LIES, DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS

Quoting the old adage, “there are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics.”

The website of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a Georgetown University based agency known as CARA, issued the following report, which on its face would indicate that condition of the Church is quite strong and healthy.

For example, CARA reports that the Catholic population in the United States has grown steadily since 1970, when it was 51 million. It now stands at 74.3 million.  

Wow!  We might be expected to believe that there are 23.3 million more Catholics today then there were almost 50 years ago.

I only have one question:  where are they?

They do not attend Mass regularly, nor do they frequent the Sacraments.  Their presence within society and the expression of their Catholic values in the voting booths is negligible.

And yet, should we find comfort in the numbers CARA reports.

The truth is the numbers are meaningless.  

For once baptized, a person is regarded a member of the Church until he or she passes from this earth to eternal judgment.  There is no system by which the Church can account for the millions of baptized Catholics who have abandoned the Faith or whose relationship to the Church is so tenuous as to be irrelevant.

But let’s continue with the CARA report.

The number of annulments of Marriages initiated has fallen from 60,691 in 1984 to 22,631 in 2016.

Does this mean that fewer and fewer Catholics are divorcing and that Marriages among Catholics are sound and stable?

Of course not.  It means that fewer and fewer Catholics who have divorced are bothering to make an attempt at a second Marriage recognized by the Church by having their previous attempt at Sacramental Marriage annulled.  

In reality, more and more divorced Catholics are simply entering into civil unions or establishing domicile with domestic partners without recourse to the Church’s marriage tribunal process.

But, why stop there, let’s continue reviewing the findings of CARA.

Here’s a statistic which I find of particular interest, since I have noted its implications repeatedly on this blogsite.

The value of services rendered by Catholic Charities has also expanded, from $361 million in 1974 to $3.124 billion in 2016, with the number of persons served by Catholic Charities rising to 8.371 million in 2016 from 2.452 million in 1979.


What should be noted is the fact that the vast majority of funding for these programs comes from the Federal Government.  Little wonder, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is so supportive of the Democratic Party and its minions and so dismissive of the Republican Party.  

Enough said.

And finally, perhaps, the most curious of the statistics contained in this latest CARA report.

And that has to do with the number of Priests in active ministry in the United States and elsewhere.

The number of priests in the United States has dropped from 59,192 in 1970 to 37,181 today.  

That’s a loss of over 22,000 Priests over the course of the past half-century.  

But what is profoundly misleading about the remaining number of Priests presently in service is the fact that no mention is made of their age, the overwhelming majority of whom are in their mid 60s and early 70s, that is, within range of their expected retirement from active ministry.

The fact is that there is a crisis in the number of Priests who are and will be available in the very near future to serve the needs of the Catholic faithful who still regularly practice the Faith, a crisis much more profound than the CARA report on its own indicates.

Of course, CARA itself makes no effort to spin these numbers positively or negatively.  The Center merely reports its findings.  The Center appears to be reputable and I have referred to their studies repeatedly over the course of my postings to this blog.

But then, there will be those with particular agendas, liberal or ultra-conservative (as I refer to them) who will spin these statistics to their own purposes.

Numbers alone can be deceiving.  Statistics alone can be very misleading.

That why I caution those referring to them to make an honest effort to understand what the figures truly represent rather than skew them to their own advantage.

My thoughts, at least, on this Friday the 13th, 2018!