I often wonder whether the crisis of vocations is really a crisis after all is said and done.
The Archdiocese of Boston website has a stat that indicates only 15% of Catholics here attend weekly Mass. Looking around at other dioceses and assuming the weekly Mass attending Catholics hovers at around 30%, how many priests do we need? The Catholic population increases, but most do not go beyond baptism and First Holy Communion. The kids attend CCD (but not Mass), are Confirmed and that is usually that until they want to have a church wedding.
If there were more priests, would more Catholics attend weekly Mass?
This is a good point -- a much better one than that made by the original article. The number of priests and the number of laity are declining pari passu.
Are we going to need many New Mass priests in the future? I think that the vision you invoke is already coming true in some locations: a mass-produced sacramental system where a handful of priests say the magic words for all the rituals, while the people show up only for special occassions. We can already see this in action in many of the main-line protestant denominations.
Why do they bother hanging around at all? Because of the money. The protestant ministers, and the New Mass priests, won't entirely disappear until the endowments are all spent. Rosemary Radford Ruether, when she was asked why she stayed in the Church at all, answered, "Because that's where the copy machines are." In this respect, maybe the current scandals will hasten the day when the money is gone, so there is no longer any incentive for "ministers" who don't believe to keep hanging around the Church, and then a solution might become possible.