(Obligatory disclaimer: BrJR, by using you as an example, I am in no way implying that you are a liar.
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I’m crushed. :crying:
If the average is 43 and the median is 34, it indicates that the data has outliers. In a normal distribution, the mean, median and the mode should be pretty close to equal. In the local newspaper, they give the median price for houses sold in our area over a given period of time. They do not give the mean or average because of the problem with outliers.
With situations like this, we have a question of interpreting the statistical data correctly.
That’st he problem when this organizations that keep track of these numbers ask you for a specific piece of information, that piece of information may not accurately reflect the reality. In this case, they asked for the average age of the brothers. When I take the fact that we have 1/3 that is very heavy into the 60s and the 20s, of course the average is going to be different from the reality. The number is not lying. The average age is 43, but most of our brothers are in their 30s.
I didn’t want to bog us down in a statistics class. I just wanted use that example to show how statistics are not a reliable way of measuring the growth of the Church. The statistics will give you numbers, but not causes. I can think of some very important causes for the decrease in the number of bodies in the pews, right off the top of my head, that have nothing to do with tradition or Vatican II.
- Secularism – it’s a worldwide reality except in Muslim countries.
- Sexual revolution - another worldwide reality that has nothing to do with the Church. The Church did not trigger it, nor could she stop it.
- Birth control and abortion – the Church did not trigger it and she can’t stop it. It’s legal, cheap and available. The Church can only teach what she teaches on the dignity of life.
- Lower number of births – this is related to numbers 2 and 3. Religious population is getting older, not just among Catholics. Visit a synagogue on Saturday and count the number of people under 40.
- Competition – in the movie Sister Act, Sister Mary Clarence delivers a monologue to the Mother Superior that drives home a point. The Church has competition. She says, “People like going to Vegas, but they don’t like coming to church.” We have a younger generation that has many activities and many choices that compete with churches and synagogues. The Jews didn’t have a Vatican II and neither did the Orthodox Christians.
6.Anomalies – for some reason, today’s Catholic, especially Trads, seem to believe or want to believe that the Church before Vatican II was typical. That is absolutely false. The Church goes through cycles as does every human institution.
I know one diocese that recently had trouble with its stats. I’ll make up the numbers, because I don’t recall the actual numbers. They reported that the diocese had something like 600 priests, 150 brothers and 400 sisters. When the stats came out, three religious orders had a fit. The fit was so serious that superiors threatened to pull out.
The person doing the counting was a laywoman who was not very familiar with how religious communities define themselves. She had counted all of the ordained Benedictines, Cistercians, Franciscans, Piarists, Salesians, Jesuits, etc as priests, which decreased the numbers of brothers.
She was totally confused when three major superiors of men demanded that the numbers be corrected and that those brothers whom she had counted among the priests, be subtracted from that group and added to the number of brothers. These are orders of brothers not orders of priests. They have priests, but they are religious brothers. Some of these priests never celebrate any sacraments except the Eucharist. Their vocation is to live the fraternal life of prayer, work and penance. The new number was something like 420 priests, 330 brothers and 400 sisters. I am waiting for the three communities of nuns to explode, because they were counted among the sisters. There are about 80 nuns in that group.
I just made up those numbers. I don’t have the original count. But my point is that counting is tricky, because how the person doing the counting views things and how those in the group view themselves may not be the same. It’s important to keep that in mind.
The reality is how people view themselves, not how we view them. At Easter this year, the Vatican reported an outrageous number of converts, increasing the number of Catholics around the world. They’re doing the counting according to the number of people who self-identify as Catholic, not the number of active Catholics.
Numbers and their reasons are not as clear as we believe. To blame the decline in the number of vocations and active Catholics on Vatican II or the spirit of Vatican II is too simplistic.
In addition, there is something that the Holy Father pointed out to the American bishops during their Ad Limina visit. Americans seem to be very preoccupied with increasing the number of men studying for the priesthood, but are completely disinterested in the number of men entering religious life. The Holy Father impressed upon the bishops that they had to impress upon us our duty to promote the religious life among males as well as the priesthood. Males need to know that God calls to both and that both are essential to the life of the Church. It was Cardinal Dolan who blew the whistle on this one about three years ago when he arrived in NYC. He made a public statement that NYC has one of the largest numbers of male religious in the country and that the Church in NY pretends that they do not exist, but takes everything it can from what they have to offer. He made this statement on TV. Cardinal O’Connor had made the same observation. We have a utilitarian view of vocations. When the Franciscans started to drop out of parishes, the people in those parishes called them everything but heretic. They came close.
The idea of friars living in a neighborhood doing nothing specific but just walking the streets and being present blows people’s minds. They can’t accept that as a very high vocation. I always get the same silly question. “What do you guys do?” I always give them the same silly answer, “We won’t know until we get up tomorrow morning. God has not told us what he wants from us tomorrow. I can tell you what we did today.” What gives with this business of everything has to be measurable and observable? Sometimes I feel as if I were living in a science lab, not a Church.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, FFV
All I have to say regarding the dress code which, outside of Mass, apparently exists among SSPX laity: I was born a pre-Vatican II Catholic and grew up attending the traditional Latin Mass and attended Catholic school. Aside from wearing dresses (as every female, Catholic or otherwise) did back then for Church and school, we DID wear slacks/peddle pushers (today Capri pants) for just about everything else. There was nothing immodest about this attire. I think far too much ado is made today about SSPX women - that they should NEVER wear pants. Personally, this is one’s PERSONAL choice! I can just see the woman who claims she never wears pants, down on her hands and knees in a skirt, scrubbing the kitchen floor! I would ask that traditional women, men, clergy, refrain from such pious dictatorship. If true modesty is taught and lived well, a woman/girl will refrain from dressing in the extreme.