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Chris Carstens's avatar

Brendan: Terrific piece of numerical journalism. You once again prove the importance of arithmetic, a much ignored science.

However, I think your “net change” statistic is not intuitive — when I first looked at the US chart, I thought, “Oh, it’s pretty much stable” — which is the wrong conclusion. It is as if the airplane is slowly easing down into the mountainside, instead of suddenly nosediving into the ground. Eventually plane and surface will meet.

It’s always fun to come up with statistics for other people to calculate. I’d like to see a graph of this simple ratio: Number of Catholics in a country divided by number of active priests in that country in the same year. My hunch is that would be a graph that would show us how fast we are approaching the crash.

Thanks again for your excellent work.

Chris Carstens

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Neil Flattery's avatar

Brendan,

Thanks for doing this research! Just for clarification, this is only taking into account ordinations of diocesan priests and not priests that are ordained for particular religious orders, correct? If that's the case, I'm curious if there are any countries or areas that have strong vocations for particular religious orders that aren't showing up in this data because its limited to diocesan ordinations.

Also, I'd love to see this same sort of analysis done but on a US diocese-by-diocese basis. I'm sure you have a enough on your plate, though, so just a suggestion. Thanks again!

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