How many Orthodox Priests are in the world?

[RileyG]

***EO ONLY PLEASE. NO DEBATING/ARGUING ***

(There are roughly 400,000 Catholic priests in the world and roughly 1 Billion Roman Catholics. For comparison, that's like the population of Omaha NE (a medium sized city) meeting the needs of China) ).

How many Orthodox clergy are in the world?

I read somewhere there are relatively 800 Orthodox priests in the United States. I do not know if that is accurate????

God Bless

 

[ArmyMatt]

no idea, although I would assume there would be a lot due to Russia

 

[RileyG]

no idea, although I would assume there would be a lot due to Russia

Thanks Father

 

[ArmyMatt]

Thanks Father

yeah, sorry, kind of a “duh” answer, but I honestly don’t know of any actual registry

 

[JSRG]

no idea, although I would assume there would be a lot due to Russia

Wikipedia in its Russian Orthodox Church article claims there are "40,514 full-time clerics, including 35,677 presbyters and 4,837 deacons". The page it links to as its citation for this is this page on the official Russian Orthodox Church site. This page is in Russian, but I ran it through Google Translate and it appears to confirm the numbers, though this is for 2019 so things might have changed (the article talks about how this is an increase from 2009, which had 30,670 clergy, including 27,216 priests and 3,454 deacons).

But of course, that's just Russia. I suppose someone could try to find information on the number of priests for each autocephaly and add them together.

 

[JSRG]

I read somewhere there are relatively 800 Orthodox priests in the United States. I do not know if that is accurate????

The Orthodox Church in America's website claims (in an article form 2020) there are 640 priests currently in charge of parishes. But the Orthodox Church in America is only a portion of all of the Eastern Orthodox churches in America (its name is a bit misleading), e.g. it doesn't include priests in the Greek Orthodox Church or Antiochian Orthodox Church parishes that are in America.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Wikipedia in its Russian Orthodox Church article claims there are "40,514 full-time clerics, including 35,677 presbyters and 4,837 deacons". The page it links to as its citation for this is this page on the official Russian Orthodox Church site. This page is in Russian, but I ran it through Google Translate and it appears to confirm the numbers, though this is for 2019 so things might have changed (the article talks about how this is an increase from 2009, which had 30,670 clergy, including 27,216 priests and 3,454 deacons).

But of course, that's just Russia. I suppose someone could try to find information on the number of priests for each autocephaly and add them together.

yeah, Russia is hard to track since their numbers of ordinations are so high methinks

 

[RileyG]

interesting

 

[Spingle]

Thanks Father

He is a priest?

 

[Lukaris]

He is a priest?

Yes, he is.

 

[ArmyMatt]

He is a priest?

yep, by God’s grace I am

 

[RileyG]

It I say understanding Russia has a large amount of atheists? Is this true?

 

[The Liturgist]

It I say understanding Russia has a large amount of atheists? Is this true?

They represent a much smaller segment of the population than, for instance, in Estonia, which tragically has the highest ratio of atheists to Christians in Europe (whether Lutheran or Orthodox), and it also suffers from a schism among the Orthodox, and the Lutherans in Estonia are much more liberal than their counterparts in Latvia and especially Lithuania, so the situation is quite unfortunate. I believe the ratio of atheists to Christians is even worse than in Belgium, where it is known to be quite bad.

That said of course there are going to be a reasonable number of atheists in any former Soviet country including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, even the Central Asian republics, this being a relic of the pervasive influence of the Communist Party. All of the well-paying jobs in the Soviet Union required party membership, and party membership was only available to atheists.

I am of the view that Communism is in fact a religion, albeit a Nihilistic, materialist religion, but nonetheless bears all of the hallmarks of a religion, including holidays, a pantheon of Communist leaders such as Marx and Lenin, and other figures depending on which specific communist party and which nationality you belong to, and it has various rituals, and it even has pilgrimages, generally to the tombs of its former leaders. Every single founder of a communist state has been embalmed, including Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and so on, except for the founders of the Eastern European satellite states of the Warsaw Pact, and perhaps for Fidel Castro, I am not sure if they did that to him or not, although in the case of Enver Hoxha, the brutal dictator of Albania, he was embalmed and preserved in a spectacular mausoleum which resembled the Space Mountain attraction at Disneyland, but my understand is that he has been disposed of and the mausoleum which contained him has been removed.

 

[The Liturgist]

By the way @RileyG the short answer to your thread is not enough - while Orthodoxy is not suffering from a vocations crisis on the scale of what is happening in the Roman Catholic Church, we could still use more clergy.

 

[JSRG]

By the way @RileyG the short answer to your thread is not enough - while Orthodoxy is not suffering from a vocations crisis on the scale of what is happening in the Roman Catholic Church, we could still use more clergy.

I wouldn't say the Catholic Church has a vocations crisis exactly; it's more that specific portions of it do. Europe and North America are having issues with vocations. But in other areas, like India or Africa, it's doing great in terms of vocations. This article has some interesting data, even if the data it offers only goes up through 2019:

Is there a global vocations crisis? A look at the numbers

Analysis

www.pillarcatholic.com

As it notes:

"Europe and North America are seeing a net decrease in the number of diocesan priests each year, while countries in many parts of the developing world see a positive net change each year."

I'm not sure which areas for the Orthodox are gaining/losing vocations.

 

[The Liturgist]

I wouldn't say the Catholic Church has a vocations crisis exactly; it's more that specific portions of it do. Europe and North America are having issues with vocations. But in other areas, like India or Africa, it's doing great in terms of vocations. This article has some interesting data, even if the data it offers only goes up through 2019:

Is there a global vocations crisis? A look at the numbers

Analysis

www.pillarcatholic.com

As it notes:

"Europe and North America are seeing a net decrease in the number of diocesan priests each year, while countries in many parts of the developing world see a positive net change each year."

I'm not sure which areas for the Orthodox are gaining/losing vocations.

Indeed, it is not a global vocations crisis, so forgive me if I implied that. If Pope Benedict XVI had not resigned, I myself probably would have pursued oridination in the RCC with a view towards obtaining bi-ritual faculties, since being able to celebrate the Tridentine mass and the Divine Liturgies of St. Chrysostom and St. Basil would be a delight, but unfortunately this has been prevented, particularly for diocesan clergy. However I love the Orthodox Church very much and am very happy to be a part of it. Also I feel comforted by the knowledge that the kind of disruptive changes that occurred to the Roman Rite, Maronite and Ambrosian Rite liturgies are impossible in Holy Orthodoxy.