RORATE CÆLI: Statistics

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Rorate City and State Statistics for 2016: Top 10 cities, states, and countries

Thanks to all our readers for their interest during 2016, our best year yet!

We have two interesting lists of the 10 cities that sent us most visitors. First, an overall look:

A scene from the annual "Mass for Education" celebrated by then-Cardinal Bergoglio in his cathedral in 2010. (Source)

Update: The website of the Organizacion de los Seminarios de la Argentina has comprehensive statistics for major and minor seminarians in the country from 1997 to the present (ESTADÍSTICAS COMPARADAS). The rapid and unrelenting collapse of vocations is unmistakable: from 1,501 major seminarians in 1999 to 916 in 2012, 875 in 2013 and 827 in 2014; and from 624 minor seminarians in 1997 to only 59 in 2012 (the last year for which there are statistics for minor seminarians).

The following statistics come from the article SACERDOCIO: LA CRISIS DE VOCACIONES IMPACTA EN LA IGLESIA published by the Argentinian news website Tres Lineas on Sunday:

Seminarians studying in Argentina:

1999: 1,501

2014: 827

Seminarians in the Metropolitan Seminary of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires:

1980's (no precise year given): 200

2016: 80

The seminary received 15 new entrants this year.

In 2016, Buenos Aires -- which has more than 3 million inhabitants -- will see only three of its seminarians ordained to the priesthood.

The article reports that in Greater Buenos Aires. many parishes now either have no resident priest, or are served by priests from countries such as Poland and South Korea. The religious congregations are faring no better.

Argentina's population stood at 43.1 million in 2015; the Pew Research Center reported in 2014 that 71% of Argentinians identify as Catholics. In short there were only 827 major seminarians for around 30 million Argentinian Catholics in 2014.

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Before his ascension to the papacy as Pope Francis, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, S.J. was Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires from 1992 until 1997, when he became Coadjutor Archbishop of the same Archdiocese. He became the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and Primate of Argentina in February 1998 and remained in that post until his election. As his successor he picked one of his former Auxiliary Bishops, Mario Aurelio Poli.

For the record: Latest FSSP statistics

FSSP Diaconal ordinations, Denton, NE. March 15, 2014.

Source.

As of October 24, 2015, the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter has a total of 421 members (257 incardinated), of whom 262 are priests, 14 are deacons and 145 are seminarians (including postulants but not including the deacons). All the deacons are incardinated in the FSSP. Of the 262 priest-members, 243 are incardinated, 11 are incorporated "ad annum", 4 are associated and 4 are postulants. Fifteen priests have been ordained this year -- the highest since 2004, when the FSSP had seventeen sacerdotal ordinations. (FSSP has averaged at 11 ordinations per year since 2004). The average age of the membership of FSSP is 37.

DENIAL: The state of the Church in Germany

As it has been recalled on Twitter, almost twice as many defections from the Church in Germany under Francis than under Benedict XVI... Well, well...

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German Bishops' Conference: Numbers of Catholics Leaving the Church Are at Its Highest On Record

Daniel Deckers
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
July 17, 2015

218.000 persons left the Church in the year 2014, 22 percent more than in the year before – and, besides that, more than ever before. The reason for it, according to the Archbishop of Freiburg, is very profane and secular.

In the year 2015, more Catholics than ever have left the Church. As the Catholic Bishops' Conference reported on Friday, the number of people having left the Church has risen 22 percent within the last year to now 218,000. The number of baptisms has remained nearly the same, however, when compared to the previous year: 165,000. The number of new members whom the Church has received either by entrance or by a re-entrance, has further sunken. Taken together, this number – for the first time – is less than 10,000.
The Bishops' Conference did not say anything about the deeper causes for such developments. Its president, Archbishop Marx of Munich, was quoted as saying that these new statistics show “that Church is multi-faceted and has still had a missionary force, even though the high number of exits from the Church makes us painfully aware that we do not reach people with our message.” Archbishop Burger, of Freiburg, spoke of the “irritations caused by the new way of gathering the Church taxes by referring to the capital incomes – which was erroneously then interpreted by many as an 'increase of taxes.'” Originally, the Church tax [Kirchensteuer] was only gathered together with the other taxes, when the tax payer formally requested it. Now, since 1 January 2015, it happens automatically. When, at the end of 2014, the banks started to inform their members about this new procedure, the number of exits considerably increased in the Catholic Church as well as in the Protestant churches.
[…]
[Concerning the numbers of the regular participants at the Sunday Mass: it is now 10.8 percent.] In 1990, the year of the re-unification, the number of the regular participants at Sunday Masses was 21.9 percent.

Also with regard to the priests and religious, the signs of implosion in the Church become visible only in a longer-term view. For example, the number of active priests [not yet retired] went down within the last fifteen years from nearly 13,000 to around 9,000. At the same time, fewer and fewer young men now prepare themselves for the priesthood in the seminaries. The number of female religious has been nearly cut into half since 1999 and is now down to approximately 17,500. Concerning the male religious, there is to be found a reduction of nearly 30 percent.

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Press Release of the German Bishops' Conference, 17 July 2015

Church Statistics

(Click for larger view)

From the blog of the admirable Father Gary Dickson, who celebrates the traditional Mass every Sunday for Catholics of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle (Northumberland and Durham, Northern England):

Members today

Interesting visitor statistics: top 10 cities

The two weeks of the 2014 Extraordinary Assembly of the Synod of Bishops "on the Family" and its aftermath (up to today) were the best in our existence in visits and pageviews: thank you all so much for your loyal readership! And there was a very interesting change in the list of top cities sending us visitors: for the first time ever, a city of non-native English speakers reached the second position in number of visitors, and two such cities were among the top 10.

The top 10 cities in number of visitors from the first day of the Synod up to this Monday were the following:

THE COLLAPSE OF CATHOLICISM IN LATIN AMERICA:
New Poll, Statistics, Tables and Graphs - Extensive Analysis

When confronted with the undeniable evidence of the decline of Catholicism on so many levels, especially in Europe and North America, one favorite tactic of many "conservatives" and some "liberals" is to point to the state of Catholicism in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where the faith is assumed to be vibrant, unaffected by secularism and modernist compromises, and increasing in followers by leaps and bounds.

If one counts the number of those baptized in the Catholic faith, then undoubtedly the numbers continue to be excellent; never before have there been so many baptized Catholics including in North America and Europe. The problem is that the number of baptized Catholics has little relation to the actual state of Catholicism anywhere: otherwise secularism would be an unknown phenomenon in countries where most citizens have been, at one point in their life (usually at infancy) baptized in the Catholic Church. The question of how many of those who have been baptized in the Church retain their self-identification as "Catholics" is a more important indicator when measuring the true vigor of the Church in any given country.

It is the ultimate hypocrisy to lament and criticize, as do so many Catholic pundits and "apologists", the lack of catechesis and poor formation of the vast majority of nominal Catholics, and then turn around and point to the sheer numbers of the same nominal Catholics as proof that all is well and the Church remains in excellent shape.

When it comes to Latin America, Catholicism has been under serious and sustained siege from Evangelical Protestantism and the secular unbelief since the 1980s. Just how serious the losses have become are revealed in Corporación Latinobarómetro's latest survey of religion in Latin America, released on April 16, 2014: "Las religiones en tiempos del Papa Francisco". Understandably for a document released to honor the first year of the pontificate of the first Latin American pope, the study has an upbeat tone in the introductory remarks about the strength of religion and of Catholicism in Latin America. Nevertheless the graphs and statistics present a wholly different story, at least as far as Catholicism is concerned.

(Note: Latinobarómetro is a non-profit corporation which is the Latin-American version of the well-established Eurobarometer -- it is the only full regional database of opinion surveys, providing accurate information on the attitudes of Latin-Americans for several different international organizations, including the United Nations and the Inter-American Development Bank. Its surveys are highly regarded for their accuracy and transparency, and the database provides a look at the historical evolution of national opinions regarding all kinds of different issues.)

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The first chart (from p. 5 in the study) shows the change in the percentage of Catholics in 18 Latin American countries between 1995 and 2013. (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Haiti are not included in this study, while the countries in the same geographical space that do not have a Romance language as their main language are generally not considered as part of "Latin America" for statistical purposes.)

The percentage of self-identified Catholics slightly increased in Mexico (the notable exception) and the Dominican Republic but dropped everywhere else, with the most precipitous declines recorded in Nicaragua (a drop from 77 to 47%) and Honduras (from 76% to 47%). These countries went from being overwhelmingly Catholic to being majority non-Catholic in less than a single generation, along with countries such as Guatemala (which saw a drop from 54% to 47%) and Uruguay (from 60% to 41%) where the hold of the Catholic faith was already in peril as of 1995.

As noted at the bottom of this table, South America and Mexico went from 82% Catholic to 72% Catholic in 18 years, while Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and, for the purposes of this study, the Dominican Republic) fell from 73% Catholic to 56% Catholic in the same time frame.

The following chart (from p. 7) arranges the countries of Latin America in terms of the percentage of Catholics, from the largest to smallest. As seen from the first chart, all of these countries had been majority Catholic in 1995. Today, four are majority non-Catholic while another two (Chile and El Salvador) are on the edge.

It is telling that Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala are the countries where Liberation Theology and the alliance of Catholic religious and clerics with the Far Left were most pronounced in the 1980's and 1990's. The collapse of Catholicism in Honduras also occurred entirely during the tenure as Archbishop of Tegucigalpa (1993 to the present), of its leading prelate: Óscar Andrés Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga SDB, currently the coordinator of the "Council of Cardinals" and one of the most influential architects of the current Pontificate's policies.

The situation of Uruguay is of special interest in that it has always been at the vanguard of "social progress" and secularization in Latin America, and doubtless gives us a glimpse of what the future will be like for Latin America if the process of secularization is not stopped. Uruguay is also culturally very similar to Buenos Aires, with which it shares the same different Spanish accent and the same secularized society.

Taken together, according to another table in the same study (p. 4) the percentage of Catholics in the Latin American countries covered in this study fell from 80% in 1995 to 67% in 2013. The decline was steady except for a short lull from 2005 to 2009 and again from 2011 to 2013.

While Catholicism has declined in most Latin American countries, Evangelicalism has grown by leaps and bounds (see the next graph, located in p. 6 of the study). The study claims that as of 2013 Evangelicals accounted for 40% of Guatemalans (as opposed to 47% Catholics), 41% of Hondurans (47% Catholic), 37% of Nicaraguans (47% Catholic), 31% of El Salvadorians (54% Catholic), 21% of Brazilians (63% Catholic) and 21% of Costa Ricans (62% Catholic).

In contrast, in 1996, Evangelicals comprised only 25% of Guatemalans (54% Catholic), 12% of Hondurans (76% Catholic), 11% of Nicaraguans (77% Catholic), 5% of El Salvadorians (67% Catholic), 18% of Brazilians (78% Catholic) and 9% of Costa Ricans (81% Catholic).

The survey unfortunately bears out what many Evangelicals from North and South America have been boasting about since the 1990's: the mass conversion of tens of millions of Catholics in Latin America to Evangelicalism. This is mirrored in the United States where Hispanics are also defecting in considerable numbers to Protestantism. This is a reality that could no longer be ignored for the sake of presenting Catholicism as the victor in the "numbers game" of conversions to or from Protestantism.

Statistics time: top 10 cities

We would like to thank once again all our readers in this round-up of the cities that send us the most visitors.

In total numbers, this is our top 10 list since our last round-up, with a wide representation from all corners of the Anglosphere - and the Eternal City, of course:

1. London
2. New York
3. Rome
4. Dublin
5. Melbourne
6. Sydney
7. Chicago
8. Washington
9. Toronto
10. Los Angeles

Once again, we would like to thank all visitors from non-English-speaking countries who help make our blog exceptionally international. The top 10 cities in non-English-speaking nations in the past few months were the following. Un saluto tutto particolare ai nostri fedeli amici romani: grazie! Dziękuję! ¡Gracias! Merci! Obrigado! Hvala! Tack! Danke!

1. Rome
2. Warsaw
3. Buenos Aires
4. Paris
5. São Paulo
6. Zagreb
7. Madrid
8. Milan
9. Stockholm
10. Vienna

Statistics: Top 10 Countries and Cities in 2013

Thank you once again for your strong readership throughout 2013!

Here our some of our statistics for the year.

The top 10 countries in number of visitors were:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Italy
6. Germany
7. Brazil
8. Poland
9. Ireland
10. France

The top 10 cities were:

1. London
2. New York
3. Washington
4. Rome
5. Chicago
6. Sydney
7. Melbourne
8. Dublin
9. Toronto
10. Los Angeles

Considering only those cities located within non-English-speaking countries, the top 10 cities were:

1. Rome
2. Warsaw
3. Buenos Aires
4. Sao Paulo
5. Paris
6. Zagreb
7. Stockholm
8. Madrid
9. Munich
10. Milan

Statistics: Top 10 cities for May.
Plus: Top 10 cities from countries where English is not a native language

Thank you all for your numerous visits in the month of May! Our top 10 cities in number of visitors for the month were the following:

1. London
2. New York
3. Rome
4. Sydney
5. Washington
6. Chicago
7. Dublin
8. Melbourne
9. Toronto
10. Los Angeles

We were also curious to find out which cities in regions in which English is not a native language or at least an official language send us the largest number of visitors. In the month of May, they were the following:

1. Rome
2. Sao Paulo
3. Buenos Aires
4. Warsaw
5. Zagreb
6. Lisbon
7. Paris
8. Madrid
9. Milan
10. Stockholm

Statistics: top cities and countries in March 2013

As it probably happened with other Catholic or Catholic-inspired pages, March 2013 was the month with the greatest number of visitors in our history: thanks to all our readers!

Our top 10 cities in number of visitors for the month were the following:

1. London
2. New York
3. Washington
4. Rome
5. Melbourne
6. Sydney
7. Toronto
8. Chicago
9. Dublin
10. Houston

Our top countries for the month were the following:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. Italy
6. Germany
7. Brazil
8. Poland
9. France
10. Ireland

2012 statistics for the FSSP

The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter reached their 24th year last month, and they have just released their updated statistics.

As of this moment (Nov. 1, 2012), the Fraternity has 397 members, including 236 Priests, 11 Deacons, and 150 non-diaconal Seminarians. The average age of its members is 37, and 5 of its members are no longer on this earth (requiescant in pace).

[For a comparison with the previous year's statistics, visit our 2011 post here. If you wish to add recent statistics of other groups and societies of priests dedicated to the Traditional Mass, please do so in the comment box.]

A fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos

Exactly one year ago, the reigning Roman Pontiff made the most important (though not his most famous, after the "Regensburg affair"...) speech in his pontificate: his Christmas address to the Roman Curia.

We are quite glad that this blog was the very first English-language medium to report the speech, minutes after it was pronounced, an address which was at the time mostly ignored by the mainstream Catholic media for weeks. "Progressive" Catholic journalists and bloggers would ignore it for almost one month... Our first series of articles was dedicated to it, which we called the "Epoch-making Speech", a definition which we uphold.

Its main thrust: to establish the basis for a "hermeneutics of continuity", that is, of continuity between the bimillenial Tradition of the Church before 1962 and the complex content of the Vatican II documents themselves and their confusing aftermath. We still believe that a good foundation was laid with that speech, but nothing was conspicuously built on it in the past 12 months (maybe this year's address to the Curia, to be delivered in the Roman morning of this December 22, will give us some clue of what may happen).

The bitter fruits of the Council cannot be denied by an impartial observer based on their effects on the Church, and two interesting pieces of news published this Thursday confirm this fact once again.

In France, the pollsters of the CSA Institute have just announced that 23% of French Catholics believe that Our Lord was "a man like any other"...

And John Allen (one of those who ignored the December 22, 2005 speech for several weeks) mentions the not very well known conclusion by Philip Berryman (but self-evident to any superficial observer of Latin-American Catholicism) that one of the main causes of the Pentecostal explosion in Latin America in the past forty years was the "alienation from recent trends in Catholicism (such as the relaxation of tradition, for example Mass in the

vernacular)".

May we never forget to pray for the Holy Father.

__________________

P.S. One correspondent reminds us that the Holy Father received the Secretary of the Congregation for Divine Worship, Archbishop Ranjith, in a previously unannounced audience this Thursday.

Rorate City and State Statistics for 2016: Top 10 cities, states, and countries

Coincidence or the real Francis effect? The collapse of vocations in Buenos Aires and all Argentina from the 1990's to the present.