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It is obvious that our research data must be restricted here to the people who have actually undertaken to follow the vocation of a religious professional. It may well be, as some surmise, that tremendous numbers of people receive the original calling, but do not respond to it, and that therefore many vocations are "lost" to the cause of the Church. We are not asking here how many people do not become religious functionaries, nor what their reasons are for failing to do so. There appears to be no scientific method by which researchers can gather the information to answer these questions. Sufficient data have been brought together, however, to enable us to make certain generalizations about the early life of these Americans who are now pursuing a life career in the Church. The aim of this chapter is to indicate the main stream of these experiences.

Most of those who follow the religious vocation in today's America -- like the majority of young people in general -- were youngsters who had one or more brothers or sisters. The most recent studies in this area show that only 5 per cent of the candidates for the seminary and convent come from families in which they were the only child. At the other end of the scale another 5 per cent come from families of ten or more children. About two fifths of them are from families with from one to three children, and the average vocation family has a little more than four children apiece.

There has been a persistent myth among Catholics, apparently the fruit of a "logical supposition," that vocations "flourish" in large families. Obviously, the statistical probability that more than one child would follow a vocation in any single family, grows as the number of children in the family increases. The fact is, however, that in the vocation families under scrutiny in recent surveys, those with four children or fewer contribute about one third of their total to the service of God, while families with five or more children contribute only about one fifth of their children.

This means that, given the potential total of vocations in all of these families, the smaller families (four children or fewer) are actually more productive of vocations than are the larger families. The practical conclusion for vocation recruiters is that they should look to the Catholic families that have five or more children, not because they have been a prolific source of vocations, but precisely for the opposite reason: they have "extra" children and have not been making a proportionate contribution. Two explanatory remarks may be made at this point. The first is that the large family is often the poor family, and these families with below-average income are not a large source of vocations at the present time. The second is that large families are typical of the rural areas, and rural Catholic families do not contribute their share of vocations in proportion with their percentage of the total American Catholic population. . .

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