Joe unpacks a new article that evaluated the “spiritual fruitfulness” of all the dioceses in the US. The results will surprise you!

Transcript:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to take a deep dive in the numbers to see where we find America’s most fruitful diocese, where we find America’s least fruitful diocese and why? Now, if you know me, you might’ve noticed by now on Thursdays, I like to do a longer episode, and I often like to do a little bit of a deep dive. Sometimes it’s on the Bible or theology or philosophy or spirituality, and sometimes it’s just on data.

And I like seeing how the numbers play out. I think everybody has kind of a vibe for what works and what doesn’t work in the church. And it’s easy to assume your anecdotal experience of like, man, we did this thing in my parish and it was amazing, or we did that and it really annoyed me and to kind of universalize that. And so to check my own biases and hopefully yours as well, I like to occasionally step back and to say, okay, but what do we know about the big picture? What do we know about the numbers? And so to that end, I’m really pleased that recently JJ Ziegler and Catholic World Report came out with a thing that just crunches the numbers. So there’s something called the official Catholic directory, and it reports things like number of baptism, number of weddings, number of seminarians, that sort of thing. So Ziegler compiles all of that and then reaches out to the diocese that didn’t have complete data and then puts together a chart measuring how spiritually fruitful each diocese is. Now, obviously, what do we mean by spiritually fruitful? How does one measure that in the ultimate sense, we’re not going to be able to measure it perfectly because the best kind of fruit is somewhat invisible.

It would be wonderful to have a chart that just said, here are the number of saints per capita being produced by every diocese. Here’s the percentage of the Catholics in this diocese that are going to heaven, and here are those who are saints because of the diocesan culture compared to these other ones that maybe are saints in spite of the diocesan culture. Here are the initiatives that help get people to heaven. Here are the ones that don’t, but unfortunately this side of heaven, we just don’t have that data set. And so we have to make our best guesses. We have to do our best to figure out how effective different programs are, how effective different ministries are, how effective different diocesan cultures are. So to that end, Ziegler points to four stats which are weighted equally for these purposes, you could decide for yourself, you think one of these is more important than the other three, but in terms of just the ranking of the different diocese in the us, the following four are rated.

So per capita based on the Catholic population, not the overall population of your diocese. Maybe you’ve got a diocese of a million people, of which 200,000 are Catholics. It would just be out of that 200,000, how many seminarians, how many Catholic weddings, how many babies getting baptized, and how many other people are being brought into the church? That’s going to be conversions. That number’s also going to technically include kids who aren’t babies who are brought into the church later. So if you’ve got RCIC or OCIC where it’s RCIA, but for kids, anything like that, that’s all going to be in that fourth category. But the basic idea is do you have a culture where it’s producing priests and seminarians where people are getting married in the church and having babies and baptizing those babies and converting other people and bringing them into the church? If you can say yes to those things, that sounds pretty spiritually healthy if you’re saying no to those things, that doesn’t sound spiritually healthy.

In fact, for three of these, I think it’s pretty obvious that these are kind of fatal. If you can’t say yes, if you’re not converting people, if you’re not baptizing your kids, if you’re not even getting married in the church, then there’s no future of the church. This is also true in maybe a somewhat less obvious way in terms of priests and seminarians, but as Benedict the 16th warned the American bishops back in 2008, let us be quite frank, the ability to cultivate vocations to the priesthood and the religious life is a sure sign of the health of a local church. There’s no room for complacency in this regard. So at diocese that even if you have weddings and baptisms, if you are not also producing vocations to the priesthood and you’re just constantly relying on people outside the diocese to take care of your diocese, that’s a sign that there’s something spiritually going wrong.

There’s a deficiency there that needs to be addressed. So when you look at those four things, when you look at the ratio of seminarians of Catholic weddings, of infant baptisms and non infant baptisms and people coming into the church, what we find are honestly kind of shocking levels of variation, and I think this is worth pointing out for a really simple reason. Well, two reasons. One, because when we talk about the state of the American church, some people are way more optimistic than others. Some people are way more pessimistic, but when you actually look at the numbers and you’re like, oh yeah, some of you’re living in much better diocese than other people, it kind of makes sense. I am very white pilled about the future of the church, but as I’m looking at the numbers, I’m like, my diocese is doing a lot of things right, and the diocese I’m near are also doing a lot of things right, and they’re bearing a lot of spiritual fruit.

So of course I’m like, this doesn’t look that bad you guys. But other people, sometimes the people commenting are in places where the situation is way more dire and they don’t have the act together and they don’t have any kind of plan to bear any serious spiritual fruit. And so this could be one of those things where based on where you are, you’re going to see some things that impact how you imagine the church globally or nationally, and it’s maybe just more like the church in your region positively or negatively. But second, the second reason I think this regional variations matter is when you see the variations this big, this should cause us to pay attention. This should cause us to say, hold up. What’s going on? What is diocese A doing? Well, the diocese B is not, what do we need to learn from all this? Because if you had two different businesses in the same field and one of them is producing 30 times the revenue or 30 times the profit as another one delivering the same product, you would say, okay, A has cracked the code in a way that B hasn’t. So when we look at the diocese, what do we see? Well, let’s start with the ratio of ton seminarians into Catholic. What percentage of your Catholics are entering diocese in seminary?

In the diocese of Rapid City, which ranked first, you have a diocesan seminarian for every 1900 Catholics. Now, obviously, not all of those guys are going to go on to become priests, but that by itself is a pretty cozy ratio. You could have a situation where God forbid there’s some kind of horrible accident that wipes out all of the priests in Rapid City and just the bishops remained and he confirms ordains all of his seminarians. He would still not be in a horrible situation in terms of the sheer ratio of priests to Catholics because one priest in 1900 Catholics is what many parishes deal with on a regular basis. So this would be, if you think about it this way, if you think about an ordinary, I don’t know the exact, I got to be very clear. I don’t know the exact size of an ordinary parish around these parts.

The idea of having 2000 people in a parish is not insane. So this would be one seminarian for every 2000 person parish basically. In contrast, the diocese of Fairbanks is in Alaska and has no seminarians. I think that’s pretty forgivable. It’s not a huge or super populated diocese or I guess it is huge, but it’s not super populated. But the Diocese of Brownsville, which we’re going to take a closer look at, has only one seminarian for every 169,933 Catholics. Now, you can survive with a newly ordained priest for every 1900 Catholics. You can be doing pretty well, particularly since there’s no media striking all the priests. And so that’s a pretty extremely manageable ratio. But one seminarian for every 169,933 Catholics, that’s not manageable at all. And so it means several things. Number one, that a Catholic in rapid city is 89 times, excuse me, more likely to become a octan seminarian than a Catholic in the Diocese of Brownsville. And we’re going to want to take a closer look and say, why? What’s going on there?

Obviously, some of that can have to do with things like demographics because not everyone can become a dialysis seminar, and it’s only men, realistically, it’s men of a certain age. So you can have a few things that are confounding factor slightly, but not an 89 times kind of slightly. That’s a huge difference that we’re going to have to take a careful look at. That’s what I mean when I say these are some enormous differences, and you might just imagine, oh, this is a fluke. There’s only a handful of seminarians and a small diocese, and so you gain one one year, you lose one that’s going to throw off the numbers in terms of a per capita ratio. I hear all of that. That’s not going to come close to being an adequate explanation of the variations we find or how predictable these variations are. You can map ’em and figure out where you’re going to find healthy and unhealthy diocese.

So that’s the first thing. Diocese and seminarians, the second infant baptism in Nashville, which we’re also going to take a closer look at. You’ve got one baby being baptized for every 48 Catholics every year. This is fantastic. And contrast diocese of Lubbock, another Texas diocese, we’ll talk about it a little bit. You have only one infant baptism for every 603 Catholics, so that’s a red flag because it means that there’s more than 12 times more infant baptisms per capita in Nashville. Some of that, again, you can say maybe demographically different parts of the country, people have more kids, they get married younger, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But as Ziegler points out, you can’t actually explain away these differences that easily because the differences in infant baptism rates are actually much bigger than the differences in things like birth rates. So the obvious takeaway is babies being born in some parts of the country, two Catholic families are way less likely to get baptized than babies born to Catholic families in other parts of the country. This points to something pretty important about how different Catholic cultures in the US are doing The third criterion still un baptism. What about non infants entering the church, kids getting baptized, people getting confirmed, et cetera?

Diocese of Raleigh has one convert defined this way for every 71 Catholics, Newark, New Jersey, one convert for every 2,448 Catholics. So if you’ve got a parish of roughly 2,500 people, you could expect if you’re in Newark, to have one person being received into the church at Easter, that same church, 2,500 people, if it’s in Raleigh, you can expect 34, 35 people to be received into the church at Easter. It’s an enormous difference. I mean, if you went to those two Easter vigils, you would immediately come away thinking like, okay, one of these places is doing a lot better than the other one is because that is a huge glaring stat, and that’s not some weird fluke. That’s their overall average. It isn’t like, oh, that’s the one weird parish. It’s like, no, no, that’s their actual rate. The rates are that far apart.

What about marriage? Solan, Kansas? There is one wedding for every 178 Catholics. That’s 15 times better than in the diocese of Lubbock where there’s one Catholic wedding for every 2,722 Catholics. Now, if you think about how many people are getting married, that suggests that a ton of people are getting married every year without even bothering to have a wedding in the church. That shows a very stark institutional, if you think about the whole cycle of how people join the church or become lukewarm or leave the church, there’s a lot of people who aren’t practicing in the full sense. They’re not regular mass goers. They don’t believe everything the church believes. They don’t follow church teaching, but they have enough of a connection that they still want get married in the Catholic church. They still want to baptize their kids maybe to have a place like what Lubbock apparently has, where there’s one wedding for every 2,722 Catholics suggests that you have a lot of people who aren’t even that lukewarm. They’re not even that connected. That’s a problem.

And once again, you can’t reduce that to the fact that some populations are younger, you have higher marriage rates. That’s all true state by state. You’re going to find differences and the age people get married at how frequently people get married, all of that stuff. All that’s true. That doesn’t come close to accounting for the level of difference between these. Okay, so I’ve mentioned that there are some regional patterns that jump out. So let’s look at, excuse me, the 20th healthiest diocese, and then we’ll look at the 20th, the 20 least healthy Diocese. Ziegler points out that there are several Midwestern and southern states where every diocese in the state has above average fruitfulness. And sure enough, as you go through the list, I just made a chart looking at a map of all of the different diocese in the US and I highlighted in yellow the top 20.

You’ve got the Diocese of Nashville and Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Wichita, Kansas, Savannah, Georgia, Knoxville, Tennessee. Let’s see, Eastern Tennessee, diocese, Birmingham, Alabama, grand Island, Nebraska, Salina, Kansas, Indianapolis, Indiana, Memphis, Tennessee. My own Kansas City, St. Joseph. That’s where I’m recording this right now. Rapid City, South Dakota, that’s the western half of South Dakota, Lexington, that is Kentucky, the eastern edge of Kentucky, Jefferson City, Missouri, Evansville, Indiana, Jackson, Mississippi, Amarillo, Texas, Kansas City, and Kansas, which is the diocese next door to me, Fort Wayne, south Bend, Indiana, and then Bismarck, North Dakota. Now, a couple things jumped out to me. First is if you look at the map, there’s a pretty strict western wall. There’s nothing to the west of Nebraska in terms of the most spiritually healthy diocese. There’s nothing northeast of Kentucky. So you see some obvious places where you don’t find the greatest spiritual growth. It’s rather clustered around the Midwest and the South.

To put it another way, almost all of those diocese are in the central time zone. In fact, I believe every diocese is either entirely or partially in central time zone. A couple of the diocese like in Western South Dakota and Western Nebraska are split. They have, and actually Western Kansas Salina is like this as well, where you have counties that are in mountain time, but all of them are at least partially either in central time or completely in central time, or at least are a diocese away from central time zone. I believe that’s true of all of them. The only one I’m not a hundred percent sure of is in the case of Eastern Kentucky. But either way, that says a lot, only about a quarter of the US population lives in central time zone, so that a hundred percent of the spiritually healthy diocese are in or very close to central time zone seems very significant.

What about the least healthy diocese? So this is going to go from worst to least worst. So the worst in terms of the most spiritually unhealthy. And I want to be very clear as I’m doing this, my goal is not to attack any of these diocese as I think we’re going to see. A lot of these diocese are in tough for reasons nobody can easily control, including the bishop. And in fact, the bishop of the worst performing diocese, Brownsville Bishop Flores, just became the vice president of the U-S-C-C-B because he is by seemingly all accounts a very good bishop. He’s just been dealt a very difficult hand. So in terms of the diocese that we might just say are in the most trouble, Brownsville, the very bottom tip of Texas is in the worst spot, followed by El Paso, which is the western tip of Texas, followed by Norwich.

I probably am pronouncing that too much like a non-kin Connecticut tour. Las Vegas is the fourth worst. San Diego is fifth worst. Then Lubbock, Texas, Portland and Maine, New York, New York, Laredo, another of these Texas border diocese, Sacramento, California, Buffalo, New York, Providence, Rhode Island, San Antonio, Texas, Fort Worth, Texas, Rochester, New York, Erie, Pennsylvania, Uchin, New Jersey, Phoenix, Arizona, Gallup, New Mexico, and Corpus Christi, Texas. So all of these diocese that are struggling are ones that are either in the northeast or the southwest or Texas. And so it’s actually kind of striking that Amarillo is one of the healthiest diocese when so many of the other Texas diocese seem to be very clearly struggling. Emory is not just the top half, it’s in the top 20 of 175 diocese, so it’s basically 90th percentile. That’s pretty remarkable given that most of the diocese in Texas don’t seem to be having anything like that spiritual health, and several of them are in that, the bottom 10, 15% or so.

So what can we say about this? Well, as Ziegler says, all of the diocese in the Northeast and all of the diocese in Southern California have below average fruitfulness that whatever else may be true. There are some things that are much bigger problems than an individual bishop or individual diocese seems to be able to solve because we have these things where if it was just a matter of different Episcopal styles, you might imagine a really healthy diocese and expert to really unhealthy diocese, and we find all of New England, that eastern end of the Rust Belt, all of southern California, we find a lot of struggles. We also find a lot of struggles along the US Mexico border, and I think we’re going to get into maybe why that is in some ways, but I think you’re going to have all sorts of issues that might impact how effectively bishops can administer their diocese and minister to the people of those diocese.

But those are the situations that we find. Now, I want to compare two of these diocese. I want to compare Nashville, which is the middle diocese in Tennessee to Brownsville, which as I said is the southern tip of Texas. So let’s compare these two vs because Brownsville was the worst rated in terms of overall spiritual fruitfulness. Nashville is the best rated in terms of overall spiritual fruitfulness. And I think this is helpful to see because earlier when we were talking about you take the best in baptism, you take the best in weddings, et cetera, et cetera, it’s going to be a lot better than the worst in baptisms, the worst in weddings, et cetera, et cetera. That looks like you’re just cherry picking stats. You’re saying, look, on this one stat, this one diocese is doing way better than this other diocese. But if you compare Brownsville and Nashville as kind of the outliers, the two extremes, it’s not just one stat.

It’s a strong indication of two very different diocesan cultures. So Brownsville on his website said it said it has 72 parishes, 88 deaths and priests, and 11 Catholic schools serving a population of 1,189,529 people. Now significantly, Catholics make up about 85% of the population in Brownsville, which is the bottom four counties in Texas. It is extremely Catholic on the books. The only diocese that has a higher percentage of Catholics in the US is in Laredo, which is actually also ninth least spiritually fruitful. We mentioned that a moment ago. So we have these places that are down by the US Mexico border that are full of a lot of Catholics on paper, maybe they’re baptized Catholics, but you have every sign that they’re not effectively integrated into the Catholic life in a spiritually fruitful kind of way. So that’s what we find within the diocese of Brownsville.

They have five seminarians that’s at all levels of formation. Their poster looks like they have nine, but that’s the bishop, the auxiliary bishop, two vocation directors, and then five seminarians for a population over a million. In contrast, the diocese, Nashville has only about 90,000 Catholics. Now, Nashville is pretty big, but Catholics only make up about 3% of the population and vocation wise, instead of five people, they’ve got 35. But it’s not just vocations, I mean because just in terms of vocation, they’d be on par with something like Chicago. I think they have, if not the same, at least within one or two of a much bigger, one of the major monolithic behemoth kind of Catholic diocese. But it’s not just seminarians, it’s all sorts of things. So Brownsville, we already saw that it had 72 parishes. Nashville’s not that far behind. It’s got 53 parishes.

It also has three parish missions. I’m going to call it 56 for those purposes. It has 33. I know there’s a lot of numbers here. I’ll unpack all this in a minute. There’s 33 di in priests. Now, that’s actually a little misleading because there’s a lot of priests working in the diocese who aren’t diocesan. They’ve got 19 religious order priests and then they have another 12 priests who are on loan from outside the diocese, although they absolutely don’t need it compared to the rest of the country. They also have 23 Catholic schools. Remember, Brownsville is more than 13 times bigger and has 10, Nashville has 23, they’ve got 14 elementary schools. They’ve got two high schools listed on their website plus a Chesterton Academy that the diocese promotes on its website plus three independent Catholic schools, which the diocese also promotes on its website, plus they have a Catholic college, Aquinas College.

These numbers are stark, and maybe the easiest way to see how stark they are is just imagine for a minute a diocese called Nash Browns kind of like hash browns. You just combine Brownsville and Nashville and just say, okay, imagine for a minute they had a diocese the size of Brownsville. So 13.3 times larger, but the diocese has the same kind of spiritual fruitfulness of Nashville. And then I want to compare the imaginary diocese of Nash Browns to the real diocese of Brownsville, and what you’d see is Nash Browns would have 745 parishes instead of 72 to be at the level of intimacy of priest and parishioner to have that same level of not having super overcrowded parishes or parishes. Nobody goes to 745 parishes, but instead they have 72, you’d have 439 to Austin priests, but instead they’re 88. And again, remember that number is actually low because there’s way more priests working in Nashville because a lot of them are from outside the diocese or they’re religious order priests to be on par with the schools in Nashville.

Our imaginary diocese of Nash Browns would have to have 306 schools, but instead Brownsville has 10. And then in terms of seminarians, to have the same ratio of seminarians for Catholic population, Brownsville would need to have 466 seminarians and it only has five. Those are shocking disparities in my view. It’s not like they’re off by a handful here or there. So why are there these dramatic differences? That’s one of the things I want to explore. And again, one of the things that jumps out when you look at a map like this is, okay, these are places where you have a lot of historic Catholic populations that maybe aren’t super devoutly practicing the f... Read more on Catholic.com