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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.
Precisely my point. We are incessantly harped upon to remember the 6 million Jews. But nary a Catholic could say how many of his own religious compatriots were slaughtered in this same fratricide that he might offer a prayer for their eternal rest.
Charity starts at home, and radiates outward from there.
Great compassion can and should be shown for the Jewish victims of Hitler from Catholics as soon as Catholics recover a horror and compassion for the fate of their own brothers in the same conflict and a realization that their butchers may be the WWII vet living right down the street from them who "just took orders" to firebomb a city or cut-off distribution of food to civilians or to shoot up a village of harmless farmers grazing their cows.
The "heroic" WWII vet bombers used the spires of Christendom as their method of spotting and directing a rain of fire from the sky on Germany, Italy, France, etc. The better of them, like my great-uncle, have hung their heads in shame for sixty years over what they did, not prattled on about how just and worthy they were.
Precisely. That's why they were ghettoized.
We didn't kill them all, did we?
Only because Germany had outright criminal trash like Odlio Globocnik running things on the ground in Poland, while the US did not. It wasn't for some people's lack of trying in the US, if you go back and read the propaganda of the times, esp. in California.
Hermann, do you have a problem with Jews?
No.
Sometime, you should find and read Joseph Roddy's article "How the Jews Changed the Catholic Church", published in 1966 in Look Magazine in the aftermath of Vatican II. Its online and its about the above.
Are you angry that the Allies stopped the Holocaust?
You are suffering from a myth. We didn't stop the holocaust. We let it go churning right on till it was almost all over and nearly every Jew in Hitlers grasp was dead. Did you forget already - the US, Britain, etc. all refused to let Hitler release Jews to them for resettlement or to let them go to Palestine.
We didn't fight WWII because of the Holocaust. We fought to prevent Germany from becoming a fellow superpower, conveniently (for the US), sacrificing Britain's superpower status along the way.
Again, go back and look at the propaganda of the times. It was all about Hitler taking over the world, not about saving Jews. The US and Britain didn't give a damn about the Jews and their fate, nor did the generality of the US and British populace. It would nto have motivated them to fight. It was tough enough motivating Americans to fight with threats of Hitler conquering the world with no real direct threat to their lives from Hitler (unlike in blitzed Britain).
"The Holocaust" as a historical phenomena etched in people's consciousness is a creation of the 1970's. Prior to that time, if you pick up a WWII history (like Eisenhower's or Churchill's), or an old Encyclopedia, it will mention in about a paragraph (if it mentions it at all) that Hitler persecuted and killed Jews (not using the term "Holocaust" since it was not yet appllied to the historical event). The movement of it to center stage of the period's history is something from only the past 25 years.
They invented it on an unparalleled scale, since they had from 1942-1944 to sit on their hands doing nothing in Britain, followed by 1945-1947 sitting on their hands in Germany doing nothing. It is the first time in history a massive Army is raised and sent abroad with nothing to do but fornicate for three years, fight for one, and fornicate for another three years. Most armies are raised to fight from the start.
Its one thing that during war, it may be expected that some troops will take occasional sexual liberties in between fighting. Occasional sins can be repented and struggled agaisnt. Its another to leave them for years with that as the only thing to do. Such activity over a long term coarsens and destroys the mind and soul, as demonstrated by the utter collapse of civility and decency since 1945.
You are missing my point. You have a state run by a bunch of gangsters up from the gutters. What would you expect them to do to their self-proclaimed enemy number one?
I'm not apologizing for it, but pointing out that little else could have been expected from them. If it is thus a supposed concern of another party (like the US and Britain), they should take into acount the character of who they are dealing with an act accordingly to protect this perceived interest.
"Over paid, over sexed, and over here"?
No a Church that allies itself with Soviet Russia to expunge the Nazis is one that has lost is moral compass.
You seem to be suffering from the "Hitler the only Mosnter" syndrome. Many of us think that he should have been left to a slugfest with Stalin, with the good guys coming in to mop up the remains of both.
Heck, you don't even say Hitler should have been excommunicated, unless he was a "spiritual problem," whatever the hell that means.
No, I'm not trying to reinterpret what Pius XII was thinking by using temporal weapons he didn't have in place of spiritual weapons he did. Me personally, I think Hitler should have been excommunicated before the war for his assaults on the Church in 1937-1938, along with an interdict of all of Germany to foment social unrest. That is what a real Pope, like a St. Gregory VII, would have done.
"Over paid, over sexed, and over here"?
Oooo! Oooo! Oooo! Me! Pick me! I know!
Its an eminently American point of view, first brought to my attention by my WWII Army Air Force (Bomber) vet great-uncle, and seconded by several conversations with Joe Sobran on this historical subject.
It is not a "rah, rah, rah, Roosevelt is great" point of view.
Did anyone recently hear what ex-SecDef Robert MacNamara said of his role in planning the WWII bombing campaigns in "The Fog of War":
"We killed 90,000 Japanese civilians in one night. Women and children. Is that moral? Do we have a law against that? ... LeMay told me that he thought, if we lost this war, we would both be tried as war criminals. But we didn't lose, we won. But how is it that if you lose, it's a crime against humanity, but if you win, it's moral?"
http://esoteria.typepad.com/tuxedo/2004/01/errol_morris_ha.html
Another striking lesson for me on this topic was reading of the reaction of horror of Fr. Feeney (yes, the Fr. Feeney) in 1945 to the news that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been nuked, especially since they were centers of Catholicism and the Jesuits in Japan. The horror he expressed is simply absent from most Americans on this topic.
No, I don't care what you think, because I already know who you are and what your agenda is.
As I said to you about 1 year ago - 225 years ago, my ancestors with other Americans of like mind fought a war to kick people like you out of this country and back to Britain. Its too bad you've returned with your obnoxious ideas. Don't expect to sell them to me though.
The gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
A phrase on the minds and lips of many Englishmen during WWII regarding US servicemen
Truthful facts are objective and knowable by all.
It is a fact that the Jews were subversive to the Nazis because the Nazis were utterly opposed to the Jews remaining as they were.
The alternatives are obviously false. The Nazis and Jews were neither allies nor neutral towards each other. Therefore, it must be expected the Nazis would go for the throat, as Hitler violently warned the world on 1/30/39 in a Reichstag speech:
"If the international finance-Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations into a world war yet again, then the outcome will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
http://www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/hitler-19390130.shtml
The world's total lack of meaningful concern for the known fate of the Jews under Hitler shows clearly that this was not any motive in our actions in WWII. It is a gloss applied later to make a quest for superpower status by three opposing factions (America, Soviets, Nazis) look glorious and morally appealing on our part.
To use a later gloss to justify prior actions is ridiculous and a sham. If the prior explanations of the day no longer carry water, the original quest has to be rejected as poorly grounded in right motives.
The orignial context was a consideration of motives for war:
Were they wrong to stop him from exterminating the Jews and likely Catholics next?They didn't stop it, did they? And this wasn't the reason we went to war, was it? And America had the same sort of exclusion of Jews from society as Germany did into the 1950's, didn't it? And the Jews weren't being exterminated until the rest of the world refused to let them migrate out, post 1941, were they? Nobody wanted them! What was Nazi Germany supposed to do with a subversive element? Mollycoddle them? Did we Mollycoddle the Japanese in the US and Latin America (yes, we went and rounded them up in Peru and Mexico and elsewhere too)? Save yourself from the modern propaganda!
Again, stopping the slaughter of Jews was not a motive of our going to war (1) because it wasn't happening when we did go to war, but afterwards 1942-1944, (2) we never made stopping the slaughter a priority, although we were begged by the Jews to do so (i.e. bomb Auscwitz, bomb the railways leading to there, etc. - we bombed the Buna Synthetic Rubber factory at Birkenau, but not the gas chambers and crematoria right next door), (3) we really didn't want all those Jews anyway, although we could have taken them in, (4) the actual outcome of mass slaughter was the known and expected outcome by all parties involved - nobody was surprised, and it was in the news throughout WWII, as a review of newspapers from the time readily shows.
The actions of all involved do not show a motive of saving Jewish lives as being operative at the time. Bluntly, Germany considered them subversive, and we didn't care. Therefore, positing the stopping of the slaughter as our motive and justification for war is historically false (aside from its numeric difficulties - it is hardly "worth" the lives of 40 million to attempt to save the lives 10 million Jews - no matter how you balance the scales - expectations of attaining the result and proportionality of means are two of the tests for just cause in war - if all lives are equally valuable one cannot justify the known and unavoidable deaths of four people to save the life of just one other - but of course, such reasoning was not what as used to justify the war).
Which is what I meant by saying it is a non-American p.o.v.Even those who find Roosevelt odious hold to it. It is American dogma. Joseph Sobran is a good example of one who is vilified as anti-semitic and anti-American for uttering these kind of heresies.
"We as head of the Church refused to call Christians to a crusade to free the Russian people. ... National Socialism has had a more ominous effect on the German people than has Marxism on the Russians, so that only a total reversal of German policies, particularly of those relating to the Jews, could make any move on the part of the Holy See possible." (Pius XII, Consistorial Allocution, 1946, quoted in "Undermining the Catholic Church" by Mary Ball Martinez)
In his mind at least, stopping the deaths of Jews was more important than the overwhelming slaughter and destruction of Catholics and Protestants and Orthodox necessary to achieve it, or the freedom and liberty of the Church in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Again, familiarity with Fatima makes us realize that this is the Pope fighting spiritual wars with ineffective temporal weapons - and against the wrong enemy. Mary did not warn us that "Germany will spread her errors" but "Russia will spread her errors". Yet the Pope picked Russia and her errors over Germany and her errors as the primary threat to the Church and mankind. The wisdom or foolishness of this history is for you to decide.
That takes real nerve to bash a good Pope like Pius XII. Don't ever accuse traditionalists of being their own Pope. Your latest comments prove that in yourself.
Cut the "we" cr**. No one hates America like you do except for a European. I don't believe for one second you are an American.
What "anti-Semitism",
You, Hermann. It's you.
Yawn. Again, Pius XII gave us Bugnini and Antonelli and their Concilium who gave us the New Mass. Credit shoudl go where it belongs.
Don't ever accuse traditionalists of being their own Pope. Your latest comments prove that in yourself.
The comparison between criticizing political forays of a Pope to matters of spiritual obedience is nonsensical. I'm not under an obligation to follow the political opinions of the Pope. You are obliged not to be a schismatic.
Cut the "we" cr**. No one hates America like you do except for a European. I don't believe for one second you are an American.
Last I checked, I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of parents whose ancestors had been in America since the 1600-1700's.
Hate America? Be serious woman.
You, Hermann. It's you.
Your lack of examples gives simply another demonstration of your willingness to fling slurs without evidence, as with your beloved pejorative "Neo-Catholic".
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