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Posted on 01/20/2004 7:24:59 AM PST by Maximilian
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As soon as I heard of Ken Jones' Index of Leading Catholic Indicators,1 I had an intense desire to purchase a copy. The 113-page paperback book contains statistics relating to all aspects of Catholic life: Catholic education, religious orders, Catholic practice and belief, seminarians, nuns, and diocesan priests. Having read the Index, my compliments go out to Mr. Jones. Like myself, Mr. Jones is the father of seven young children, so I understand the sacrifice it was for him to take the time to bring this important information together. He has done an excellent job of presenting clear, irrefutable, unbiased, and undeniable raw data pertaining to the crisis in the Church, and he also provides some important analysis of that data. It is important work, and it is solid evidence supporting what many of us have known for a long time.
Poring over page after page of bar charts, graphs, and tables in the Index, one cannot help but be overwhelmed by the sense of loss. In every category — religious orders, diocesan priests, religious priests, teaching orders, you name it — the decline is sharp, obvious and undeniable.
Being a mathematician, however, I was not content to just read his book cover to cover. Mr. Jones' analysis was good, but he did not view his data the same way a mathematician does. Instantly I saw linear functions, exponential functions, and patterns that we can use to model and make predictions. The numbers, bar charts, figures and statistics gave me a level of excitement and an adrenalin rush that most would have to turn to bungee jumping to achieve.
At the sight of the tables of data, I reached for my computational tools: Maple 8.0, Sigma Plot, SPSS for Windows, and my trusty old Texas Instruments TI-85. Initially I was not sure where to begin, but after careful consideration, I concluded that the most important statistics are those having to do with seminarians. Seminarians are the future of the Church; without priests we will become a different Church. Godfried Cardinal Danneels of Belgium stated in an interview with the Catholic Times in May 2000 that "Without priests the sacramental life of the Church will disappear. We will become a Protestant Church without sacraments. We will be another type of Church, not Catholic." Already we can see this bleak prediction coming to pass as one parish after another is turned over to "Lay Administrators." So the chart having to do with the total number of seminarians2 throughout the better part of the last century is the most significant to us as Catholics.
Now, an initial glance at the bar chart titled "Total Seminarians" seems to indicate that there are essentially two functions: one linear and one exponential. The period prior to 1965 shows a linear increase and the period from 1965 to the present shows an exponential decrease.
We begin our analysis by plotting the graph for the period prior to 1965. This period was one of steady growth, so I found that we could roughly match it with a line of slope 829.331. This means that each year that passed there were approximately 829.3 seminarians more than there had been the previous year. So every ten years there were approximately 8,293 seminarians more than there had been the previous decade.
The growth rate over this period can be expressed as P (for "Preconciliar Growth Rate") as a function of time t, where t is in years and t = 0 in 1920:
Or, expressed as a function of the year:
Where the value of year can range from 1920 to the year 1965.
The growth was actually not perfectly linear, as we can see; in fact it was beginning to accelerate into what appears an exponential growth in the final years from 1940 to 1965. However, let's assume the worst — that the growth had just continued at the linear rate described by P(year). Then the number of seminarians we could have had in the year 2003 would have been approximately:
So, had this growth rate continued, by the year 2003 we would have a total of approximately 73,927 seminarians instead of the current figure of less than 5,000. Below you will see the actual data, and superimposed on it is a projection of P(year), the Preconciliar Growth Function, extending through the year 2002.
It is clear that the period from 1965 onward is nonlinear, so a different technique is required for modeling this period. The exponential decrease from 1965 onward appears similar to a graph of radioactive decay; as it turns out, this period can be modeled by what is commonly called an exponential decay function. Since this period of the Church is commonly called the "Springtime," we shall refer to this function as the Springtime Decay Function S(t), where S, the Springtime Decay, is a function of time t. We begin by taking the log of each of the data points. This gives us an essentially linear data set, to which we can match a line as we did previously for the Preconciliar Growth Function. Now we exponentiate both sides of our equation obtaining the following function:
Or, expressed as a function of the year:
Applying this model we can see that by the year 2065, 100 years from the beginning of the Springtime Decay process, there will be a total of 10 seminarians in the United States. The half-life of this process is 8.19 years, the approximate period of time it takes for the number of seminarians to diminish by ½.
There are some who will argue that this model does not apply. The last two actual data points are higher than the exponential decay function; certainly, according to some, this means that the decline is over, and that all will be back to normal soon. This is wishful thinking, but to accommodate them we turn to the modified exponential decay model. The Modified Springtime Decay Function is not as simple, but it is more accurate:
Or, expressed as a function of the year:
According to this modified decay function there will be 779 seminarians in the year 2065 instead of the 10 predicted using the previous model.
We can obtain a rough estimate of the number of lost vocations by taking the sum from 1965 to the present, in five year increments, of the difference between P(year) and S(actual), where the values for S come from the actual data in Mr. Jones' Total Seminarians table.
This estimate makes two assumptions:
We obtain the following values for each year:
| Year | P(year) | S(actual) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 46,560 | 28,819 | 17,741 |
| 1975 | 50,706 | 17,802 | 32,904 |
| 1980 | 54,853 | 13,226 | 41,627 |
| 1985 | 59,000 | 11,028 | 47,972 |
| 1990 | 63,146 | 6,233 | 56,913 |
| 1995 | 69,293 | 5,083 | 62,210 |
| 2002 | 73,098 | 4,719 | 68,379 |
| TOTAL: 327,746 | |||
According to this rough estimate, approximately 17,741 vocations were lost over the first five-year period, 32,904 were lost over the second five-year period, etc., for a total of 327,746 since 1965.
There is no formula available for the calculation of the number of souls lost as a result of this loss of vocations.
There is one additional set of data that was not included in the Index, and that is data relating to the increasing number of vocations found through the "Traditional" Catholic seminaries, or those seminaries in which the 1962 rite is followed and priests are formed according to preconciliar standards. At the moment these seminaries are relatively new, but the growth is impressive. I was unable to obtain any statistics on the Institute of Christ the King, Sovereign Priest, which has a small presence in our country, but the figures for the graph below were provided courtesy of Fr. James Jackson, rector of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska. Our Lady of Guadalupe, where priests of the FSSP (Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Petri, or Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter) receive their formation, is now in its twelfth year. Since their move from Pennsylvania to Nebraska four years ago they have been operating at maximum capacity. This fall, Academic Year 2003-2004, as in previous years, they had to turn away a large number of candidates due to lack of room in the partially completed seminary.
The noticeable gap at year eight was during their move from Pennsylvania to Nebraska.
Many have asserted that the sudden decline in all aspects of Catholic life that began in 1965 was due to "other factors," such as the influence of "the sixties." But Mr. Jones soundly refutes that argument by including a simple chart3 which shows a marked decline in Church attendance among Catholics from the 1960s to the present while it remained virtually level, with a slight increase, for Protestants. To more fully understand the nature of the crisis we find ourselves in, I highly recommend that every Catholic capable of reading beyond an eighth grade level purchase a copy of the Index and study it.
It is clear from this brief analysis of the data relating to the number of seminarians over the past eighty years that several things are true:
Although we cannot know the will of God, we can ponder the significance of the following:
The author, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army, teaches Computer Science and Mathematics at Lyon College in Batesville, Arkansas where he resides with his wife and seven children.
This is the reality of the Catholic Church. You cannot explain away the reality of tens of millions of Catholics falling away from the practice of the faith by so many individual decisions.
bump
Gratutitous assertion with no backing. And is the direction of the Church given over to the heirarchy or the laity?
Many, many Catholics found the doors of their churches bolted, prior to the arrival of the wrecking crew, so that some new modern monstrosity could take its place.
Last time I checked, the deeds were in the name of the Bishop, not the parishoners.
Millions upon millions of Catholics have sent their children to Catholic schools, often at great personal sacrifice, believing that they were being taught the faith, only to find out that the faith of their children was destroyed through the teaching of insidious heresies using catechism materials that are outright denials of the Catholic faith.
Entirely the fault of the parents. Parents bear the primary responsibility for what goes into their children's minds. If they really didn't like it, they are free to not send them there.
The Church is here to save souls, not condemn them. To say that the tens of millions of souls who have fallen away from the faith deserved to go to Hell is callousness of a high order. The shepherds had a divine obligation to protect their sheep.
Max, don't put words in my mouth. I never said "deserved to go to hell" you dishonest scoundrel. I said if people leave the Church, IT IS THEIR OWN FAULT (barring an excommunication). The sheep have an obligation to follow their shepherds, not to wander off on their own.
Lay Catholics never asked or wanted any of this. They never asked for a new Mass. They never asked for a new morality. They never asked for new catechisms.
From the overwhelmingly positive response to the introduction of Mass in English, I'd say you are totally wrong. Reading historical accoutns of the time show that 75-80% of attendees approved of the changes.
They wanted to continue practicing the Catholic faith, but they were denied that opportunity by the bishops and the parishes and the liberals all acting in the name of Vatican II.
Utter nonesense. The Catholics Faith is still being and will always be practiced in the Catholic Church. You are just displaying your inner schismatic for all to see. Think of how many people have given up devotions at their home. Did the liberals and evil progressive Bishops burst in at gunpoint and say "Stop saying a family Rosary, stop saying grace at meals, stop praying before bed, stop hanging crucifixes and images, and for pitys sake, no more holy water stoops, or will shoot you all dead!"??? Come on Max! The fault of apostacy lies at the feet of the apostates.
Only the despised traditionalists are publishing any of the materials that used to be available. The major publishing houses have gone out of business. The mainstream Church publishes absolutely nothing of Catholic tradition. An ordinary Catholic attending a New Mass parish has no clue that anything ever existed prior to 1962. They deliberately suppress all knowledge of everything that happened before the revolution, just like Orwell described.
I have many books and prayer books and the like published by mainstream sources full of traditional stuff. And I've never seen anything supressing knowledge of pre-1962 material anymore than in 1962 they were supressing knowledge of the books of the 1800's by not continuing to publsih them.
If you have true faith in the Catholic Church, then you know that souls will not voluntarily leave the true Church and the true Faith for greener pastures. If they are given the true Faith, if they are served by true shepherds, if the reality of grace is communicated to them, they will never leave for protestantism or atheism or any other -ism. A few will always fall away, but the mass defections we are currently witnessing can only be a sign that the faithful are being unlawfully denied their rightful heritage which is the fullnes of the Catholic Faith.
Which is it? No one will leave, or a few will fall away?
If mass apostacy is impossible, please explain the Protestant revolt, the flourishing Albigensian heresy, the Arian crisis, Monophysitism, etc.? What happened to St. Cyprian and Augustine's African Church? Where is it today? How about the Church in Egypt or Anatolia?
You sound like a Calvinist heretic here, not a Catholic. People leave the Catholic Church voluntarily all the time. The Bible warns clearly about this.
1 St. John 2.19 They went out from us but they were not of us. For if they had been of us, they would no doubt have remained with us: but that they may be manifest, that they are not all of us.
Honestly, its a good description of folks like you too.
All your thrashing about in the wake of St. Peter's Barque is just going to sink your little lifeboat. Do you have your Sou'wester and Mae West on? You are going to need them.
Max, either each person is responsible for the salvation of their own soul, or at judgement, we will have the Whiners Club, with everyone saying "Lord, I didn't want to sin, but He didn't teach me!" You really think that will carry water? Does God provide for His own if they will but will it or not? Cardinal Rigali will not be answering for my actions, but for his own.
This is the reality of the Catholic Church. You cannot explain away the reality of tens of millions of Catholics falling away from the practice of the faith by so many individual decisions.
I very freely acknowledge it and did so in my post. What the heck are you talking about implying I don't?
Take any set of statistics you want, you'll see the same trend. You seem to prefer church attendance over seminarians. Fine. Take a look at the recent Gallup poll which showed a steady decline in Church attendance by Catholics from 1962 to today, recently reaching its nadir at a point lower than the protestants for the first time ever. There has to be some cause for this trend. Blame it on sunspots if you like. But it's simply disingenuous to pretend that there is no cause, and it is nothing more than tens of millions of individual decisions that share no commonality.
I never made the assertion you are refuting. My position is simple. The destruction of the Church is a direct causal outcome of the result of World War II and the cultural revolution that followed in its wake. The Allied/Communist victory in World War II destroyed the traditional basis of an exclusionary Christian society in Europe and America. The cultural revolution was the natural outcome of trends coming directly out of its aftermath, including the spread of pornography, the atomization of society by suburbanization, the cultural filth produced by the TV and Hollywood, and the universalization of the Birth Control mentality.
This also accounts for the fact that the "peak" of different statistics occurs at different time periods in the 1960-1975 period. Everything does not just suddenly decline starting in 1965. Some waits until 1969 or 1972. Some starts in 1962. Some in 1965.
You are desperately seeking to find any explanation except the plain and obvious one that is staring you right in the face. Why? Why won't you just admit that every one of these problems can be traced back directly to Vatican II?
Because they are not traced back to Vatican II. If the reversal of Vatican II was a solution, we'd see all the apostates flockign to Traditionalist apostolates, which we do not. This says that the problem is not a change of liturgy.
The problem is a tidal wave of atheism, greed, selfishness, and impurity. The trend comes straight out of WWII, with an entire generation sent overseas to fornicate and steal and obsess about saving their own ass for 4-6 years. Their experiences gave birth to modernity in the late 1940's and provided the ready-made market for Playboy, divorce lawyers, and the Pill, all well entrenched by 1962.
Surely you follow the messages of Fatima. Did Our Lady of Fatima give any warning about the dangers of a new Ecumenical Council and changing the Mass? Or did she warn about a new World War, Communism, a laspe of prayer, and licentuous impurity and immodesty?
Shall I wait for the 12th of Never for an honest answer out of you to this query?
WHOA. Spoken like a true anti-American. Hermann, I do believe you are actually French.
Do we have Free Will or not?
Either people freely walked out the door, careful not to let it hit them in the a**, or they were shoved. If it was not an individual decision, it must have been somethign done by physical compulsion.
Since you ridicule my assertion that they walked freely out the door, of necessity, you must assert that the Priests have foreced tens of millions out of the Church and somehow gotten into their minds to steal away their faith.
This is some sort of bizzarre Jansenist determinism you are spouting.
Really, there is no need to complicate things. Concupiscence and free will are more than sufficient to explain millions apostasizing.
But if you still won't accept this, please tell me the method of physical compulsion used to force people not to come to Church and to make them give up the infused virtue of faith in their mind and soul.
WHOA. Spoken like a true anti-American. Hermann, I do believe you are actually French.
Chalk up one vote from a so-called Catholic Traditionalist against Our Lady of Fatima's warnings.
I'll be keeping a tally. Anyone taking bets on how many more will bite?
PS. Deb - I'm German-Norse. Trust me. Very, very, German, very, very Norse. Not a drop of French blood, near as I can tell, anywhere in the past 500-1000 years.
This is largely true. Things that we in our decadent culture label as "innocent" (such as pin-up girls, condoms, etc.) were prevalent among the "greatest" generation. These paved the way to the things that Hermann names.
I agree that WWII was an antecedent causal factor. It set the stage. But the Church does not collapse because of external factors. When the faith is strong, then external circumstances just make it even stronger.
The Allied/Communist victory in World War II destroyed the traditional basis of an exclusionary Christian society in Europe and America.
I agree that the Allied/Communist victory swept away traditional political foundations in some European countries. But the Church was still standing strong. It was in the 1950s when the Vatican signed a model concordat with Spain making Catholicism the only officially recognized religion. The Church was the last bulwark against the destruction of Christian society. Until Vatican II and the documents on Religious Liberty, Ecumenism, and Nostra Aetate.
Evelyn Waugh provided an outstanding analysis. His trilogy of WWII "Sword of Honour" (also called Men at Arms) described the "unconditional surrender" of European Christian civilization. But he saw the Catholic Church as the only beacon of light preserving all that was best. All the more reason why he was crushed when Vatican II came along and the Church sold out to all the phony theories that had already taken hold of the political situation.
So no one would agree with you more than Evelyn Waugh when it comes to the role of WWII in the destruction of traditional Western Christian civiliation. But he was very clear that the Church had remained immune until Vatican II. The trilogy was written throughout the fifties, but when he went to write a new preface for a one-volume edition in 1964, he wrote:
"On reading the book I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries.... It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour, that the Church was susceptible of change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent. "I can't find the rest of the preface on-line, but this quote is from an article by Ralph McInerny who goes on to comment:
"Waugh was a convert to Catholicism, and like many for whom the doctrine, ritual, and culture of Catholicism represented the very antithesis to modern decadence, he found Vatican II a severe test, if not of his faith, at least of his loyalty. He was appalled by the sanctioned and unsanctioned changes made in the wake of the council. He communicated his views to John Cardinal Heenan, and their correspondence has been published... The fact that the very aspects of the modern world from which he was fleeing should suddenly be regarded as worthy models for the Church elicited memorable prose from Waugh."
are innocent only by comparison to the depths of depravity plumbed by our present culture. And they really weren't as innocent as legend would have them ... google up < WWII Nose Art >; you'll get pictures of paintings on combat aircraft that range from the patriotic to the pornographic (with some overlap between the two categories).
I'm with you on this one.
Very, very, German, very, very Norse. Not a drop of French blood, near as I can tell, anywhere in the past 500-1000 years.
If one were "very, very" Norse he wouldn't be German, and vice-versa. And if you family tree goes back 1000 years, then there wasn't any distinction between Germany and France, so you may have more than "a drop of French blood" after all. Charlemagne would be considered a German by today's standards.
Is Ramirez Red and White still there? How about Richter's Department store?
I intend to visit their graves with my sons in the near future. Since everyone is working,it is hard to come up with a time we all can go.
We lived in a partially converted,abandoned Masonic temple for several months. Ugh. What experiences I had along the river. It is a true affirmation of the strength of the Faith that my sons and I are all well and Catholic. My husband went from Del Rio to Nam and was shot down there.
For some years,shortly after his death I got confused and caught up with the spirit of Vat II,it was pretty bad and I can truthfully say "been there,done that,grew up".Don't let all this back and forth even if a bit venomous at times discourage you. Arm yourself visibly with the Bible,the CAtechism and the encyclicals of the last few years,pray unceasingly and speak out the Truth at every oppurtunity and despite the flak and the rocking the Barque will stay afloat and it is a wild and wonderful ride Home.
In fact this was not the intent of Vatican II. Pope John XXIII, in his opening address, specifically warned against any criticism, anathemas, negativity, etc. He said we wanted to throw open the windows of the Church. He said that the goal was "aggiornamento" -- updating the Church. For this he was named 1962 Time Man of the Year.
Nepotism. Plus she can still send you to your room, you know! ;-)
That war,WW I,was to be the war to end all war. It was a culmination to the rallying cry of the French Revolutionists "down with the crown and the tiara"."End the tyranny of monarchs and popes".The oath against modernism was an attempt by the Pope to squelch it before it infected the laity. That is why he required all priests to vow to combat modernity,to protect the millions of lay people who were unaware of the battle raging.
After WW II,the enemy was sure they had won both crown and tiara. Unfortunately the majority of Catholics didn't know it and neither did most of the priests and bishops. But by then the enemy had infiltrated the hierarchy,the evil doers in the hierarchy were stunned that the Church in America was actually healthy and growing attracting loads of converts and ordaining many priests.They knew that measures had to be taken in order to accomplish their mission,to turn the world over to the "godpeople" who would rule the peasants.
Vatican II offered them one more opurtunity to overthrow the Church. Men in high places managed to highjack and circumvent and convolute all matter of things and thus we find ourselves where we are today. But believe me their intent was not to still be battlling with us.
It is tiring and depressing much of the time but I see a turning and God willing we will win this battle before a new onslaught from elsewhere occurs. But no matter where it comes from the "evil one" is the driving force and God will prevail,it's up to us to remain in His hands,doing His will.
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