www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Parish Life & Evangelization STATISTICS

You may have followed the thread elsewhere on this site on the significance of the Annuario Pontficio data. The exchanges left me a bit confused.

1. Does your Church (here in the U.S., and perhaps Canada) itself publish reliable current and historical data on matters such as the numbers of Faithful who have come to this country from abroad, the numbers who were born here and baptized into your Church, the numbers who are now only nominally members of your Church, the numbers who are active members, the numbers of parishes, convents, monasteries and other institutions formed over the years and the numbers of institutions still active?
2. Does your Church itself publish reliable current and historical data on the number of clergy, monastics and other consecrated religious, as well as candidates for the priesthood, diaconate and religious life over the years, and at present?

1. To the best of my knowledge, no Church has accurate figures on anything beyond nominal membership, and these are misleading due to double counting. Baptisms are recorded at the parish level, and passed up to the Eparchial/Diocesan level, but people baptized in one parish are habitual members of another, sometimes of a different particular Church. The Church does not correlate between baptisms and attendance, nor does it maintain accurate records of transfers between parishes, so that a person registered in Parish A moves and is enrolled in Parish B, without, however, being removed from the rolls of Parish A. And, above all, there is no correlation between baptismal rolls and people who actually show up. The net effect is to overestimate the number of active Eastern Christians by at least a factor of two.

2. On the other hand, Churches do maintain accurate numbers on clergy and religious, if for no other reason than they have to pay their insurance premiums. The accuracy of the number of candidates in presbyteral and diaconal programs, however, is all over the map--though you would think that some Churches would have it easy, seeing as they might only need one hand to count.

Tim,

The figures reported by jurisdiction in Annuario Pontificio are those provided by the jurisdiction and, for those in the US, (should) correspond to the data in the Official Catholic Directory of the US, published annually by PJKenedy & Sons (if I get an opportunity tomorrow, I'll compare a prior year in the OCD to the same year in the AP for a couple of jurisdictions, just to verify that there are no differences). That said, Stuart makes valid points about the factors that artificially inflate numbers.

As well, there are just plain outright errors - some of which get corrected each year, some of which are created each year.

Witness, for example (overlooked in our discussions on the other thread, because we were focused on the US jurisdictions), the Slovak GCC data for the Eparchy of Bratislavia 2009-484,046 versus 2010-20,000

Similarly:

the Ukrainian Exarchate for Great Britain and that for Germany & Scandanavia reported decreases in the number of faithful in that same period of 40,000 and 20,000, respectively (probably getting closer to actual figures), while the Exarchate of Odesa-Krym would have us accept that its numbers increased by 18,000 and the Archeparchy of Lviv by 85,000 (with no corresponding decreases anywhere else);

the Armenians report a drop of 100,000 in the figures for their East European Ordinariate - undoubtedly appropriately;

the Maronites, however, claim a one year gain of 39,000 in the Archeparchy of Tripoli and of 32,000 in the Patriarchal Eparchy of Joubbe, Sarba and Jounieh;

the Chaldeans report an overall increase of 45,000 faithful over that same single year period;

the Malabarese claim to have had an increase of 14,000 in the Metropolitan Archeparchy of Trichur;

the Melkites overall increase is only 11,000, but the data would have us to understand and believe that all but 1,000 of those are attributable to the Australian Eparchy and the Archeparchy of Saida in Lebanon, each claiming 5,000 new faithful;

even the tiny Exarchate of Athens for the Greeks wants to claim an addition of 200 faithful, a 9% increase.

The only number that jumps out at me as likely very accurate is that of Grottoferrata - the Abbey reports a loss of 1 - from 88 to 87.

If anyone believes the increased numbers that I cited to be accurate, I have a cathedral in Antarctica that I'll sell very reasonably - cashier's check only, please.

Many years,

Neil

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that there are "plain lies, damn lies and statistics." I do not suggest any of the data pointed out in Neil's very helpful post fall into any of those categories, but it seems clear that some published data cannot be relied upon and that some ominously negative trends may be obscured by carelessly optimistic numbers. It seems to me that the lack of reliable data on the growth, or decline, of our Churches may be an obstacle that needs to be addressed. Declining numbers need not be a cause for pointless hand-wringing; they may be a helpful wake-up call to hierarchs, clergy and layfolk. If our ecclesiastical ships are losing passengers, we may need to consider more than re-arranging the liturgical deck chairs.

Father Serge added another category, lower than statistics: Church statistics.