Cleansing Fire

Defending Truth and Tradition in the Lay-Run Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester

Posts Tagged ‘Catholic Stats’

We’re doing something wrong

September 3rd, 2011, Promulgated by Mike

I tell my relatives and best friends, “If you want your children to fight for their faith, send them to public school. If you want them to lose their faith, send them to Catholic school.”*

A two-year, $1 M study of “nearly 2,500 American high school graduates between the ages of 24-39″ was recently conducted by Cardus (a Canadian group that describes itself as “a think tank dedicated to the renewal of North American social architecture”) in partnership with the University of Notre Dame.  The study examined “43 different categories of academic, spiritual and civic life,” with graduates of public, Catholic, private (both religious and secular) and home-school programs being surveyed.  The results were published last week.

So how did Catholic high school graduates fare, compared to all their counterparts?  Well, if secular measures are important to you, the answer would be “Pretty well.”  But if you are a parent (or grandparent) who believes he is paying for a solid Catholic education, “Buyer beware!” might be a more appropriate answer.

For instance, the study determined that, compared to their public high school counterparts, Catholic high graduates were  “less likely to believe in moral absolutes, to respect the authority of the Catholic Church, to believe in the infallibly of Scripture or to condemn premarital sex.”

A story on the survey goes on to report,

“In many cases, the difference in outcomes between Catholic and Protestant Christian schools is striking,” the study states. “Catholic schools provide superior academic outcomes, an experience that translates into graduates’ enrollment in more prestigious colleges and universities, more advanced degrees and higher household income.

“At the same time, however, our research finds that the moral, social and religious dispositions of Catholic school graduates seem to run counter to the values and teachings of the Catholic church,” the study concludes. “For example, students graduating from Catholic schools divorce no less than their public school counterparts, and significantly more than their Protestant Christian and non-religious private school peers. Similarly, having attended Catholic school has no impact on the frequency with which those graduates will attend church services, and Catholic school graduates are less likely to serve as leaders in their churches.”

The study also found, “On every measure of traditional religious beliefs, Protestant Christian school graduates show significantly more adherence to the church teachings than their peers, findings that hold up after rigorous controls, indicating the impact of the Protestant Christian school on the long-term religious beliefs of their graduates.”

The authors of the study concluded, “Protestant Christian schools play a vital role in the long-term faith of their students, while Catholic schools seem to be largely irrelevant, sometimes even counterproductive to the development of their students’ faith.”

Other results of interest to Catholic parents include the following:

  • The net effect of Protestant and religious home education was an increase in graduates’ reported attendance at religious services, while Catholic and non-religious private school grads reported a decrease in attendance.
  • Protestant and religious home educated graduates showed a net increase in belief in the Bible as an infallible guide for personal life and behavior, that premarital sex is wrong and that divorce is wrong, while Catholic and non-religious private schooling showed a net decrease in these beliefs.
  • Catholic schools – whose administrators also reported to Cardus a higher emphasis than their Protestant peers on academic achievement – produced more graduates attending top 20 universities and significantly more attending Carnegie Research I and II universities.

The Cardus team again summarized their findings: “This research finds that Catholic schools are providing higher quality intellectual development, at the expense of developing students’ faith and commitment to religious practices. Protestant Christian schools, conversely, are providing a place where students become distinct in their commitment to faith, but are not advancing to higher education any more than their public school peers. Graduates of Catholic schools and non-religious private schools show a significant advantage in years of education, while Protestant Christian school graduates have statistically identical attainment levels as their public school peers. Additionally, graduates of Protestant Christian schools attend less competitive colleges than both their Catholic and non-religious private school peers.”

The researchers suggested the differences between Catholic and Protestant schools may be directly tied to the institutions’ priorities, as measured by an included survey of over 150 private school administrators in the U.S. and Canada.

“These outcomes closely reflect the values reported by school administrators,” the study concludes. “While Catholic school administrators rank university as the top priority more than any other option, more Protestant Christian school administrators rank family as the top emphasis of the school.”

Full story here.

Cardus report here.

——————–

*This quote is widely attributed to Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (see here, for example), although I have been unable to determine from which of His Excellency’s many books, homilies, TV shows, speeches, etc. it comes.

Tags: ,
Comments: 12 Comments »

Church weddings (and baptisms) in decline

July 16th, 2011, Promulgated by Mike

News Tribune, a North Central Illinois newspaper, has posted a report on a local trend away from church weddings. The story includes this analysis …

Among the reasons why civil weddings have grown in popularity:

  • Flexibility: Churches may restrict not only the venue but other elements such as music selection and personalized vows
  • Brevity: Civil weddings can be concluded in minutes
  • Participation: Guests may be more likely to witness the exchange of vows at a non-religious ceremony held at the same site as the reception
  • Interfaith marriages: Couples of differing faiths may prefer to bypass required pre-marital counseling or religious instruction.

With regard to its local Catholic Church the report says,

One denomination that does track marriage numbers regionally is the Roman Catholic Church. In the 26-county Diocese of Peoria, the number of church weddings has fallen 27 percent since 2000 — from 923 weddings performed in 2000 to 672 in 2010  — according to the Official Catholic Directory.

The Rev. William Gardner, pastor of St. Valentine and St. Mary churches in Peru, said he wasn’t surprised by the trend.

Gardner said he’s observed a growing shift toward secular ceremonies and attributes it to a societal change: Marriage is viewed more as “a partnership of life and love,” he said, and less as a solemn institution for raising children.

By way of context, the number of Catholic church weddings nationwide declined 33% from 2000 to 2010.

Here in DOR the story is even worse. The 2000 OCD reports 1,962 local Catholic marriages while the 2010 edition shows 1,049, for a drop of some 47% in just 10 years.

Given that trend it is not too surprising that DOR’s number of infant baptisms is also in sharp decline, falling 44% (from 4,637 to 2,579) over the same time period. (The nationwide drop was 16% over those same 10 years.)

Decades of “Jesus loves you – don’t litter” catechesis would seem to be having their predictable effect.

UPDATE: Mark Gray of CARA has also addressed the subject of the declining number of Catholic marriages.  See here.

Tags: ,
Comments: 5 Comments »

The class of 2011

April 27th, 2011, Promulgated by Mike

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) has released the results of its annual survey of candidates for ordination to the priesthood.  The Class of 2011 includes 480 members, 329 (69%) of whom participated in the survey. Of those 329, 275 are scheduled for ordination as priests for 128 different dioceses and archdioceses, with the remaining 54 anticipating ordination as members of religious orders.

Some of CARA’s findings include …

  • The average age of ordinands for the Class of 2011 is 34. The median age (midpoint of the distribution) is 31.
  • 8% are converts.
  • 82% report that both of their parents are Catholic.
  • 34% have a relative who is a priest or a religious.
  • 53% come from families of four or more children.
  • 47% attended a Catholic elementary school, 39% attended a Catholic high school and 39% attended a Catholic college.
  • 70% reported praying the Rosary regularly and 65% reported regular participation in Eucharistic adoration.

The same two figures that caught my attention last year continue to seem noteworthy:  About half of the potential ordinands come from large families and about half of them attended Catholic elementary schools.  As I wrote then,

Large Catholic families and Catholic schools continue to be seedbeds of vocations (see here and here for similar results from another survey). It’s too bad we don’t have very many of either in DOR.

Also of interest is the fact that 12% of the diocesan ordinands report that they had lived in the diocese or eparchy for which they will be ordained less than a year before they entered the seminary.  Last year this number was 10%, while in 2009 it was 17% and in 2008 it was 16%.  CARA does not speculate as to the reasons for this phenomena or its apparent decline the last two years. It is, however, an open secret that many orthodox men who were raised in a “progressive” diocese like DOR and who have felt a call to the priesthood, have found it necessary to seek ordination elsewhere (see here).  In other words, DOR’s “priest shortage” is, in part, a self-inflicted wound.

Full CARA report here.

Tags: ,
Comments: 12 Comments »

Selected stats online for U.S. dioceses

March 6th, 2011, Promulgated by Mike

In obedience to St. Paul’s admonition to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5), we note that FutureChurch.org has an interesting and potentially helpful statistics utility available on its site.

The data comes from the Official Catholic Directory and is a subset of what one would find in its annual issues.  This limited data is available for every diocese, archdiocese and eparchy in the United States, but only for the years 1976, 1991, 2001, 2004, 2006 and 2009.

A couple of examples follow …



The utility may be found here.

Tags:
Comments: 12 Comments »

CARA’s 2010 rerospective

December 30th, 2010, Promulgated by Mike

The days between Christmas and New Years seem to be the prime time for retrospectives with many secular news outlets airing year-in-review pieces featuring what they see as the significant events of the preceding 12 months. (This one from Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News struck me as especially poignant, as nearly all of the 57 recently deceased personalities mentioned were more like household names than historical figures to me.)

CARA’s Mark Gray has also taken a look at the year almost finished and has come up with some “statistical nuggets” that have recently come to light.  A few of the more interesting ones follow.

  • The U.S. Catholic population continues to grow and is projected to exceed 100 million by 2050.
  • At the same time, the number of infant baptisms and marriages in the U.S. Catholic Church has declined in number each year since 2001. In 2009, there were 12.7 infant baptisms and 2.7 marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics. [The 2001 numbers were 15.4 and 3.9, respectively. -Mike] Although nearly all Catholic parents continue to baptize their children in the Church (as the birthrate declines) many Catholics are choosing to get married in non-Catholic houses of worship or secular settings.
  • Yet even as the recent trend in infant baptisms is down slightly, there are still more than enough people joining the Catholic Church each year to sustain population growth. In 2009, The Official Catholic Directory reported 857,410 infant baptisms, 43,279 adult baptisms, and 75,724 receptions into full communion in U.S. dioceses. This totals 976,413 in one year. To put that in context, the number of new Catholics in 2009 would make this one-year cohort of new Catholics approximately the 26th largest membership Christian church in the United States.
  • On the institutional side, if the current trend in parish closures were to continue and current priest projections bear out, there will likely be only 12,520 active diocesan priests and 14,825 parishes in the United States by 2035 (also in OSV).
  • There has been no measurable decline or increase in Mass attendance percentages nationally in the last decade. Just under one in four Catholics attends Mass every week. About a third of Catholics attend in any given week and more than two-thirds attend Mass at Christmas, Easter, and on Ash Wednesday. More than four in ten self-identified adult Catholics attend Mass at least once a month.
  • The average tuition for the first child of Catholic parents attending a parish Catholic primary school for 2008-2009 was $3,383. For that same child the per-pupil cost of education for 2008-2009 was $5,436. This means that only 63% of this child’s per-pupil cost was covered by their tuition.
  • A majority of U.S. Protestants express a belief in the Real Presence and those who believe the Bible is to be taken literally word for word are most likely to do so.
  • 22% of Nones in America (those without any religious affiliation) were raised Catholic.

There is more here, including a glimpse at what CARA is working on for 2011 and Gray’s apologia against charges that he and/or CARA “spin” the data to put the Church in a more favorable light than it deserves.  He concludes by making this point:

There are measurable doses of “unreality” in Church discourse these days. Much of it fashioned around anecdotes and agendas. My promise now and in the year ahead to readers of this blog is that you’ll find none of this unreality here.

Tags:
Comments: 7 Comments »

A different slice of the pie

December 16th, 2010, Promulgated by Mike

I recently called your attention to an article by CARA’s Mark Gray on the interpretation of statistics related to the U.S. Catholic population and Mass attendance. It began with this intriguing line,

Are you Catholic and in need of something to be thankful for this year? The Catholic Church in America is growing and may be primed to grow significantly in the next few decades.

Msgr. Charles Pope of the Archdiocese of Washington has also read that article and has come up with his own take on the numbers.  For instance,

In the early 1950s there were about 35 million Catholics in the US. Today there are are over 75 million. This number however does not distinguish between practicing and non practicing Catholics. It is estimated that just over 80% of Catholics attended Mass each Sunday in the 1950s. Today it is estimated that about 25% of Catholics go each Sunday. That means that in the early 1950s about 28 million Catholics were in Church each Sunday. Today that number, even with a growing Catholic population, has dropped to 19.2 million. In other words, almost 9 million fewer Catholics are in Church now as compared to the 1950s.

Msgr. Pope’s conclusions are worth pondering – and praying over.

In the end, I find looking at the CARA analysis helpful in distinguishing the true problem. The overall number of Catholics is, in fact rising. However the critical factor seems to be that Mass attendance has dropped dramatically since the 1950s, from over 80% to around 20-25% now. This indicates a very critical condition indeed. Tell me any organization in which 80% of its members were inactive that you would call healthy. Our condition is critical. It is helpful to know that we seem to have stabilized at this number. That is, we haven’t gone lower in over ten years. However I am concerned that the 25% number is soft and wonder if it will be stable for long. Rampant secularism, the moral malaise of many, a hostile culture etc. all stand to likely erode that number even further…

In the end, the greatest tragedy is not the numbers per se but the fact that almost 80% of our Catholic brothers and sisters are away from the sacraments, away from the medicine they need, and not having the gospel preached to them. These 80% live in a poisonous culture wherein their mind will increasingly darken without the help of the Sacraments and the Word of God. This is tragic and if we have any real love for them we will not rest until they are restored to God’s house. God asked Cain one day, “Where’s your brother?” And God still asks this of us. We may protest that we have murdered no one. And yet, many of them will die spiritually if we remain indifferent. “Where is your brother?…Where?”

Msgr. Pope’s full article is here.

Tags: ,
Comments: 3 Comments »