Decline in vocations — does it parallel the decline in marriages?

According to that same NYT article I linked in the last post,

In 25 years, the number of priests in the United States has declined 26 percent, to 42,500, as the number of Roman Catholics rose 29 percent, to 65 million.

Priesthood is not a job:  it is a vocation, comparable to marriage.  So how has marriage been doing?

Since 1960, the decline of those married among all persons age 15 and older has been twelve percentage points—and over 23 points among black females. It should be noted that these data include both people who have never married and those who have married and then divorced.

…In order partially to control for a decline in married adults simply due to delayed first marriages, we have looked at changes in the percentage of persons age 35 through 44 who were married.  Since 1960, there has been a drop of almost 19 percentage points for married men and over 16 points for married women. A slight increase in the percentage of married people in this age group occurred beginning in 1999, for unknown reasons, but this increase now appears to have ended.

The number of marriages, or rather the proportion of marriageable people who are married, has declined too. 

I wonder if the root cause is a general fear, not of the priesthood, but of commitment?

Of course, the proper comparison, to evaluate the relative effect on priesthood and on marriage, is this:  (decline in number of married men/number of adult men) compared to (decline in number of Roman Catholic priests/number of adult Roman Catholic men).

You could also look at the decline in vocations compared to the decline in marriages.  From the marriage article:

Americans have become less likely to marry. This is reflected in a decline of more than 40 percent, from 1970 to 2002, in the annual number of marriages per 1000 unmarried adult women.

A claim (unverified, sorry) quoted in this article says that vocations have declined 60 percent since 1975.

That’s not all that far off.   If vocations to marriage AND vocations to the celibate life are both declining sharply, perhaps the decline in vocations to the celibate life is not entirely due to dissatisfaction with the idea of celibacy.

Admittedly, the decline in American marriages is not quite as sharp as the decline in American religious vocations.  But the difference is small enough that we should consider them in relation to one another, and not necessarily as independent.