Are younger Catholic priests growing more conservative?

A question posed by both our own data and that of the Austin Institute was addressed in this piece at OSV.

A snippet of the interview with Executive Director, Stephen White:

Our Sunday Visitor: Do you get the sense that the American hierarchy has grown more conservative, that the American bishops are more conservative than they once were as a body? In other words, if America’s priests are growing more conservative, do you think America’s bishops are growing more conservative?

Stephen White: I think that’s probably true. One of the things that’s worth paying attention to is what we mean by conservative and what we mean by progressive. And we can get into that a little bit more, because what a priest or a bishop means when he says that about himself might not be what the Wall Street Journal means when it repeats something that was in a different survey. So there’s some qualification there that I think paints a bit more complex and nuanced a picture than just “priests are getting more conservative.”

Read the whole piece.