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.
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.
Continue reading at Grain of Wheat