I have not been writing articles for a while (and probably won’t be doing much) for several reasons, but I am sharing some new graphs and charts that I’ve put together for an upcoming project that builds upon my prior attempt to build the CARA-Georgetown University dataset of Catholic statistics in the United States backwards, including some new info on converts, how there were more causes beyond just Vatican II involved, and on many of the uncertainties involved in such a project.
The biggest stories, or new points of emphasis versus my article on it from earlier this year, is some positive signs over the last few years, as well as some hints that things were declining for Catholics in the United States by some metrics from the 1920s onward, which point, as I’ve argued in several of my last articles, that modernity as a whole, as both an ideology and as a neural psychosis, is the cause of our current struggles and not justthe last council, although things happening around the council certainly don’t seem to have fixed the problem.
We can only fix the problems and challenges around us, ultimately, by first fixing ourselves by prioritizing living the Catholic life first, which is, among other reasons, why I’ve been writing less here.
Catholic Statistics (Web Version) (Expanded Version of CARA Dataset)
Catholic Statistics (Google Sheets Version) (Expanded Version of CARA Dataset)
While I continue to see many challenges in the numbers, I don’t want to encourage despair, so this is not a fear-mongering article, just a few bits of data and many graphs, all of which come from this slideshow presentation, to provide hopefully some helpful context and numbers beyond debates that too often, as I’ve seen in myself, are often ideological, too anecdotal, too abstract.
Please let me know of any issues you see in the following, especially before next week.
Thanks so much!
Sources (Partial List)
The base dataset, charts, and graphs were primarily calculated by me from the CARA-Georgetown data at https://cara.georgetown.edu/faqs but with additions from various U.S. diocesan, Catholic, and secular media, and other research data to backdate data before 1965. Some pre-1950 data is estimated by interpolation.
My most common source was various online scans of the Annuario Pontificio and the Official Catholic Directory, but here is a (rather unprocessed and incomplete) set of links that I used to garner some of the key numbers, but all the numbers do have an argument behind them. My methodology and sources are explained in more detail here and here:
https://mysecretismine.com/newsletter-post/historical-stats-being-catholic-in-1900-1965-2005/
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2016/08/18/catholic-school-system-we-know-it-must-change/
https://archive.org/details/officialcatholic1930unse/page/n245/mode/2up
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2011/05/12/where-converts-are-made/
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