[Torie]

How do you define shrinkage, since the Catholic Church counts adherents as for life based on baptism I think, even if many of those have exited to secularism, or Protestantism, or whatever. Quite how one gets a count escapes me.

[Arthur McGowan]

There is membership purely in the theological realm. In that sense, once baptized, always baptized. Once ordained a priest, always a priest.

But the practicing membership of the Church in the U.S. is going to plummet.