birth, marriage and death were understood through Christian categories.

Nobody had to construct the supernatural world from scratch. Indeed, for most people it would scarcely have been imaginable not to inhabit it.

The decisive achievement of secularism was to make naturalism the default. Science — rational, empirical, cause-to-effect reasoning — explains the physical world; the body and mind; the sociology of behaviour. In Douglas Adams's phrase, we've mastered Life, the Universe and Everything. The concept of God, marginalised, blurs into Mystery: perhaps it's still there, a final defence against purposelessness, but not doing much explanatory work.

Deeply Catholic Poland is now struggling to generate priests and is importing clergy from Africa and Asia. If Poland cannot sustain its own clergy, it becomes difficult to blame the British collapse on Anglican competition, the French collapse on republicanism, or the German and Dutch collapse on liberal bishops. Poland had John Paul II, packed seminaries, immense clerical prestige and Catholicism bound tightly to national identity. But as Polish society belatedly entered the same late-modern cultural world, the same process began.

Here are some American figures. Among US ordinands in 2025, 92% had been baptised Catholic as infants, 89% had been raised by a married couple, 78% regularly practised Eucharistic Adoration before seminary, and 89% said somebody had explicitly encouraged them towards the priesthood. In the West, vocations now emerge disproportionately from very dense Catholic microcultures. The old society produced these almost automatically; the modern Church has to engender them explicitly, and that is so much harder.

The only thing really working for the church is the absent core of secular modernism itself: it's hard to really see oneself as an organic robot, here to turn the hamster wheel for the Man. 

Religiosity says that that really isn't all there is. But the Catholic formulation of that insight draws one into a truly complex and heavy journey.

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* An unkind person would say we leave that to the Anglicans.

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Suppose we'd dated when we were both seventeen?

Our hypothetical disco-date, when we were both seventeen

The venue would have been the Locarno, the city centre disco in Bristol close to the harbour and the Council House - Clare couldn't actually have made it as she was living in Liverpool with her family at that time, but she was 'just seventeen'.

This is the summer of '68.

The scene you see above - ChatGPT's best reconstruction - is pretty much as my memory tells it: the boys in their somewhat stuffy outfits (there was a male dress code - no jeans); the girls all revelling in their sixties freedoms; yes, these were my girlfriends.

And when I actually met Clare, when she and I were twenty six, I do recall her somewhat uninhibited dancing style - there was not much self-consciousness there. In this, as in so many other areas, I was and am the polar opposite. *

Clare at sixteen (AI reconstructed)

In Clare's case we don't have many teen pictures so GPT-5.6 Sol Extra High (to give its fully illustrious title) had to do some deblurring from ancient family pictures and some de-aging from ten years on. The resulting image above seems not wholly out of line

Nigel at eighteen (sadly, this is reality)

In my case we have this brooding portrait from 1969 when I was 18. Vanity has lost the glasses, which were by then a necessity. Blues, Progressive Rock and Theoretical Physics were my top attractors, at least intellectually.

And then there was the Locarno, where I also sought to follow Feynman's example.

Yes, I think the psychology of the top picture is spot-on: there is some magic trying to get out... but neither party seems to have really noticed; the boundaries of the subconscious are not too porous as a teen. It's better that we waited another nine years to meet.

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* Clare would say indignantly that she would never have worn a dress like that: she'd have worn jeans.

And she's right: Clare would take no prisoners, would make no concessions to female convention, would not dress to impress and would laugh at the idea of 'attracting boys'.

And that often works too - more often than you'd think.

But it's my post, so I'll just let it be the way I'd have wanted it...

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COVID Symptom Day Four

My symptoms started on Sunday (Clare is four days ahead of me). So today being Thursday I'm in the 4–6-day window when symptoms are at their most acute. Today it's shivering, muscular and joint aches, and the feeling of being alienated from one's own body. A poor night's sleep last night was partially compensated for by three hours' sleep this afternoon.

I haven't picked up a guitar for serious practice for three days — I lack the energy and mental concentration. Instead, I'm escaping into Jerry Pournelle (Janissaries, Mamelukes, Starswarm).

I did also finish The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera) and, as always, was awestruck by the penetrating intelligence of this novel: its characterisation, its narrative arc and its deep integration of philosophy and cultural analysis (cf. kitsch) with personal destiny. The bar is set very high for would-be novelists here.

Around me, life swirls actively: Alex and Clare were at the garden centre this morning while I was shiveringly putting a washing cycle through; this afternoon, while I slept, seven or eight purchased plants and bushes were relocated into the back and front gardens. To be honest, I am largely indifferent, but that's a minority position.

And the P(doom) nonsense continues unabated — luckily, COVID inoculates you against caring that 'someone (a lot of people) said something (lots of things) very stupid on the Internet (and MSM)'.

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COVID has rolled around again

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Tested myself this morning. Clare was unwell starting last Thursday, six days ago, and my own symptoms started on Sunday, three days ago.

Didn't quite feel like a cold - too much fatigue for both of us.

I'd almost forgotten about COVID (except for my vaccination against it coming up in a couple of weeks).

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23 years gone today

Clare at Herne Bay, September 14th 2003

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Herne Bay is a seaside town on the north coast of Kent, about 7 miles north of Canterbury and roughly 5 miles east of Whitstable. It faces north across the Thames Estuary towards Essex, with Margate farther east along the coast.

I have only the vaguest memory of this visit. Were we looking for something? Margate - which we visited a little later? We had just come back from our two years in America.

I don't remember - Clare's treating it as a holiday. 

Perhaps a T. S. Eliot pilgrimage?

Eliot retreated to Margate in the autumn of 1921. Granted a mandated leave of absence from his desk at Lloyds Bank to recover from a severe nervous collapse, he sat in a seaside shelter and wove his fracturing mental state into the third section of The Waste Land.

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Oh, puss-puss! Why...?

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Within the last week or so we've had occasions of the cat weeing behind the TV, and then in this corner. Which explains why you see above the old blue cloth tablecloth protecting the carpet, with the yellow plastic tablecloth layered on top. Didn't stop puss-puss urinating on it yesterday evening, however. 

You see it above after I mopped up the still-warm fluid with kitchen roll and then sponged it over with disinfectant.

ChatGPT said that it was either a medical condition or stress. We think the puss is perfectly well - not at all off her food and, at 7 years old, in her prime.

But there has appeared lately a much larger black cat laying claim to our garden. Puss-puss has been ferociously chased a few times through the cat-flap and into the kitchen.

The AI's solution was litter, to tide her over the stress of going outside (although Clare has taken to riding shotgun first thing in the morning with conspicuous success). So off to Tesco in the car yesterday evening and half an hour later, these stashed away...

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Here's the miscreant: butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

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Robert Conquest’s 3 Laws of Politics (GPT-5.6 redux)

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Robert Conquest's three celebrated laws of politics are usually given as follows:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2. Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3. The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

When I quoted these on this blog in 2014, I offered three glosses as to what Conquest might have meant:

1. Head over heart where it's important.

2. Eventual capture by the many idealists with a retributive agenda.

3. Regulatory capture.

Let's ask GPT-5.6 to review my response at the time.

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Looking at them again twelve years later, I think all three of your responses deserve revision. Conquest's jokes are better than your explanations of them. Beneath the political provocation lie three rather general propositions about knowledge, institutions and incentives.

The first law is not really about choosing the head over the heart. It is about expertise. The more closely one understands a complicated system, the more one discovers that its apparently irrational features often embody constraints invisible to outsiders. Radical simplification is easiest when somebody else has to deal with the consequences.

The network engineer knows why the ugly legacy system cannot simply be ripped out. The surgeon knows why the irritating procedure exists. The programmer has learnt what usually happens when somebody proposes rewriting the twenty-year-old application from scratch. Expertise does not necessarily make people politically conservative. It makes them conservative about interventions in systems whose failure modes they particularly understand.

Conquest's first law is therefore a kind of informational Burkeanism: knowledge breeds respect for somewhat esoteric constraints. We are most susceptible to schemes of radical reconstruction precisely where we know little.

The second law is more interesting than Conquest's partisan formulation suggests. Organisations do not have opinions in quite the same sense as people do. They acquire opinions because particular kinds of people have stronger incentives to shape them.

A hospital, university, museum, charity or professional association contains many people principally interested in medicine, scholarship, paintings, charitable work or their profession. Such people may have perfectly definite political views, but they did not join the organisation in order to make it express them. Alongside them are people with much stronger views about what the institution itself ought publicly to stand for. They write policies, join committees, redefine missions and supply the moral vocabulary in which institutional decisions are discussed.

Those with intense preferences repeatedly defeat those with weak ones. The latter may disagree, but usually not enough to spend Tuesday evening arguing about the wording of the diversity statement.

That makes Conquest's second law less a law of Left and Right than a special case of Mancur Olson's general thesis. Organised minorities with strong incentives beat diffuse majorities with weak incentives. In the cultural circumstances of modern Western institutions, the energetic institutionalisers have very often been progressive. Under a different social equilibrium the ideological direction could conceivably be different.

So I would now rewrite the second law as: unowned institutions drift towards the ideology of those most determined to run them.

Your old explanation of the third law as regulatory capture was simply too narrow. Regulatory capture describes the familiar case in which an industry succeeds in bending its regulator towards the interests of the regulated. Conquest is making a larger and rather nastier joke.

Institutions can behave as though their enemies had taken control of them without anybody intending this outcome at all.

A bureaucracy rewards behaviour actually visible to the bureaucracy. Staff learn to satisfy procedures, targets, budgets, audit requirements and career incentives. Managers minimise risks to themselves. Departments defend their territory. Metrics substitute for purposes. The people who become most successful within the organisation are increasingly those who have mastered the organisation rather than necessarily those most committed to whatever it was originally created to achieve.

No conspiracy is required. Indeed that is the point of Conquest's joking insight. Ordinary institutional incentives can produce outcomes so perverse that sabotage seems the more charitable explanation.

This is the territory of principal-agent problems, Parkinson, Goodhart and Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy rather than regulatory capture. The organisation gradually becomes one of the things it exists to maintain.

So my revised glosses would be:

1. Knowledge breeds respect for constraints.

2. Unowned institutions drift towards the ideology of those most determined to run them.

3. Bureaucracies eventually optimise for themselves rather than their ostensible purpose.

Stripped of some of Conquest's conservative mischief, the laws actually become stronger. The first concerns information, the second collective action and the third principal-agent failure.

The explicitly political content is somewhat incidental while the institutional pessimism is certainly not.

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'Kickin' Off'

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This is the 'Kickin' Off' solo, the first one, from James Shipway's book shown above.

I last played the guitar in public at the beginning of 1970, at Warwick University, when I was 19. Soon after that I joined the revolutionary left, sold my strat and abandoned guitar. I think I recognised my limitations as a budding musician.

Here, I'm really showing the difference between the early tentative playing of an exercise vs. a proper performance. Lots of errors (bends not properly cut-off, strings being traversed in a rather hit-or-miss fashion) - but of course practice is everything.

And - compare and contrast...

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Guitar progress report: August 2026

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After about nine months of serious guitar practice, I've reached the point where progress is apparent but deficiencies are also becoming clearer. My studies now divide into two broad streams: acoustic fingerstyle and electric blues soloing.

Acoustic fingerstyle

The attraction of fingerstyle lies in using the guitar as a self-contained instrument, combining bass, harmony and melody in a complete solo performance. It remains my principal interest and, plainly, a long-term undertaking.

I am approximately two-thirds of the way through Berle and Galbo’s Beginning Fingerstyle Blues Guitar. I am currently working on alternating and walking bass, chord inversions and chords in higher positions. The book concludes with several integrated pieces in traditional blues styles.

My principal limitation is that my thumb and finger movements are not yet sufficiently independent. I can maintain an alternating bass beneath a simple picking pattern, but the treble notes remain tied to that pattern instead of developing into a freely shaped melody above it. Realistically, that is probably what one should expect at this stage: I have learnt some coordinated patterns, but not yet the ability to vary the melody freely while the thumb carries on regardless.

The immediate plan is therefore to complete the present book without rushing its final material, study all the concluding blues pieces for what they teach, and bring at least some of them to a secure and musical standard.

After that, I intend to move on to Joseph Alexander’s Fingerstyle Blues Guitar. That should extend the same underlying skills: alternating-bass control, finger independence, blues vocabulary and the ability to place more varied melody lines above the bass.

Working on technique alone can be pretty tedious and also doesn't really calibrate progress. I am also working on several accessible and personally interesting acoustic performance pieces: Sunshine of Your Love in an acoustic version, Here Comes the Sun and Killing the Blues. I also have the Paul Simon pieces Stewart pointed me to previously to return to later. These provide something recognisably musical alongside the technical exercises and expose my limitations.

Electric blues soloing

My interest in amplified blues guitar goes back to my early teens. Very little in popular music matches the emotional force of a good blues lead guitar. Unfortunately, my current abilities remain at the most basic skill set. I have to work on:

• improving picking-hand accuracy, string selection and string crossing;
• developing effective muting and control of unwanted string noise;
• consolidating scale positions while learning the locations of root notes and other important intervals;
• developing controlled bends, vibrato, timing, rests and phrasing; and
• connecting adjacent areas of the neck rather than remaining trapped inside one memorised scale box.

I am finding James Shipway’s Blues Soloing for Guitar, Volume 1: Blues Basics useful because it provides a structured syllabus rather than an assortment of famous solos to imitate. Work on the first of its five solos has already exposed weaknesses in string selection, picking accuracy and coordination.

Occasional work on existing songs, particularly material by Cream, will provide some variety and allow the new techniques to be used in a familiar musical setting. The Shipway book will remain the main line of study as it's extremely systematic.

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The Best Instant Coffee?

Grind

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My question: "Grind is pretty good instant coffee, but it is by no means the most expensive. Could you recommend an instant coffee of even better quality for a black Americano than Grind is? Perhaps I can order it over the internet if it's not in Waitrose."

[GPT-5.6 makes some recommendations].

My response: "None of these apparently do micro-ground coffee as part of the product, which you said was very important for giving the oils and the deeper taste."

GPT-5-6 concedes:

You are right. I conflated two different kinds of “better”.

Speciality freeze-dried instant such as Colonna or Common can offer cleaner, more distinctive fruit and floral flavours—but may be lighter-bodied.

Freeze-dried plus microground coffee gives more suspended coffee solids, roasted aroma and mouthfeel. It is more likely to produce the deeper black-Americano character you want.

I also overstated the oil point slightly. Microground particles retain some coffee lipids and aromatic material, but they do not simply release large quantities of oil into the water. Their principal effect is greater body, texture and roast flavour.

Grind unusually combines speciality-grade Arabica, slow freeze-drying and 15% microground coffee. By comparison, Illy contains 3% microground and Lavazza Prontissimo Intenso about 10%; Starbucks VIA also contains microground coffee but does not appear to disclose the percentage. None is convincingly superior to Grind overall.

So I should revise my recommendation: for a rich black Americano, Grind may already be the best readily obtainable true instant coffee. Colonna might be more refined and interesting, but it is not necessarily better for your particular taste and could seem thinner. I would stay with Grind unless you want to experiment in a different, lighter speciality-coffee direction.

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