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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.
What's there to be grateful for? Millions of deaths and half the world enslaved? Saving Uncle Joe Stalin's chestnuts? All the new cases of veneral disease brought back? All the post-war divorces that gave the jump start to the divorce industry? The Veterans in my family realize what a stupid and brutal war it was.
If you think I'm being vile, why not look up how many condoms the US Army distributed per month during WWII? Why not ask an older German lady what the loaded question "Spazierengehen Fraulein?" meant when coming from a Army man in 1946?
Here's a vote from another so-called Catholic Traditionalist who obviously didn't have the benefit of your Fatima wisdom:
I am worried by the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning aginst the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul....I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the univeral flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.
A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, "Where have they taken Him?"
-----Pope Pius XII
Good, I think it is pretty obvious, unlike with the post-war aftermath of WWI, which didn't have the results we see now.
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.
My dad's family was very, very 100% German. My mom's family is very, very 100% Norse (Anglo-Norman and Norwegian). We can trace them back 500-1000 years. Hence my statement.
And Charlemagne was a German - Kaiser Karl der Grosse, holding court at Aachen (not Aix-La-Chappelle), in the German language, not a Roman tongue. The real French are really German Franks. The short dark haired "French" are really Gallo-Romans.
But I'm not even a Frank because my dad's family is pure Allemanian from Switzerland, the Palatinate, Alsace, Baden, and environs.
Please enlighten us Hermann.
Were the Allies wrong to save the world from Hitler?
Were they wrong to stop him from exterminating the Jews and likely Catholics next?
Should the evil American fornicators have stood by and done nothing while the occultist Hitler moved to invade all of Europe to establish his empire?
Was Pius XII wrong to house and feed thousands of Italian Jews who took refuge in the Vatican?
Was Pius XII wrong to oppose Hitler's plans???
If America had done nothing would Europe be a Catholic nirvana today, or would Catholicism be all but extinct as Hitler envisioned?
Not so! Pius XII was full speed ahead for collaboration with the Allies/Communists despite the fact that Catholic Europe was on the other side (willingly or not). Fish rot from the head. As Mary Ball Martinez put it in "The Undermining of the Catholic Church" (I can't reccomend this book enough) of Pius XII in WWII:
"His priority? Jews, not Catholics."
Lest we forget, it was Pius XII who appointed Bugnini and Antonelli in 1947, and Pius XII who initiated the planning of Vatican II, carried into effect by his less than forthright sucessor pretending that he had come up with the idea on his own. Judaizing agents of B'nai Brith and the AJC like Cardinal Bea and Fr. Malachi Martin were appoitnees of Pius XII.
Yes, the Church, considered as a whole can and will always preserve all that is best. But the institution has been in revolutionary hands since the death of Pius XI, following a course plotted by Cardinal Rampolla at the turn of the century. Outwardly, this no longer can appear so.
Do you own a history book? Or do you not view the Jewish Holocaust as important?
"His priority? Jews, not Catholics."
There is something seriously unholy going on with you Hermann.
Since Hitler was not after the world, it did not need saving from him. His interest - destroying and subjugating Soviet Russia. Was it worth it to destroy Germany to save Communism?
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!
Should the evil American fornicators have stood by and done nothing while the occultist Hitler moved to invade all of Europe to establish his empire?
Lest you forget, France and Britain declared war on Hitler, not the other way around. Left to himself, it is likely he would have made do with what he was interested in - the riches of Soviet Russia. Invading and occupying the rest of Europe was a defensive burden imposed on Germany by Britain to prevent Hitler from achieving his aims of a Russian Empire for Germany (rather hypocritical from the leader of the British Empire with all its subjugated Indians and Africans and Maylays and Arabs, no?).
Was Pius XII wrong to house and feed thousands of Italian Jews who took refuge in the Vatican?
No.
Was Pius XII wrong to oppose Hitler's plans???
Yes. Pius XII is a spiritual leader and should have used spiritual weapons - like excommunicating Hitler - if he was a spiritual problem. He had no business orchestrating spy netowrks infiltrated by criminals and communists and endangering the Church in this manner. Ever read Loftus and Aaron's work "Unholy Trinity" about the Rote Kapelle and Schwarze Kapelle? Great read. Maybe I'll post some of the embarrassing State Department documents from it.
Do you think it right for the current Pope to oppose American plans in Iraq? Is that really why he is Pope?
If America had done nothing would Europe be a Catholic nirvana today, or would Catholicism be all but extinct as Hitler envisioned?
Probably the former, and I am unaware of any writing of Hitler where he "envisioned" the latter outcome. First, Catholicism was quite free of Hitler in Italy and Spain, since other men ran those countries. Second, Catholic Slovakia and Croatia were being run by Catholics (Slovakia by a Priest, Fr. Tiso) as Catholic States, not run by Hitler. Third Catholic France got into trouble by picking a fight it should not have. Even so, Hitler seemed happy to leave it alone to Catholics like Petain and Laval. Fourth, Catholic Belgium was intended by Hitler to be left to the hands of Leon DeGrelle, founder of the Christus Rex Party. Fifth, Catholic Ukraine was an ally of Hitler and established as the leaders of that country by him. Sixth, this leaves the only areas in trouble as Catholics in Germany and Poland. Hitler was not opposed to the Church carrying out its spiritual mission in his greater Germany provided it steered completely clear of politics. He was not about to slaughter half his countrymen and all Poles, if for no other reason than he saw all Germans as the chosen race, and a vast number of the Poles as Polonized Germans (anyone who looked "Aryan", for which they were given racial ceritificates). It is very likely that after Hitler's death, Naziism would have naturally been moderated in its authoritarian stance, since it was a cult of personality with no plausible successor. It is not reasonable, reading about Hitler's health problems, to imagine him living through the 1950's war or not. And the Church was the largest counter organization in the country and would always be a force to be reckoned with. Hitler found it impossible to subvert it during 12 years of authoritarian control. Its extremely unlikely he could have ever suceeded when 2/3 of the country's population (Bavaria, Rhineland, Baden, Bohemia, Austria, Upper Silesia, West Prussia, Westphalia) was Catholic, and most of the populace armed (contrary to other propaganda Germans had long had personal firearms, until the US Army boys came and confiscated, errr, "liberated" them all).
Lastly, for all of Hitler's persecutions, the German Church still saw through it to offer a Solemn Requiem for Hitler upon the announcement of his death on 5/1/45, at the direction of Cardinal Bertram of Breslau, head of the German Bishops. How bad could it have "really" been (as opposed to the post-war propaganda put out to make Catholics look like victims for political reasons) to have done that when it was obvious and had been for some time that it was all over but the crying? Apparently, Cardinal Betram was being quite sincere to his true beliefs when he ordered it.
You should do some work of seperating out convenient post-war propaganda from actual occurances. Simple point - if Hitler really meant to wipe out the Church, then he could have simply rounded up all the Priests and Bishops and Seminarians one day and shot them, like the Soviets did, or like he did with recalcitrant Communists. He didn't because he wasn't out to wipe out the Church.
Its not important like it is made out today - the central event of world history. Certainly no more important than the massive slaughter of Germans, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, etc. during and after WWII.
5 million Russian died in Operation Keelhaul, when we deported them back to the love bursts of Uncle Joe's machine guns. Was that any less a crime? How about the 3 million Germans and 1 million Poles who died when forcibly expelled from their homelands in Silesia, Prussia, and Galacia? The 1 or 2 million Germans burnt alive in aerial bombardment of German cities?
I'm sure you can tell me how many Jews died in WWII. Can you tell me how many Americans? How many Russians? how many Germans? How many Italians?
No? Are Jewish lives worth remembering more than the lives of variosu sorts of Christian Europeans?
I wouldn't say vile but you certainly seem oddly and extremely bitter about something.
If you truly believe that American GI's invented wartime sexual immorality then two things we can conclude are that you are naive in the extreme and historically ignorant.
Yes, good point. WWII was just finishing the work of WWI.
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"
Very true. In our own country we saw during this time the imposition of the income tax, the creation of the Federal Reserve paper money system, the creation of standing armies, and female suffrage.
After WW II,the enemy was sure they had won both crown and tiara.
And they weren't entirely wrong.
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.
Very interesting analysis.
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.
Yes, they were finishing the work they had started.
But believe me their intent was not to still be battlling with us.
All your points have been so interesting up to this point, I'd like to know more about what you think the "intent" was. When I see events like the recent Fatima Interfaith Conference, it makes me think that business as usual is right on schedule for those in control of the process.
Hermann, Hermann, Hermann!!
Something about the above statement bothers me a great deal.
I hope you can guess what it is.
Are you angry that the Allies stopped the Holocaust?
Yep. Houston, we have a problem.
How in the world were ghettoized Jews a "subversive element" in Germany?
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)?
We didn't kill them all, did we?
Hermann, do you have a problem with Jews?
Because we weren't and instead we are still battling I state with assurance that they have not yet won. What's more I think that they won't.Have you read the book by Msgr. Hugh Benson,entitled "Lord of the World",it's a chiller and a thriller and provides lots of food for thought.
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