CHURCH ETIQUETTE
DIOCESES RANKED ON SEMINARIANS
A BOOK COMPARING HOLY WAR AND JUST WAR
UPDATE ON REGISTRATIONS FOR OUR CRUISES
Dear Subscriber:
Down the block from my home is a Mormon church. When I drive back from Sunday Mass and pass cars going in the other direction, it's easy to tell which cars are occupied by Mormons leaving their services. The men all wear the one-time FBI uniform: dark suits, dark ties, white shirts. The women all dress modestly (but not in the unattractive gunnysack style favored by some home-schoolers).
Then I think back at what I saw at my parish. Most people dressed well enough, though only the readers and ushers wore coats and ties. Some people wore shorts (which, I think, are acceptable in church only if you are three years old or younger). Other people wore sweat suits. Some wore jerseys or jackets emblazoned with the names of their favorite teams. One guy wore his ball cap throughout Mass.
As summer nears, the Attire Quotient declines. It goes up in late autumn as the days become chilly. It's a cycle as reliable as the seasons themselves.
I'm not saying that we ought to mimic the Mormons, but I am saying that we ought to think of Mass as a destination different from the mall or the stadium. Some folks still don't understand that. No one knows this better than priests, who have to look out over the people in the pews.
I was sent a Code of Church Etiquette that one frustrated priest recently posted at his parish. He had tried indirect reminders from the ambo and small notices in the bulletin. They had no effect. He decided to be blunt. Here are a few of the items he listed:
“1. Please remember appropriate clothing. Especially during the summer the church should be a décolletage-free zone. (If you don't know this word, I have another word for you: dictionary.)
“2. Please remember that chewing gum by anyone (any age, Catholic or not) is not acceptable during Mass. Reason 1: respect. Reason 2: one-hour fast prior to Communion.
“3. Please refrain from reading the bulletin, e-mails, or text-messages during Mass.
“4. Please turn off or silence cell phones and pagers.
“5. Please, no MP3 devices or iPods (Nano or otherwise).
“6. Please participate in the Mass with your mind, body, and spirit by singing, speaking, praying, and paying attention.”
There were other items in the priest's list, but you get the point. I hope his congregation did too.
GOOD NEWS ON THE PRIEST FRONT, IN SOME PLACES
In 1978, the year that John Paul II was elected pope, there were 63,882 major seminarians throughout the world. In 2005, the year that Benedict XVI was elected pope, there were 114,439. The increase was 79 percent. That's the good news.
The bad news, for us, is that in America, during that same period, the number of seminarians dropped from 9,021 to 4,603, a decline of 49 percent.
That is the countrywide statistic. Statistics for individual dioceses vary. Some actually have seen steady increases in the number of seminarians, but they have been the exceptions, of course.
In December Catholic World Report magazine printed a tabulation of the ratio of Catholics to seminarians in all 176 Latin Rite dioceses in the U.S. Religious-order seminarians were not counted. The raw numbers were taken from The Official Catholic Directory.
The magazine took the number of Catholics, divided that by the number of diocesan seminarians, and ended up with a ratio. Then it ranked the dioceses and listed the rankings for 2006 (the latest year available) with those for the three prior years.
You might not be surprised to learn that Lincoln, Nebraska, was in first place for the third year running, with a ratio of 2,473 Catholics per seminarian. But you will be surprised to learn that Juneau, Alaska, was in second place, with 2,737 Catholics per seminarian, and that in 2003 Juneau had been in next-to-last place. That's quite an improvement, but there is less there than meets the eye.
Juneau is a small diocese. It had only 2 seminarians in 2006, but that was enough to achieve second place, since the diocese had only 5,473 Catholics that year. (Your own parish may have more than that.) I presume Juneau had no seminarians in 2003, which is why it was in the cellar that year.
Most of the top-ranking dioceses are small or smallish, and their rankings may not tell us much, either about them or about the state of the Church in America as a whole. More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that few large dioceses score high.
Of the top 40 rankings, only two are held by dioceses with Catholic populations above 150,000: Denver (400,000 Catholics) and St. Paul-Minneapolis (650,000 Catholics).
Most populous dioceses are found toward the bottom of the list: Boston at 162 out of 176; Brooklyn at 155; Detroit at 160; Galveston-Houston at 164; Los Angeles at 171; New York at 170; Orange at 156; Philadelphia at 144; Rockville Centre at 163; San Bernardino at 159. All of these dioceses have a Catholic population exceeding one million. The only million-plus dioceses doing fairly well are Newark at 78 and Chicago at 42.
My own diocese of San Diego doesn't quite make the million-Catholic cut-off; it had 950,743 Catholics in 2006. But it did achieve a certain distinction. In the rankings it came in dead last at 176 out of 176.
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Roberto de Mattei is a historian who teaches at the University of Cassino and the European University of Rome. He has written sixteen books, the latest being a thin volume called Holy War, Just War: Islam and Christendom at War. I wrote the foreword to it and was glad to do so. It's a book that explains how the Christian idea of a just war differs notably from the Muslim idea of a holy war, and it argues that most people misunderstand Islam and therefore misunderstand what to do about it.
De Mattei’s book is available from its publisher, The Rockford Institute, for $15.95. You can get a copy (and read my scintillating foreword) by calling (815) 964-5053.
CRUISES UPDATE
A few months ago, as the economy tanked, I began to worry about this year’s Catholic Answers cruises. Prior to 2008 we sponsored just one cruise per year. Given the success we enjoyed over several years, we expanded our offerings to three cruises for this year: Alaska (June 8–15), Baltic (August 20–September 2), Mediterranean (October 2–16). Then came the housing crash and all the rest. Would we have anyone at all aboard the ships with us?
After a slow start, bookings really picked up. We already have registered more people than we sailed with last year (on our very successful first cruise in the Mediterranean), and we’re still five weeks out from our Alaska cruise, four months out from our Baltic cruise, and more than five months out from our Mediterranean cruise. We have a chance to double the total number of registrations between now and the end of the summer.
For information on this year’s cruises, please visit:
www.catholicanswerscruise.com
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
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