The Scale a Shepherd Can Carry: Diocese Size and the Structure of Knowing One's Flock

Archbishop Filippo Iannone, prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, gave an interview to the Croatian Catholic weekly Glas Koncila in late May 2025 describing how Rome selects bishops.[^1] He said Pope Leo XIV holds regular meetings with bishops, one-on-one and in groups, returning again and again to what he called the core of a bishop's life: "nurturing one's inner life, prayer, openness to others, a willingness to collaborate, and attentiveness to the marginalized." For Iannone, the model behind all of it, he said, "remains Christ, the Good Shepherd."

Finding men who fit that description and are also ready to run a diocese is, by every account, difficult. There are two different explanations for why, and they point to two different fixes.

The first says the shortage is about formation: seminaries form men for interior life and one-on-one pastoral care, not for running an organization with a real budget, a workforce, legal exposure, and hundreds of employees, so of course candidates are scarce — we need to be forming a different kind of priest, one closer to an executive. The second says the shortage isn't about the men at all. It's that dioceses themselves have grown to a size that no personally-formed pastor, however gifted, can run the way a bishop historically ran one. On this account, asking for "CEO priests" is asking seminaries to solve a scale problem instead of solving the scale problem itself.

What happened to the family farm

A hundred years ago, most American farms were family operations of a few dozen to a few hundred acres — worked by people who had grown up on that land, knew every field personally, and passed the operation to their children the same way. Over the twentieth century, mechanization, crop insurance, patented seed, and industrial-scale finance turned farming into an enterprise business. The numbers are stark: the U.S. had 6.8 million farms in 1935, averaging 155 acres each; by 2024, it had 1.88 million farms — a 73 percent drop — averaging 466 acres, a threefold increase in size.[^2] Family-scale operations didn't fail because the families lost their skill. They were dwarfed by an industrial scale of operation that ran on inputs, capital, and legal structures a single family farmer was never trained to manage.

Now imagine those corporate operations collapsed tomorrow. Imagine handing the plow back to a man three generations removed from the land, whose family moved to the city decades ago, and asking him to simply farm the way his great-grandfather did. It wouldn't work, and the reason wouldn't be a failure of character or a gap in his education. The scale of the thing itself would have outrun what one man, however willing, could run using the skills his formation actually gave him.

Dioceses have followed a similar arc. A bishop was historically a father who knew his priests and, through them, his people — the literal meaning behind "Good Shepherd" language that still gets used every time a pope addresses one. But over the same century that reshaped farming, dioceses absorbed population growth, parish mergers, real estate portfolios, insurance and liability exposure, HR and safe-environment compliance, and multi-parish finance councils that would be recognizable to any corporate controller. A priest formed in the seminary is formed the way the family farmer was: for direct, personal, small-scale cultivation — of souls rather than acres. Asking him to also run what a large archdiocese has become is not a different degree of the same job. It's a different job, superimposed on the first one.

Two dioceses, and what "scale" actually means here

The Diocese of Bismarck, North Dakota, has 93 parishes and 81 priests, current as of its 2026 directory.[^3] A bishop overseeing 81 priests can plausibly know each of them by name, know their strengths and struggles, and visit their parishes on a real rotation — something closer to the family-farm scale of operation.

The Archdiocese of Washington serves more than 667,000 Catholics across 140 parishes and 287 priests.[^4] Tellingly, Washington isn't run by one bishop alone: as of this July, it has three auxiliary bishops serving alongside its archbishop, following the ordination of two new auxiliaries and the departure of another to lead a diocese of his own.[^5] That's not incidental. It's the Church's own admission, in practice, that a single bishop cannot personally carry what Washington has become — the diocese already operates as a small team of bishops rather than one man, whatever the org chart nominally says.

The tools the Church already has, and their limit

Canon law gives dioceses two real mechanisms for dispersing a load too large for one person, and it's worth being precise about what each one actually does.

The first works at the level of priests. Canons 553 and 555 provide for a vicar forane, commonly called a dean, appointed by the bishop over a group of neighboring parishes.[^6] A dean promotes and coordinates pastoral activity within that smaller grouping, looks after the priests in it, and gives the bishop a real, known, local point of contact instead of 287 individual relationships he has to maintain alone. It works the way a Scout troop uses patrols: a scoutmaster nominally responsible for sixty boys isn't failing if he relies on patrol leaders who each know their own eight or ten well — that's the structure working as intended, not a workaround.

The second works at the level of the bishop's own office. Canons 403 and 405 provide for auxiliary bishops, appointed specifically "when the pastoral needs of the diocese require it," to assist the diocesan bishop "in the entire governance of the diocese."[^7] This is the deanery logic applied one level up: instead of one man holding formal responsibility for an operation that has outgrown any one person's reach, the office itself is divided among several men, each capable of the same close, personal knowledge Bismarck's bishop has, just applied to a smaller share of a larger whole.

Here is the honest limit of both tools. A patrol system doesn't change how many boys are in the troop; if the troop keeps growing, at some point you don't need better patrol leaders, you need to split the troop. Deaneries and auxiliary bishops are the Church's patrol system — real, useful, and already load-bearing in places like Washington. But leaning on them harder is a way of managing a diocese's size, not a substitute for asking whether some dioceses have simply grown past the point where any structure short of actually smaller sees, or a permanently larger episcopal team, can restore what "the bishop knows his priests" was always supposed to mean.

A real cost worth naming plainly

None of this erases something true and worth saying without softening: many priests describe the call to become a bishop, auxiliary or diocesan, as a call toward greater isolation, not less. A parish priest lives inside a small, known community. A bishop, even a good and pastoral one, often carries decisions, personnel matters, and burdens he cannot share with the very brothers he's shepherding. Archbishop Iannone put it plainly: "Sometimes we forget that bishops are human beings too, with limitations, difficulties, and moments of discouragement." He called for real prayer and spiritual support for bishops, because the isolation is genuine, and the job asks something of a man that parish life never had occasion to prepare him for.

That's not a criticism of any bishop currently serving, and it isn't resolved just by adding auxiliaries or strengthening deaneries. Dispersing administrative load doesn't automatically disperse the loneliness of holding final responsibility. Both need attention, and they're not the same problem.

The actual question worth asking

So: is the shortage of episcopal candidates a formation problem or a scale problem? The farm comparison suggests it's mostly the second, and that matters for what the Church does next. If it's a formation problem, the fix is training more executive-minded priests — which risks selecting for exactly the temperament that pulls a bishop further from being a father who knows his flock. If it's a scale problem, the fix is sizing the office to what a formed pastor can actually carry: real, permanent reliance on deaneries and auxiliary bishops where dioceses are large, and a genuine willingness to ask, diocese by diocese, whether some sees have simply grown too big for the model of bishop the Church says it wants. The Church isn't short on tools for dispersing this load. The open question is whether it's willing to use them as a standing feature of how large dioceses are run, rather than as an exception reserved for the very largest.

References

[^1]: Iannone, F. (2025, May). Interview on episcopal selection. Glas Koncila (Croatian Catholic weekly). Reported by EWTN News, "What qualities does Leo XIV consider indispensable in a bishop?"

[^2]: USDA Economic Research Service. (2024). Number of U.S. farms continues slow decline. (6.81 million farms in 1935 at an average of 154.8 acres; 1.88 million farms in 2024 at an average of 466 acres.)

[^3]: Diocese of Bismarck. (2026, March 30). Diocesan Directory. bismarckdiocese.com. (93 parishes; 81 priests: 71 diocesan, 10 religious)

[^4]: Archdiocese of Washington. (2025–2026). Parish and clergy directory. adw.org. (140 parishes; 287 priests as of the 2026 directory; 667,000+ Catholics)

[^5]: USCCB. (2026, May). Pope Leo XIV Appoints Two New Auxiliary Bishops for the Archdiocese of Washington; Accepts Resignation of Most Reverend Roy Campbell. Bishops Gary R. Studniewski and Robert P. Boxie III were ordained auxiliary bishops of Washington on July 7, 2026; Bishop Juan Esposito-Garcia continues to serve as an auxiliary bishop and Vicar General.

[^6]: Code of Canon Law (1983). Canons 553, 555. (Vicar forane/dean: appointed by the bishop over a deanery of neighboring parishes; duties include promoting pastoral activity and supporting priests in difficulty.)

[^7]: Code of Canon Law (1983). Canons 403, 405. (Auxiliary bishop: appointed at the diocesan bishop's request when pastoral needs require it; assists in the entire governance of the diocese and takes the bishop's place if he is absent or impeded.)