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2 responses to “Roman Catholic and Other Statistics”
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I comment on the English Catholic statistics. I think that these are unreliable as regards marriages and baptisms because many of the former, and some of the latter, of people ordinarily resident in England occur outside of the country. This is particularly the case given the level of immigration into England from countries in Europe.
For example, my wife and I were married in Malta, where my wife’s family come from. We do not show up in the statistics. The 3 year old son of our neighbours’ born and lived all his life in London, was baptised in France where his mother is from. The 1 year old daughter of friends of ours was baptised in Poland where her mother is from. Neither of these shows in the baptism statistics. These are not isolated cases.
Of course there were always some such cases, but the reduced cost of travel and the availability of skype/electronic mail/etc. makes ties abroad stronger and arrangements easier to organise.
As regards marriages, it must be born in mind that couples marrying are often not particularly associated with any one parish (especially if they’re dutiful Catholics and not living together before they marry!) and the cost of weddings abroad is often a lot less.
I live in London and I can tell you that there is a massive Catholic revival happening here.
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Rob’s comment stresses one aspect of the Catholic Church’s statistics system, but there are many others which make the official statistics quite unreliable until they have been carefully edited, a job that takes an age of time and an excellect library. He focuses on sacramental events abroad. My mother was born and baptised in Canada, a country where she spent just a few months. A cousin recently died in Italy, on a school trip. My wife’s uncle was killed at Alamein. After several years residence in this country my sister-in-law died in her native Australia. Those professionally concerned with vital and population statistics at national and international levels have over many decades worked out protocols to ensure that key events are neither duplicated statistically, or omitted altogther. Unfortunately the Catholic bishops of England & Wales have no professional training in vital and population statistics, and do not think it necessary to consult those who have. As a result, four years ago they decided to collect statistics of marriages celebrated abroad but prepared in this country, and to treat them as marriages celebrated in this country. In some diocesan yearbooks these marriage preparations are (quite properly) excluded in the total of those celebrated in the diocese. In others they are included, giving the impression that the number of marriages celebrated with the rites of the Catholic Church in this country is beginning to recover. Some professional statisticians might reflect that “there are lies, damned lies and Catholic statistics”.
But the other defects of the Catholic Church’s statistics system in this country are far worse. Since most unwise changes introduced by the bishops in 2000-1 the task of collecting, editing and tabulating the most important detailed pastoral and population statistics has been decentralised to the dioceses, as it was until the mid-1950s. Rob tells us that there is a massive Catholic revival happening in London. Of the three London dioceses, one produces each year excellent statistics in whose reliability I am in no doubt; one produces utterly incredible rubbish; and one lies somewhere in between. Five Pastoral Research Centre reports over ten years, pressing for reform of this statistical system, have been ignored, as it seems that the bishops prefer to live in statistical Never-Never Land.
And there is more. Failure to grasp the nettle of reform has left the Catholic Church in this country with not one but at least five separate systems of pastoral and population statistics. The 22 territorial dioceses of the Latin Rite include large numbers of Polish parishes, quasi-parishes and chapels that are controlled and administered by the Polish Vicariate. They are all Latin Rite, but most of them never get round to sending their annual return to their territorial bishop -especially in London. I have long assumed that the Vicariate collects the statistics itself but doesn’t publish them. I find that letters sent to the Polish Vicariate, and to Polish parishes (even in Polish), are just ignored. And now we have the Ordinariate, which makes its own arrangements about the collection of statistics, and doesn’t send them to the CBC. And, of course, there are all the Oriental Rite missions, chaplaincies, chapels, which show a marked reluctance to send annual returns to the bishops who head the 22 territorial dioceses. Finally, the Diocese of the Forces sent a return to the CBC for the first time for the year 2012, but we have no figures for all the years back to World War II.
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