The Statistical decline of the Church

Inspired by some discussion on Twitter about the Church's failure to oppose the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s, effectively, I'm reposting this from April 2013. And with apologies for not posting for so long.

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Counter-cultural young ladies at the Family Retreat

 As I wrote in the last post, contrary to the gremlins which have falsified the figures for mid-century ordinations in England and Wales on the Vocations Office website, the Catholic Church was riding high by every conceivable measure in the middle of the 20th century. Figures for ordinations and the like peak in or shortly after the 1960s. This is true all over the West: outside the Communist bloc, throughout Europe and North America. Vatican II and the subsequent reforms took place at precisely the time the decline commenced. QED.

Actually, it is not as simple as that. For the Church's difficulties coincided with very similar problems for a whole range of other organisations. As I have blogged before, membership organisations of all kinds grew rapidly in the first half of the 20th century, and began to decline in the 1970s. Not only that, but a number of other measures of 'social capital', such as whether people trust strangers or know their neighbours, rose and declined in exactly the same way. It is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Disappearing 'Catholic Guilt' or disappearing Catholics?

Reposted from March 2013. This reflects the ecclesial situation before Pope Francis, but the observations about the nature of the 'Catholic population' identified in surveys is still relevant.
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Venerating Our Lady of Walsingham at the conclusion of the LMS Pilgrimage

The Sensible Bond draws attention to a little-reported survey of attitudes which claims that Catholics feel little or no more compunction about immoral behaviour than the general population. He links that to the recent scandal about Cardinal O'Brien - which is very interesting, but here I'm just going to focus on the survey.

The Religion and Society Programme of the University of Lancaster has a helpful page with details of a long list of 'research findings'. The stuff about Catholic guilt is not to be found there, however, but in a press release. It is based, not on a study by sociologists, but an opinion poll by YouGov. The sample size of more than 4,400 sounds impressive, but it was conducted over the internet, and they only reached 391 self-described Catholics. This self-description, translated, in the Press Release, into the term 'practicing Catholic', comes down to whether they 'currently engage in religious or spiritual practices with other people, for example attending services in a place of worship or elsewhere, or taking part in a more informal group', where the 'group' etc. is Catholic for 'Catholics', or Anglican for 'Anglicans'. There is no reference to frequency of this vague spiritual interaction, so it would presumably include non-baptised people who go to their late work-colleagues' Catholic funerals once a decade. And if readers don't know a lot of serious-minded Catholics who'd never find themselves filling in an on-line poll, they need to get out more.

Church statistics: what happened to the young men?

A break on the LMS Walsingham Pilgrimage last year.

In my last post I noted that the figures for lapsation from the Church given by Stephen Bullivant, which originated with the British Attitudes Survey, are systematically distorted by attitudes to Church membership and motives for getting babied baptised, which themselves vary over time and between regions. The inclusion of people in the category of 'self-identified Catholic' who have only a nominal or tribal affiliation increases the number of 'Catholics', but not the number of church-goers. If they felt that they shouldn't call themselves Catholics, the rate of practice would increase without any increase in the numbers of bums on pews. For this reason, I think that saying that 39.2% of 'Catholics' never or practically never go to Church is pretty meaningless.

Stephen Bullivant's lapsation statistics: methodological problems

A window into what is going on in the Church.

Stephen Bullivant of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society has produced a study based on the British Social Attitudes Survey, focusing on the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

It is marred by some typographical errors, for example referring back to the wrong diagramme at one point, and saying 'somewhat under two in five [cradle Catholics] attends religious services once a week or more' (p14) when the figure is 17.1%. Thelittle video they've produced to go with it fails to explain what the percentages they are quoting are percentages of.

A general methodological point is we get individuals' views of whether they are Catholic, Anglican, or whatever, rather than any objective judgment based on belief and practice. An interesting result of this comes out with Baptists. For some reason Baptists are much less likely than Catholics and Methodists to say that they are Baptists if they aren't practicing. This means that the lapsation rate for Baptists is the highest of the groups identified: only 28.9% of cradle Baptists identify as Baptists. Conversly, the percentage of nominal Baptists who practice is also high: 58% go to church at least weekly, another 6% at least monthly. We've all met people who think of themselves as Anglicans, by contrast, even if their family has hardly set foot in church for generations. Accordingly, 51.7% of cradle Anglicans identify as Anglicans, but only 8.9% of self-identified Anglicans actually get themselves to a service once a week, with another 10% going at least once a month.

Receptions into the Church: what makes the difference?

The Tablet reported last weekend that the number of receptions at Easter this year will be the lowest for six years, having peaked in 2011. Not all converts are received at Easter, but one would expect the trends to be closely correlated. After the end of this graph, which goes up to 2010, then, it started going down again.

The 'bounce' in the number of conversions following the election of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI does not seem to have been repeated by Pope Francis. The numbers of receptions was elevated after St John Paul's election for several years, his visit in 1982 gave it another filip, and his generosity to Anglican refugees from the ordination of women in 1992 was an even bigger boost. The last years of his pontificate, on the other hand, were not so good. Pope Benedict's election, which was more closely followed by his visit, had a remarkable effect. Pope Francis does not appear to have had a similar effect.

All of this, of course, pales into insignificance compared to the calamitous decline of the 1960s, of fully 70%, and takes no account of lapsation rates which were sky high in that decade, and have been serious ever since. The number of Catholic marriages as a percentage of all marriages is not a bad measure of the Church's health, and it is not very healthy.



But let's stick to receptions, it gives an indication of how attractive the Church is to outsiders. What drove the figures up and down? The impact of the World Wars is pretty obvious, as is things like new papacies. The cause of the really big drop is not so obvious. I've put in the dates of Vatican II, but the graph peaked in 1959. The liberals all point to Humanae Vitae, but it is hard to see what this has got to do with it, it was issued when most of the damage had already been done.

The simplest explanation is that the Church is more attractive, let us say to the people who might actually convert, when her message is clear. The election of two conservative Popes, St John Paul II and Pope Benedict, had a positive impact: that is undeniable. So did their visits to the UK, in which their conservative message was made with particular visibility. Humanae Vitae and Bl Paul VI's other conservative, dogma-reaffirming documents like Mysterium Fidei (1965) and the Credo of the People of God (1968) may have had something to do with the bottoming-out of the decline in 1971, along with the degree of liturgical stability brought about by the Novus Ordo Missae in 1970. The sense that anything was possible, that nothing was out of bounds, that the Church might do any kind of doctrinal 'back-flip', which was prevalent in the 1960s before, during, and after the Council, was obviously the worst possible message to send to sincere seekers after truth considering converting.

If you are thinking of converting, you'll want to know what is going to be expected of you. If it is all in a state of flux, you are going to hesistate. That's just obvious. If the flux carries on for an entire decade, this hesitation is going to have a disastrous effect on the number of new members.

But there is something more: even after the steep decline was arrested in 1970s, the Church was about a third as attractive as it has been on the eve of the Council. One might think that the peak of the 1950s was unsustainable, but if we consider conversions in relation to the Catholic population, it was less impressive than the situation between the wars.



The fact is that the Church had a very successful first half of the 20th century, and switched into an entirely different gear, a much lower gear, after 1960.

But this too makes sense on the basis of an analysis in terms of simple clarity of teaching. The pre-Conciliar Church was famous for its clarity. The liberals thought this was terrible, but it was attractive: along with other aspects of Catholic life, such as the much more stringent discipline, on fasting, holy days of obligation, and the marriage rules; in addition there was the traditional liturgy. These added up to a Faith which was demanding, and gave one a taste of the Mysterium tremendum.

Are you surprised? Frankly, if the Church can't present herself as serious, demanding, and holy, we can hardly expect people to flock to join.

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Is the Church 'losing women'?

A congregation with a healthy sex-ratio: the Traditional Mass on Ash Wednesday in
SS Gregory & Augustine's, Oxford

A splendid illustration of my point about the focus on women within the Church (see here, here, and here) has been offered by the National Catholic Reporter (the institution Fr Zuhlsdorf likes to call the 'fishwrap').

Surveys have long shown women lead more active lives of faith than men, and that millennials are less interested than earlier generations. One in three now claim no religious identity.

What may be new is that more women, generation by generation, are moving in the direction of men -- away from faith, religious commitment, even away from vaguely spiritual views like "a deep sense of wonder about the universe," according to some surveys.

What is fascinating is that the NCR doesn't deny the obvious - that today women are by every measure more religious than men, and found in greater numbers in Catholic churches. But the only point they draw from this is how dreadful it is if women turn out to be 'moving in the direction of men'.

The worst survey in the world

The survey in preparation for the Extraordinary Synod on the Family, which we are all invited to fill in, contains no fewer than forty questions. I started to fill it in but ran out of time; others have said it has taken them an hour and a half or two hours. It is the worst-designed survey I have ever seen. Someone should learn something from its deficiencies, so here are a few. Taking for granted, obviously, that it is absurdly long, to the point that very few people are going to be able to plough through it.

Total number of Catholic marriages taking place in England and Wales. The peak is 1968.
There are fewer Catholic marriages today than at the eve of the Great War a century ago.

It is not exactly an opinion poll; complaints about bringing democracy into doctrinal matters are not quite right. Many questions are factual.

1. Question 4a: Is cohabitation ad experimentum a pastoral reality in your particular Church? Can you approximate a percentage?

Other questions ask for an analysis of a problem, or a proposed solution.

5. Question 3e: What specific contribution can couples and families make to spreading a credible and holistic idea of the couple and the Christian family today?

Both categories of question are problematic, however, since both call for types of expertise which the person filling in the form is unlikely to have. Parish priests filling it in might be expected to have something useful to say about pastoral strategies, and parents about raising children in the Faith, but some questions are appropriate only for a social scientist, or someone who has done a study of diocesan initiatives.

3. Question 1c: How widespread is the Church's teaching in pastoral programmes at the national, diocesan and parish levels? What catechesis is done on the family?

Frankly, I don't have a clue. I could try to find out on the internet, but what would be the point of that? Presumably the people writing the survey can do that for themselves. 'Pastoral programmes' are something the ordinary Faithful are not involved with. If they are any good, they would have some beneficial effect without drawing attention to themselves. If they are bad, they will absorb the energies of the parish busybodies in endless meetings. What I do know is that Church teaching on the family is not preached, it is not taught in Catholic schools, and it is not found (much) in the kind of educational materials I sometimes browse in St Paul's bookshop. That's what I know as a layman, but that's not what they've asked.

Some questions are factual to the point that it is absurd to be asking them at all.

2. Question 4b: Do unions which are not recognized either religiously or civilly exist? Are reliable statistics available?

1. Question 6a: What is the estimated proportion of children and adolescents in these cases, as regards children who are born and raised in regularly constituted families?

Why are they asking us? Can't they look it up for themselves? What happens when they get varying answers: are they going to take an average, or just find out what the truth is?

Then there are the questions with pretensions to philosophical profundity.

1. Question 2a: What place does the idea of the natural law have in the cultural areas of society: in institutions, education, academic circles and among the people at large? What anthropological ideas underlie the discussion on the natural basis of the family?

Try asking that down the pub. Here, mate, you're a non-Catholic, what anthropological ideas underlie your discussions on the natural basis of the family? I don't say: ordinary Catholic are too stupid or uneducated to answer this question. I say: as someone with a DPhil in philosophy, I couldn't begin to answer it, certainly not in the comment box of an on-line survey, and I struggle to comprehend even what they are asking. (I think it must be a loaded question: what if people don't think the family is 'natural'?) I don't think many bishops or theologians would be able to give a useful response, and I am quite sure the people collating the results won't understand the question or the attempted answers. In fact, I don't think the people asking the question knew what they really meant. The question is a monumental waste of energy.

There are lots and lots of very open-ended questions about what is or could be done, pastorally.

3. Question 3c: In the current generational crisis, how have Christian families been able to fulfil their vocation of transmitting the faith?

4. Question 3d: In what way have the local Churches and movements on family spirituality been able to create ways of acting which are exemplary?

1. Question 8a: Jesus Christ reveals the mystery and vocation of the human person. How can the family be a privileged place for this to happen?

Catholic marriages per 1000 of the Catholic population.
After a post-war rush, the rapid collapse began in 1968.

Well, how long have you got? Someone filling this in could write a whole essay, or indeed book, on any of these questions, and I wonder whether anything short of a book-length treatment is going to be any use. The problem is that there are no widely accepted categories of answers for people to choose between; it's not like a question about whether there should be more tax and government spending or less, or whether immigrants make a contribution to the community or something. The person filling in the form would need to find words to describe the different things going on, before giving an assessment of them. More helpful questions might be: Does using the Penny Catechism lead to a tick-box attitude to the Faith? Does the Neo-Catechumenate strategy of separating age groups undermine the family? Is the love of parents for each other an education for the children in Christ's love of the Church? But then you'd have to ask many more such questions to explore all the things going on, and whether they were helpful or not.

Most worrying of course are the questions which seem to be aimed at getting people to say that the teaching and discipline of the Church needs to be loosened somehow.

4. Question 1d: To what extent — and what aspects in particular — is this teaching actually known, accepted, rejected and/or criticized in areas outside the Church? What are the cultural factors which hinder the full reception of the Church’s teaching on the family?

4. Question 4d: In all the above cases, how do the baptized live in this irregular situation? Are they aware of it? Are they simply indifferent? Do they feel marginalized or suffer from the impossibility of receiving the sacraments?

5. Question 4e: What questions do divorced and remarried people pose to the Church concerning the Sacraments of the Eucharist and of Reconciliation? Among those persons who find themselves in these situations, how many ask for these sacraments?

6. Question 4f: Could a simplification of canonical practice in recognizing a declaration of nullity of the marriage bond provide a positive contribution to solving the problems of the persons involved? If yes, what form would it take?

7. Question 4g: Does a ministry exist to attend to these cases? Describe this pastoral ministry? Do such programmes exist on the national and diocesan levels? How is God’s mercy proclaimed to separated couples and those divorced and remarried and how does the Church put into practice her support for them in their journey of faith?

These questions all present divorced and remarried couples as a problem for the Church, a problem created and sustained by all this rigid teaching and discipline. At one level, of course, this is true. But it is also true that the existence of such couples, not being able to receive the sacraments, is the flip side of a positive and attractive teaching which helps to sustain Catholic families.

Catholic marriages as a percentage of all marriages in England and Wales.
The peak is 1960, the eve of the campaign against the Church's
teaching on birth control.

Furthermore, it is the only kind of testimony to the seriousness of the Church's attitude to marriage which is ever going to be noticed by the secular world. It is a form of witness, a form which, like most effective forms, is given only at the cost of great sacrifice, a witness to the indissolubility of marriage, to a world which rejects this. The world knows that the Catholic Church, in spite of everything, joins men and women in an indissoluble bond of marriage, that it is not just talk when we say 'What God has joined, let not man put assunder'. Catholic couples know that they have something precious which they will lose if they go off with someone else. Remarried couples know that they need to get themselves right with God, however difficult this may be.

So this is a real problem with the survey. It could ask:

Would super-fast marriage tribunals rubber-stamping annulments cause scandal and undermine the teaching of the Church? Would this have a disastrous effect on couples struggling to maintain their marriages in a hostile environment?

Would turning a blind eye to divorced and remarried couples receiving Communion send the signal that the Church has given up on sexual morality? Would this have a disastrous effect on young people struggling to live in light of the Church's teaching in a hostile environment?

But it doesn't.

Pictures: statistics from the Latin Mass Society's research into Catholic Directory statistics.

Historic Statistics for Ordinations and Priest numbers

After another session in the archive, we have been able to extend the historic data to as far back as it will go. It seems that for numbers of priests this is 1841, the fourth year of the publication of the Catholic Directory; for ordinations, it is 1846. The 'Laity's Directory', which was in many ways the predecessor publication (though they overlapped for two years), does not give this information.

We have also tidied up the methodology of collecting the data and made some corrections. A full and complete set of Excel files of the raw data can be downloaded from the LMS website here.

Numbers of Priests ordained for the Dioceses of England and Wales, and for Religious Orders here, from 1847.

 The growth in the period up to the Great War is steady and workmanlike. The period from 1925 to 1964 represents a new phase: recovery from the each World War but heightened growth going somewhat beyond that. And then, after 1964, a catastrophic and unprecedented decline.

The red line, for religious orders, which is steadier, shows a very clear trend over a century up to the mid 1960s. It is impossible to describe the figures for the 1930s or 1950s as frothy or unsustainable: they were just the culmination of a long period of growth. Perhaps they kept their heads better than the secular seminaries in those decades. But they certainly lost them after 1960.

Numbers of priests in England and Wales, 1841 to 2010

The big jump in 1890 is unexplained; a decision to include regular clergy for the first time would fit the bill, however. There were 1,475 of them in 1912, when a separate total for them is included for the first time; there could very well have been 1,100 or so in 1890.

Again the boom starting in the 1920s is preceded by a long period of steady growth; it didn't come from nowhere, and that is important to stress. The unprecedented decline starts early - numbers peak in 1965. Even the large number of ordinations that year, 225, was not enough to offset the number of priests dying or being laicised. Laicisations must have had something to do with it, because assuming priests had an average life-span after ordination of 30 years or more, the cohort of priests going to their reward in 1965 had been ordained, on average, before ordinations went over 150 a year. It looks as though about 75 priests more disapear from active service than you'd expect.

Of course, once we have the double whammy of ordinations dropping and the extra-large cohorts of priests ordained 1925 to 1965 dying, the decline in priest numbers accelerates. There were also, of course, a very significant number of laicisations in the following decades as well. We have increasing life-expectancy to thank for it not looking a lot steeper; as it is they've started counting 'Retired Priests' (who are still included in the total), and we have now about 800 of these, 15% of the total. Even with the latest medical technology the '60s generation isn't going to live forever, so we can expect this graph to look more like a cliff in the next decade.

I photographed the tables called the 'Recapitulation of Catholic Statistics' from every volume of the Catholic Directory in which they appeared (not counting the ones which appeared twice); anyone who'd like to see them can view them on my Flickr page here. You can see, for example, breakdowns by diocese for many of the statistics.

What happened to conversions?

Over on Rorate Caeli I've been talking about the meaning of the statistics the LMS has collected on Catholic marriages; there's also article on our research in the print edition of the Catholic Herald out today, on p3. There is just so much to say about these statistics it is impossible to cover them all in a single post: here I'll say something about adult conversions (coyly renamed 'receptions' in the statistics for 1976 and thereafter). In another post I'll have a look at baptisms.

England and Wales has a special place in the world-wide Church, I think, as constantly refreshed by converts, to an extent far greater than in other countries. For long stretches of time Catholic life here has been dominated by converts, men like Newman and Manning in the 19th century, or Chesterton and Knox in the 20th, or indeed St Edmund Campion in penal times. One of the remarkable things about the statistics from before the Council is the scale of conversions.

 
Between the start of the series, in 1912, and 1960, 534,117 people were received into the Church, not counting those received in 1942, for which data were never published (probably in the region of another 10,000). Well over half a million people. People were talking about the 'conversion of England', and it wasn't hot air. Those are the kinds of numbers which actually make a demographic impact. Remember, the population of England and Wales was only 32.5 million at the 1931 census, and 43.8 million in 1951 (there wasn't a census in 1941.)

If you look at the graph expressed per 1,000 Catholics, the achievement of the interwar years is even more impressive. Fr Martindale and his like, hardly remembered today, were truly the St Francis Xaviers of their day.


However you look at it, something truly horrible happened between 1960 and 1970. The number of conversions declined by about three quarters, and assumed a plateau at this new, abysmal level. It is as if the Church shifted from one gear to another, an effect far more dramatic than the disruption caused by the Second World War.

Now, there were certain changes in the Church in the 1960s and early 70s, to say the least. They shook up the existing Catholic community, who were presumably often set in their ways. They were designed, however, to make the Church more attractive to outsiders. As Pope Paul VI wrote in Evangelii nuntiandi (1975):

'... on this tenth anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council, the objectives of which are definitively summed up in this single one: to make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century.'

Well, it didn't work.

One aspect of what we see, of course, is the lessening of the phenomenon of 'marriage converts'. Catholics were no longer taught that marrying a non-Catholic was seriously problematic, and that dispensations to marry a non-Catholic were not a mere formality. Some people think this is a good thing, on the basis that any kind of incentive to become a Catholic (such as wanting marry one) undermines the purity of the motive to convert.

This is a truly silly and deeply unCatholic attitude, however. All sorts of things stimulate conversions, and are designed to do so: should we deliberately put people off the Faith, so they have to struggle more to join? One does hear that sort of idea expressed, but it is not what the Saints did: they tried to attract the flies with honey. We should also remember the great social pressure not to become Catholic, up to and including the 1950s. Let's hear it from the great Fr Bryan Houghton, speaking in persona of his fictional Bishop Forrester, but certainly from his own pre-1970 pastoral experience.

'In the odd twenty years that I had cure of souls, either as curate or parish priest, I doubt if I ever received fewer that ten converts a year into the Church. I loved them. Along with the Eternal Truths I gave them all I had to offer. I never talked down to them, no matter how simple they were. The human mind can absorb infinitely more that it can rationalize and explain. How wonderful they were and how I admired them! ...
     'I suppose rather over half, say 60%, were "marriage converts". They were often among the best. Human love seems a natural introduction to divine love. In those days, the Catholic knew he had something to give and the non-Catholic something to receive. It was right and proper that the wedding ring should be set with the Pearl of Great Price. And the heroism of so many of those marriage converts! Not only were they cut off from their families (a more tragic situation in the working than in the educated classes), but they undertook willingly to obey the marriage laws. "I am only a marriage convert, Father"; my dear, you could be nothing more noble.'
(Mitre and Crook (1979) pp85-6)

Most of Fr Houghton's experience was garnered as Parish Priest of Bury St Edmunds in East Anglia (from 1955 to 1970), a part of England with an exceptionally low number of Catholics. There, one might assume, there would be more Catholics marrying non-Catholics, or converts, than in places of higher Catholic density, such as Lancashire or the Irish community in London. Supposing, then, not 60% but half of all conversions in England and Wales over this period were 'marriage converts', that would mean a bride or groom had converted in about a quarter of the weddings taking place over the period 1913-1960, a figure which is striking but not totally implausible.

Suppose, then, we halve the number of conversions recorded in 1959, and compare this reduced figure with the total for 1973 (after the gap in the series of Directories): what then? Well, then we get a decline of 27%. In other words, even if we took the insane view that, because of marriage converts not being sincere, the pre-1960 figures are inflated by 100%, we are still looking at a huge decline in conversions.

Has the new policy of granting dispensations to marry non-Catholics without quibble, and of not encouraging young people to seek partners from the household of the Faith, been a roaring success? I don't have numbers for divorces and annulments, but I think it is pretty obvious that this policy has been a disaster. The 'pastoral' policy, as so often, has created a pastoral nightmare.

Ordinations, Catholic Voices, and moving averages

I don't want to become obsessed with this subject (to which the background is here), but Catholic Voices has put out - together with a very handsome apology - a rather puzzling bit of statistical analysis designed to salvage something of their original claim, that things today are as good or better than they were in the 1950s: an analysis of the data provided by Stephen Morgan by a 'decadal' (ie 10-year) 'moving average'.

Here it is. Click to enlarge.

I can't claim to have any great statistical expertise, but a 'ten-year average' is an average of the last ten years, and a 'moving average' is when you plot those averages on a graph. To be honest, I am more than a little baffled by the graph above. For one thing, I think its creator, Joe Ronan, has forgotten to divide the totals for each decade (the ten years up to 1922, the ten years up to 1923 etc.) by ten: instead of an average of 145 ordinations a year in the decade up to 1936, for example, he has plotted 1,450, the total number of ordinations for the decade.

But above all, I'd like to know what he did when he had a year in which there was no data. Did he put in an average? Or zero?

There were four missing years of data in the 1950s in the data Stephen Morgan supplied: 1951, 1952, 1956 and 1957. For the decade up to and including 1958, the six years for which Stephen supplied data told us about 544 ordinations. Not bad for 6 years: we now know that the total for that decade was a stonking 1,106. Ok, Joe Ronan didn't know that, though if the guy updating the CV blog today had checked Rorate Caeli first it would have been kind to tell him that more data was now available. Never mind. But with a gap in the data, what Joe Ronan should have done is divide 544 (the total for six years) by six and multiply by ten, which would have given him an estimated average for the decade of 91, or an estimated total for the decade of 906, a figure far below the real one but at least methodologically defensible. What the graph appears to show, however, is 544. Oh dear, oh dear.

What that dip in the red line in the course of the 1950s shows is not that ordinations fell, but simply that the Portsmouth Diocese archive (where Stephen Morgan got his data) is missing a few editions of the Catholic Directory.

I don't want to be rude to some volunteer at Catholic Voices who is, I assume, doing his best. But please, Catholic Voices: get a grip. You are putting this stuff out into the public domain.

Now, the point of the graph is that the post-war rise in ordinations is so much less impressive than the inter-war rise in ordinations, that it makes sense to look at the graph overall as a decline starting in the 1930s. Since we now have the full set of data for the 1950s at least, I've created a graph using the number of secular ordinations and a (real) ten-year moving average. As you'd expect, the moving average is a smoother line which is below the main data line when that is in an upward trend, and above it when it is in a downward trend. (That is what moving averages are for, to show long-term trends.) The missing data for the 1950s made unclear just how strong the post-war rebound in ordinations was.

Another point to note is that, for some reason, the religious orders supplied a larger proportion of ordinations after the War than they had before the War; indeed their numbers were higher in the 1950s than in the 1930s. So looking at only ordinations of the secular clergy is misleading: the total number of ordinations, secular and religious, peaked at 250 in 1937, and then at 243 in 1956. The difference between those two numbers is not something I would want to build any grand narrative upon. See my post on the religious orders here.

It is impossible to say what would have happened if it had not been for the second world war. Many young men were killed before they could choose a profession. Others were perhaps inspired by their experiences to dedicate themselves to God. The same, conflicting, results no doubt manifested themselves after the First World War. But as far as the statistics are concerned, the contrast between the 1930s peak and the 1950s peak is not nearly so marked as Catholic Voices is claiming.

Perhaps another apology would be asking too much, but please Catholic Voices, either explain what I have failed to understand, or remove this dreadful graph.

More statistics: the Religious Orders

Update: Catholic Voices have apologised for their earlier mistake: all credit to them. They are, however, still behind the curve, since they have subjected Stephen Morgan's gappy numbers to another kind of statistical analysis, a ten-year moving average. I'd like to see this re-done with the full set of data for the 1950s. However I also think it is a largely meaningless exercise to debate whether we should talk of a peak in 1937 or in 1956, because of the effect of the second world war.

I now have complete statistics for ordinations in the 1950s - the numbers Deacon Stephen Morgan (@trisagion) compiled had gaps, because of gaps in his archive of Catholic Directories. As far as the 1950s are concerned, the gaps are now filled.

Go to Rorate Caeli to see the whole story. Between 1956 and 2008, numbers of ordinations to the secular clergy collapsed (in round numbers) by 90%: from 246 to 15.

Below is a revised graph. As well as adding the statistics from the National Office of Vocations for secular ordinations since 1982, I've now added their statistics for 'entry' into 'Order Priests' (sic), which they say they have from the Conference of Religious Superiors. I must say I find this a baffling and frustrating formula: what does it mean? Is a Benedictine monastery an 'order [of] priests', or (the alternative) an 'order [of] brothers'? Or does this mean priests or brothers joining orders? Except that they don't - they join as postulants, then they are novices, then they may be ordained, or not. So what does 'entry' mean: the novitiate, or solemn (permanent) profession? How many drop out between 'entry' and ordination?  Is the column for priests double counting the column for brothers, where non-ordained members are 'brothers'? What happens when a secular cleric joins an order - is he counted? Why are these numbers so much higher than the statistics for ordinations by the religious orders in 1982-1988 given by the Catholic Directories for those years? And why is the data for 1988 missing? Why can't they just give us a record of ordinations to the priesthood in religious orders?

Nevertheless, for what it is worth, here it is. If what they are measuring is consistent, it gives us an idea of the trend, if nothing else. The trend is similar to that for secular ordinations, without the filip from the Anglican converts in the mid-1990s. It bottomed out slightly earlier, with 10 entrants in 1993, a collapse of 90% from the peak of 101 in 1961. Except the figure for 1961 is for ordinations, so the collapse is bigger than that.

But wait, but wait! The decline of the Church since the Second Vatican Council is a myth! So all these statistics are wrong, our eyes are playing us tricks, the empty churches are an illusion, the closure of seminaries isn't really happening, just put on these green glasses and you will realise that the city you inhabit is made of emerald!

The Excel file with the numbers and graph can be downloaded here.

Ordination Statistics for England and Wales

The diligent Rev Stephen Morgan (@trisagion) and some chums have been through a huge pile of old Catholic Directories to answer the question posed by Catholic Voices and the Vocations Office: how do ordinations today, with their current upswing, compare with those of previous decades? I've parked his raw data on the Latin Mass Society site here.

To recap, the Vocations Office printed some very strange-looking figures for the period before 1980, with average annual numbers of ordinations given for each decade weirdly low: 6 for the 1930s, for example. Catholic Voices posted an article on their own blog which leapt on these to make the counter-intuitive claim that we are enjoying a higher number of ordinations now than in the 1950s. When questioned on this, the Vocations Office pulled their pre-1980 figures. Catholic Voices say they are 'looking into it.'

As TTony might say, hmm.

I have turned Deacon Morgan's columns of figures into two graphs: one showing ordinations, the other, the total number of clergy. These are figures from the Catholic Directory year by year, and they stop in the 1980s, when the Directory stopping publishing them (at least, in the same format). Where a Directory was missing from the archive he was using, there is a gap in the line, but the general picture remains very clear.  I have added the year-by-year numbers since 1980 given by the Vocations Office, as a separate line. The Directories distinguished ordinations for Secular and Religious clergy; I include both lines of numbers plus a 'total' for the two together; the Vocations Office statistics are supposed to be secular clergy only.

(Double-click to see them bigger.)

The Vocations Office is clearly counting differently from the Directories, and have higher figures where the two series overlap. There are a number of possible explanations. (Are they counting ordinations to the permanent diaconate? Is there some inconsistency between the two series about the treatment of non-religious communities of priests like the Oratorians?) It doesn't matter: they show they same trend, of steep decline starting in the mid 1960s.

In the 1950s and 1960s there were, almost every year for which there are figures, more than 200 ordinations. The twin bounces provided by the Papal Visit of 1982 and the Anglican influx after 1992 are very visible; we even managed just over 100 for two years. This year we are overjoyed to be anticipating 41 secular ordinations, not counting the Ordinariate, which (Catholic Voices say) should add another 11. Great. In 1937, the number of secular vocations was over 150; that was in a year that the religious orders ordained 80 men to the priesthood.

Another source has scanned the relevant pages of the Directory for 1940 and 1941; I have put these on my Flickr page. If you need persuading that this avalanche of clergy in the mid century was real, you can read their names. (And you can note, they aren't all Irish names.) Under 'Ampleforth' I see the legendary Fr James Forbes, later a Master of St Benet's Hall. Oh, these chaps were real enough.

I sincerely hope that Catholic Voices has the sense to modify or scrap that blog post of theirs. In the interests of posterity, here is the money quote in a screenshot taken today.

The obvious fact about the statistics is the horrible and persistent decline which started in the mid 1960s, in both ordinations and clergy numbers. The latter reflects the tragic mass laicisations of the 1970s and 1980s.

Now I am by no means a fundamentalist when it comes to explaining everything in terms of Vatican II: I've blogged about the broader social factors at work. But facts must be faced. The blips upwards in the 1990s were just that - blips. You can see the trend reasserting itself after the bulge, as if nothing had happened. That trend would have taken us to zero by now had it continued.

It hasn't. Just before the crash landing things changed. This is now the fifth year running of improving numbers. It is nothing like enough to replace the priests dying and retiring: the ones ordained forty years ago. But it a lot better than nothing. It is not to be minimised, but not to be exaggerated either. Let's be sensible about it for heaven's sake, and pray for vocations.

A newly ordained Englishman of the Fraternity of St Peter, with Bishop Bruskevitz of Lincoln, Nebraska

Statistics and the decline of the Catholic Church

Catholic Voices has picked up some interesting statistics from the Office of Vocations. These show that, while the number of entrants into seminary and ordinations declined precipitously from the 1980s to 2000, it has crept up since then. Last year we had nearly 40 ordinations: well done to everyone who made this possible. This is not, however, news to induce euphoria: we still have a long way to go before we start replacing the priests who are retiring or dying, so many of whom, as everyone knows, were ordained in the glory days of the 1960s.

But what's this? Catholic Voices claims in its headline


'Ordinations to priesthood in England and Wales now higher than the 1950s'
The writer of this headline is displaying what one might charitably call a lack of common sense. The high number of vocations between the 1940s and 1960s is not just an urban myth: just look at the age profile of the clergy, or the physical plant they needed when at seminary. They were building new accommodation wings at Ushaw in the 1960s; they closed it down just a few years ago. The Royal College at Vallodolid, again, was once a seminary in its own right, it now functions as a venue for a propaedeutic year for seminarians - ie they go from there to another seminary. All our seminaries were established before the 20th century (Allan Hall dates from 1975, but it was just moving from Old Hall Green). Now a smaller number of them cater, not only for the seminarians of England and Wales, but also for the Scots not sent to Rome, who now go to Oscott in Birmingham.

Catholic Voices should, therefore, have realised that there is something seriously dodgy about the figures given by the Vocations Office for ordinations before 1980. The first problem is that none of their figures include religious orders, who attracted another set of vocations and put so many of their priests into parishes. These now make a far smaller contribution to our priesthood: many orders in England and Wales have either collapsed to the point of no return, or have actually ceased to exist.



But even taking this into account - and the priests we used to get from Ireland - the Vocation Office figures are still weirdly low. They give only an 'average', decade bu decade, before the 1980s: 6 a year in the '30s, 18 for the '40s, 45 for the '50s, 65 for the '70s. At a guess, I'd say that these are figures for just one diocese or seminary, say Westminster.

The Rev. Stephen Morgan (@trisagion) has been able to get figures from old Directories which show that between 1930 & 1940 1,539 secular (diocesan) and 794 regular (religious orders) priests were ordained. For that decade, therefore, there was not an average of 18 per year for secular clergy: actually, the average was more than 150. It was more than this in the 1950s.

It is, of course, true, as Catholic Voices says, that we may want to discount the surge in vocations after the Papal Visit in 1982; by the same token we'd discount the surge of convert Anglicans following the ordination of women in the Church of England in the early 1990s, and the current surge following the debate about women bishops in the CofE. One might wonder, with all these blips, if looking at number of ordinations is really the most helpful measure of Catholic life. Why not look at numbers of baptisms, marriages, or Mass attendance?

This is what Michael Davies wrote in an appendix to his book 'Liturgical Time Bombs' (with my emphasis):

The most evident characteristic of the Catholic Church in England and Wales is that it is shrinking at an incredible rate into what must be termed a state of terminal decline. The official Catholic Directory documents a steady increase in every important aspect of Catholic life until the mid-sixties: then the decline sets in. The figures for marriages and baptisms are not simply alarming, but disastrous. In 1944 there were 30,946 marriages, by 1964 the figure had risen to 45,592-----but by 1999 it had plunged to 13,814, well under half the figure for 1944. The figures for baptisms for the same years are 71,604 (1944), 137,673 (1964), and 63,158 (1999). With fewer children born to Catholic couples each year, the number of marriages must inevitably continue to decline, with even fewer children born-----and so on. Nor can it be presumed that even half the children who are baptized will be practicing their Faith by the time they reach their teens. An examination of the figures for a typical diocese indicates that less than half the children who are baptized  are confirmed, and a report in The Universe as long ago as 1990 gave an estimate of only 11% of young Catholics practicing their Faith when they leave high school.

     Apart from marriages and baptisms, Mass attendance is the most accurate guide to the vitality of the Catholic community. The figure has plunged from 2,114,219 in 1966 to 1,041,728 in 1999 and is still falling at a rate of about 32,000 a year.

      In 1944, 178 priests were ordained; in 1964, 230; and in 1999 only 43-----and in the same year 121 priests died.

Note that figure of 178 ordinations for 1944 Davies gives corresponds to the c.233 average for the 1940s, including regular clergy, which Rev Morgan has established, allowing for the depressing effect of the War. Numbers were presumably higher in the second half of the decade.

Would someone from the Vocations Office or Catholic Voices like to produce comparable figures for the last decade or so, so we can bring Davies' picture up to date?

I think one 'myth' which needs destroying here is that 'gloom-mongers' have ever relied just on the statistics for vocations (or ordinations), and I think that quotation from Michael Davies destroys it pretty comprehensively. 

What I will say is that there are some very interesting factors at work in this peaking of numbers in the 1960s, not all to do with the Catholic Church. I will look at this in a post tomorrow. What can't be denied is that the numbers did peak at around that time. 

The pictures show the Latin Mass Society Priest Training Conference in St Cuthbert's Seminary, Ushaw. Before it closed. There aren't going to be any more ordinations out of Ushaw, sadly: the cavernous chapel and refectory are silent, the side altars abandoned. The saddest thing is that its reputation for liberalism was so dire that, when it closed, many people pointed out the positive result that it would no longer serve to destroy the vocations of conservative seminarians. 

A beautiful argument

I am an analytic philosopher by training. I really like arguments - sequences of premises and conclusions. An elegant or striking argument has an attraction for me even if I don't agree with it. In that spirit, here's a corker.  Hat-tip to 'Protect the Pope'.

The argument is this. The point of same-sex marriage is to make SSM 'equal' to traditional marriage. But if some churches don't accept it, it's not equal: heterosexual marriage will available everywhere, but SSM only in certain, restricted places. 

Compare the argument of people campaigning for women bishops in the Church of England. If 'traditionalist' parishes can opt out of being governed by women bishops, they aren't bishops in the full sense. No one is allowed to opt out from male bishops: there is an inequality here. Because of the attitude of their opponents, they would be deprived, under some of the proffered compromise schemes, of true episcopal authority.

It is true. In both cases it is true: the hold-outs, even if very few in number, aim to prevent the gay couple or the bishopess from being interchangeable with a mixed-sex couple or a male bishop. If the hold-outs get even a 'room to breath' concession, they have in a sense won, because they have stopped the innovation being made completely normal. The innovation remains something only allowed in certain places.

There is no room for toleration here, friends. This is a fight to the death. 

The Tablet: escape from reality

Last week The Tablet published an article about demand for the usus antiquior (or the 'Tridentine Rite', as they always call it) since the Motu Proprio. The article was carefully researched: they made enquiries with all the dioceses of England and Wales (though they got few responses), and were most eager for facts and figures from the Latin Mass Society, which we duly provided.

The Congregation at the Traditional Mass in St Mary Magdalen's, Wandsworth: were they all there three years ago? Is the camera lying?

What was actually printed, however, reflected not the results of their reporters' research but their own preconceptions: again and again The Tablet has simply asserted, in the teeth of the evidence, that demand for the Chruch's traditional liturgy is not growing, or is limited to people old enough to have experienced it before 1970. It won't surprise many people reading this blog to hear that the Tablet's editors are in a state of denial about the way the wind is blowing (or should that be: 'about innovative ways of being Church'?), but it is depressing to provide them with hard evidence for an article and then see the article draw the very conclusion the evidence shows is impossible.

They have very decently printed my letter protesting about this - with a few excisions which I show in bold.

Letter to the Editor, The Tablet.

Extrapolating from some off-the-cuff remarks made by spokesmen from seven of the twenty-two dioceses of England and Wales, your report (News From Britain and Ireland, 20th November) suggests that the Latin Mass Society may be mistaken in claiming that there has been a significant increase in demand for the Traditional Mass since the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum came into effect three years ago.

We offered your reporters hard statistical evidence for our claim, but this data did not find its way into the article. Perhaps your reporters thought that Tablet readers would not wish to hear that the number of regular Sunday Masses celebrated according to the Usus Antiquior has almost doubled since before the Motu Proprio, or that the number of Masses on a typical feast day has increased by more than 60%. Nevertheless, it is true, and readers not inclined to believe it need only download the Mass listings from our website (www.lms.org.uk), and satisfy themselves that these Masses are really taking place: they will be most welcome.

It should be noted that the increase in the number of public traditional Masses on Sundays and holy days does not, yet, reflect the increase in the number of priests able, and eager, to say it. The number of priests able to say the Roman Rite in its traditional form has tripled since the Latin Mass Society’s first Priest Training Conference, which took place just before the Motu Proprio took effect. Many of these priests are saying traditional Masses on weekdays and on special occasions, exercising great pastoral sensitivity in gradually introducing this form of the Mass to their parishes. The number of traditional Masses on Saturdays, for example, has from a low base increased by a staggering 450%.

The notion of ‘demand’ for the Traditional Mass is a slippery one. People cannot demand what they do not know about, and people who want it won't appear in the statistics if they are unable, for reasons of geography, to get it. The reality is that when a parish priest introduces a Traditional Mass at a reasonable time on a Sunday in his church a congregation emerges from nowhere, and increases over time. After a few years these congregations can rival those for the other parish Masses. There is nothing special about the parishes where this has happened: it is reasonable to assume that it would happen in any parish where it was tried. But on the basis of the places where it actually has happened, we estimate that the number of people attending the Traditional Mass regularly has doubled since the Motu Proprio.

It tends to be younger Catholics who are more open-minded about the Usus Antiquior, and younger priests who are most eager to learn it and say it. On this point, however, we can take the Pope’s own word for it: as he put it, young people have “found in it a form of encounter with the Mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist, particularly suited to them.”

End.

Congregation at the LMS Oxford Pilgrimage, regularly more than double the number we saw 2005-2007 - or are the pictures lying?

Ok, so it's a busy week; the letters page includes such jems as Mgr Basil Loftus denying that he shut down Fr Michael Clifton's blog and a screed from (once Mgr) Bruce Kent on nuclear disarmant. But lest anyone be in doubt that it is the wishful thinking of The Tablet's editors, and not the facts of news stories, which generate the content of this publication, they need only turn to p28, where they will be greeted by the headline

'Pope says use of condoms can be justified in certain circumstances.'

I know all news sources have their own angle on things, but it is downright cruel to the liberal Catholics and assorted post-Christians reading this to make them think that the Pope has said something he manifestly hasn't: they will be sad and disapointed when they realise the truth. This process of sad realisation, on a host of subjects, is often in fact manifested in the letters pages, where one sees lacrimose epistles saying 'I thought that Vatican II had done away with (delete as appropriate) Latin / the cappa magna / moral theology / priestly vocations, but it seems this dreadful thing has somehow survived!'. By trying to keep the truth from their readers, The Tablet simply makes it more painful when it does emerge.

Good Friday 2009 with the FSSP in Reading. I've been attending the Triduum with the FSSP since before the Motu Proprio, and numbers have again doubled - but don't take my word for it.
Message to the The Tablet: you can run, but the truth will catch up with you.

LMS AGM: Chairman's speech

The Latin Mass Society Annual General Meeting took place yesterday. As usual we had a report from the Secretary and from the Treasurer, a speech by the Chairman (me) and a speech from a guest, this year Fr Michael Brown, the LMS' new Chaplain for the North of England. Fr Brown has a blog, Forest Murmers, and was a tutor at the Latin Mass Society's Ushaw Priest Training Conference.

The Treasurer, Paul Waddington, gives his Report to the AGM; Paul Beardsmore, the Secrecary, is in the foreground. At the AGM Paul Beardsmore retired from his post, to take up the post of Deputy Chairman, to be replaced by David Forster.

The Secretary was able to announce the retirement of John Medlin as General Manager of the LMS; he will continent to work for us part-time as Magazine Editor and Publicist. John was the first to hold this job in it's present form. He is succeeded by Neil Glanfield, who (unlike John) will be full-time.

Fr Brown gave a very interesting talk on the usefulness of the Latin Mass Society in supporting traditionally-minded priests, and the difficulties we all still face after the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum.

Fr Brown and others at lunch after the AGM.

At the end of the AGM we sang the Creed (Credo III), as is customary. Then the Committee members and Representatives had a buffet lunch round the corner, before the splendid Pontifical Mass in Westminster Cathedral celebrated by Bishop Hopes.

Here is the text of my own speech.

Father Brown, ladies and gentlemen.

This time last year I set out a long list of house-keeping matters which urgently needed to be done within the Society, and a number of things which we were planning for the Society to do in developing its work. Our retiring Secretary has given an indication of how far we have got down that list, and I hope you will agree that we have done pretty well. I won’t tell you how much effort was required to achieve each of these things, because it would take too long, and anyway you wouldn’t believe me; all I will say is that I’m glad we won’t need to do any of them again for a good long while, let alone all of them at once. I am extremely grateful to the Officers, and especially to our retiring Secretary Paul Beardsmore, whose role meant that he was involved in all of these projects, and whose wise counsel and hard work was indispensible to them.

But while the Society has been getting itself organised internally, and has even launched new apostolates, the situation on the ground presents a paradox. Three years after the Holy Father liberated the Mass with his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum the Traditional Mass is flourishing in many places, but still faces apparently insuperable obstacles in others. Paul Beardsmore has given us some statistics which show that, overall, the number of Masses has risen considerably, and we know scores of priests who are gearing up to do more in their parishes as they gain in confidence. But we also know that some of these Masses are very thinly attended, that some congregations appear to be aging, and that the rightful aspirations of those attached to the Church’s earlier liturgical traditions are still not being fulfilled in many places. There seems to be a mismatch between the youthful enthusiasm for the Traditional Mass which is very evident on the blogs, in certain parishes, and at certain events, and what is happening in other parts of the country.

There are complicated reasons for this, including many to do with local conditions, but on the subject of youthful enthusiasm I think it is fair to say that up to now the Society has not been especially good at harnessing the energy and ideas which young people frequently have. One reason for that is that for a long time its mission has necessarily involved more diplomacy than activism. There are many things which we would have liked to have done, but haven’t done to avoid offending people, or treading on people’s toes, or even to avoid drawing attention to ourselves or to our events. Many here will have had the feeling that the more popular a Mass was, the harder it could be to get the permissions necessary for it to continue. Experience, caution, even paranoia, were the qualities needed to cope in this environment.

With the motu proprio things have not changed completely, but they have changed enough for our emphasis to shift towards activism. The Society has always wanted to be an activist organisation, making things happen, and the long period in which we were hobbled in our activism has been a painful one. The new environment allows us to be ourselves, to do more of the good and important things we want to do for the Church and for the good of souls. For the Society this means a change of tempo and a change of culture. I hope these things will be reflected in the new website, and the new membership materials we are preparing. I hope it will encourage more people to join. What it will certainly do, and what it is already doing, is to enable us to make better use of our members and volunteers. We can now far more easily adopt the bright ideas and harness the energy which is out there. And whereas the energy and ideas of individuals could easily become confined to a single parish or project, in the context of the Latin Mass Society they can more easily benefit the whole of England and Wales, and indeed the whole Church.

This last point, about the value of the Society as an organisation, is worth emphasising. It has been said a number of times that we are less necessary after the motu proprio, but this is the reverse of the truth. Only after the motu proprio is it possible for us to do, in a straightforward and direct way, what we were set up to do. There is nothing in our constitution’s list of charitable objects about negotiating permissions under indults. What it says is that we should be promoting the Traditional Mass, we should be promoting Gregorian Chant, we should be promoting Latin. These are things which we can do far more effectively after the motu proprio than before, and I am glad to say that these are all things we are indeed doing far more effectively now than in the past. To help us in our work we have, over many years, gathered together expertise of various kinds, financial resources, an office with paid staff, and a national network of members and active volunteers, a national organisation which it would probably be impossible to replicate if anyone were to try from scratch starting today. This organisation is something which amplifies the effort of individuals within it.

The amplification of individual effort is the point of organisations of all kinds: that is why they exist. By coordinating people they can achieve more, for the same level of effort, than a lot of individuals working in isolation. People working in what we might loosely call the Traditional Movement outside the LMS should be reminded of this. If you want to do something for the Church, but have finite time and energy, then collaborate with others; if you are in England and Wales, collaborate with us. We can set your efforts into the context of a network of people who will supply your deficiencies and make the most of what you have to offer.

This brings me back to the question of harnessing the palpable energy of people attached to the Traditional Mass. We can harness it by helping them to do the things they rightly want to do for the restoration of Tradition. When I started to canvass for support among choir directors and chant experts for the Gregorian Chant Network, I was told again and again that they had been waiting for years for something like this to be organised. When David Forster launched the Society of St Tarcisius, people came from all over England to attend, and people have joined the new sodality with whom we had no contact before. We are pushing on an open door. Not only that, but in doing these things we bring into the Society, or into active work for the Society, people who want to do something positive for the Church in these areas, and will help us take these and other projects forward. Far from it being the case that these kinds of projects sap the time and energy of the office and Committee, they are actually a way of revitalising the Society and bringing in human resources for all of our work.

Another initiative we have undertaken this year is a walking pilgrimage to Walsingham. I have myself been for the first time on the great French pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, whose British contingent is supported by the Society. This is a wonderful experience and I encourage all who can to make the effort to go. Not everyone on the pilgrimage of more than 10,000 people is under forty, so you needn’t rule yourselves out on that ground, but naturally most are, and it is a wonderful example of how a totally traditional devotion appeals to new generations of people. Inspired by this, and by the similar Christus Rex pilgrimage in Australia, as well as the millennial native tradition of walking pilgrimages to Walsingham, we can now announce that a group will be walking the 50 miles, or most of it, from Ely Cathedral to the Catholic Shrine at the Slipper Chapel at Walsingham, arriving on Sunday 22nd August, with Sung Masses on each day. I will be there; there are flyers at the back for anyone interested in joining us.

The Gregorian Chant Network, the Society of St Tarcisius, and the new residential Latin course we have initiated this year all have a long way to go before they are fully developed, but we have made an important start. There are two other broad areas in which the Society, it seems to me, needs to develop. One is in providing more opportunities for members to meet, to create a real sense of being fellow members of the Society, and a sense that the Society is something it makes sense to join. Another is in providing more spiritual sustenance for members, a sense of spiritual co-operation and something to sustain the spiritual life between Sundays, especially for members living far from each other and far from regular Traditional Masses.

Both of these can and should be addressed in many ways simultaneously, but we have already instituted two small things which should help. One is the system of regional chaplains, who I hope will begin to lead at least occasional events which are not only in London or the South East, but also not purely local: days of recollection, for example, such as will be worthwhile for members to travel to attend from all over their region.

Another is the new policy agreed by the Committee making provision for the spending of central funds for music at local pilgrimages and other important local events. I have long considered the Society’s many pilgrimages, organised tirelessly by local representatives, one of the most interesting and edifying works the Society does; they are also a very longstanding tradition in the Society. I hope that the in conjunction with the support we are giving the Society’s many scholas, we can foster the growth and improvement in the quality of liturgical music at the Society’s events, something which is of enormous value in demonstrating the beauty of the liturgy to newcomers.

On the subject of newcomers, one important project for the immediate future which I can mention before I end is a membership drive. This has been in preparation for some time; it requires the complete revision of our publicity materials, a new advertising strategy, and of course our new website must be in place before we can start. I hope it will take place in the Autumn, and perhaps we will even see some results by the next AGM. Before the hoped for new members arrive, however, I should like to take the opportunity to thank you, our existing members, who have stuck with us through thick and thin. This is your Society, and I hope we will have your support in developing its work in the exciting times through which we are now living.