Archbishop Martin to all catholics: "You're lapsed? The door's thata way."

Peregrinus

koth wrote: »

OK, let's apply that reasoning to a simple example.

Child is baptised. Are they discounted from diocese numbers until they receive their first communion?

I suspect that’s the wrong question to ask.

Let’s suppose that in a given year 1,000 baptisms happen in the diocese, and one of those is koth’s. The people who compile the diocesan figures know that there were 1,000 children baptized, but they don’t know that one of them is koth. (The diocese asks for numbers of baptisms, but not for names and addresses of everyone baptized.) Consequently they’re not counting koth as a Catholic, and in eight years’ time they will not be looking for koth’s name among the list of those making their first communion. Because, again, they won’t get names; they’ll get numbers only. They neither know nor care how many of those reflected in the communion figure were reflected in the baptism figure eight years previously.

Nor are they saying that, in the year in which there were 1,000 baptisms in the diocese, that there were 1,000 Catholics. Clearly, there were many more that that. How can you work from number of baptisms to total number of Catholics? Well, you have to make assumptions about how many Catholics have children in any given year (taking account of the fact that few people under 20, or over 40, have children in any given year, and only a proportion of those within that age range), how many of them have their children baptized, and how many of the children baptized have a non-Catholic parent. Given those assumptions, you can work from number of baptisms to an estimate of total numbers of Catholics.

Of course, the figure you get is crucially dependent on the assumptions you make, and it will be useless unless the assumptions are pretty good, so they need to be based on realistic data about fertility rates, about rates of mixed marriages, about the demographic profile of the population of the diocese, etc. Some of this information will come from data which the church itself has (e.g. rates of mixed marriages) and others will have to come from public or professional sources (figures published by the CSO, actuarial information published by life offices, etc).

This all sounds a bit hairy, since a tiny change in the assumptions will lead to a large change in the result. But of course they’re doing a similar process with figures for first communions, figures for confirmations, figures for weddings, figures for funerals. From each of these, with appropriate assumptions, you can work back to an estimate of the total number of Catholics in the diocese, and you can test the figure arrived at from one of these calculations against the figure arrived at from another. What you need is set of assumptions which are well-grounded in data, which are reasonable and which produce a similar result when applied to the years’s baptisms, the year’s communions, the year’s confirmations, the year’s weddings and this year’s funerals, and which do this consistently year-on-year. Do this properly and you will arrive at a good estimate of the total number of Catholics in the diocese for any given year, even though the majority of them don’t turn up in baptism, communion, confirmation, wedding or funeral statistics for that year.

And the fact that the church estimate, nationally, is so close to the government measure of religious self-identification suggest that, taking the rough with the smooth, the church process is pretty robust. (I admit that this surprises me.)

But note that at no point anywhere in this process are you identifying who is a Catholic; you are just estimating total numbers of Catholics. It never matters, in this process, whether koth is or is not a Catholic.

Right. So you’re the diocesan official whose job it is to produce this figure. And a letter lands on your desk from koth which says, “hey, I was baptized (say) 25 years ago, but I’m definitely not a Catholic now. Please acknowledge.” How is this going to affect your calculation?

Not very much, is the answer. Koth says he was baptized 25 years ago. Even if we assume (or if he says) that he was baptized in the diocese, that merely means that he had a marginal effect on the figure for 1986. But he wasn’t baptized in 2011 (and he didn’t make his first communion, or confirmation, or get married, or buried). So he doesn’t show up at all in the figures the parishes have sent in to you.

But he may show up indirectly. Koth probably doesn’t say this in his letter, but it is possible that he had a child in 2011 and that that child was baptized. Or an older child of his is showing up in the communion or confirmation statistics. Or koth could conceivably have got married this year, to a Catholic, in a church.

The last of these isn’t a problem. If koth has taken the trouble to write to the bishop and say that he isn’t a Catholic, it’s very unlikely that he told his wedding celebrant that he was a Catholic, so if koth’s wedding does show up in this year’s figures it is almost certainly reported as a mixed marriage.

But the assumptions made about the number of Catholics implied by the baptism (or communion, or confirmation) of one child need to reflect the fact that not every such child has two Catholic parents. In addition to the children of mixed marriages, there will be some children who celebrate these sacraments who have a parent (or conceivably two parents) who have ceased to be, or to regard themselves as, Catholics). We need to make an estimate of this, and adjust the figures accordingly.

For this purpose it doesn’t actually matter whether koth has a child showing up in the statistics or not, and we don’t have to ask him. A proportion of the parents of these children have left the church. We don’t as always need to identify them, and therefore we don’t need to know whether koth is one of them. But we do need to estimate their numbers, and make an appropriate adjustment to our total. Koth’s letter reminds us of this need, and it does this regardless of whether koth himself is one of the parents involved.

Now, this is something we should be doing anyway, so the reminder presented by koth’s letter may be unnecessary. But even if that is the case, koth’s letter could still be relevant. Because how are we going to estimate the number of Catholics leaving the church? One factor which could feed into such an estimate is the number of such letters received by the bishop. Most, of course, do not send such a letter, but in all likelihood the more letters the bishop gets, then the more Catholics are leaving, and the bigger the assumption we ought to make about this.

So koth’s letter could, have an effect on the overall diocesan estimate. But the effect is that koth should be stricken from the lists; koth isn’t in the lists. The possible effect is that, because we have received koth’s letter, we may make a slightly larger adjustment to reflect Catholics leaving the church than we would otherwise have made.

But, in the end, it matters very little. Koth’s letter may result in an adjustment to the figure which will be published in Annuario Pontifico some years later (these things come out several years after the event), but it will have - and should have - no effect at all on the bishop who points out that 86% of the population are Catholic. That figure comes from the census and, assuming koth filled out the census form correctly, he is already including in the 14%, and not the 86%. And if koth filled out the census form wrongly, then he can write all the letter he wants to the Bishop of Cork and Ross, but they will make no difference at all to the figure that matters. Either way, his letter changes nothing.

koth wrote: »

I'm currently being counted as a member because I'm finding it impossible to locate information as to how to get myself excluded from their numbers.

How do you know you’re being counted as a member, if you don’t know how they make the estimate? If the process in your diocese is as it seems to be in Cork and Ross, and if they’re already making an adjustment for Catholics who leave, then the only question is whether the adjustment is a reasonably close approximation to the true number. Overall, as I pointed out, the church process seems to produce a surprisingly accurate figure (when compared with the figures emerging from government processes) so there seems to be no reason to assume that the church process is flawed.

expectationlost

tl:dr^ look yes the defections letters were as much about principle as anything else, and the campaign to say your not an atheist in the census was the campaign for official ireland, your taking a long time to say nothing new Peregrinus

it all comes down to schools.

Peregrinus

expectationlost wrote: »

tl:dr^ look yes the defections letters were as much about principle as anything else, and the campaign to say your not an atheist in the census was the campaign for official ireland, your taking a long time to say nothing new Peregrinus.

Yes, but I wouldn’t be saying it at all, except that the myth refuses to die. There seems to be a segment of the atheist/agnostic population who cling on to this belief in the teeth of reason and common sense. In this very thread, Dr Doom (post #12) believes that he is being counted as a Catholic by the bishops in their public statements, and Lollipop23 (post #46) apparently agrees.

I’ve no problem with encouraging nonbelievers to register the fact that they are not (or are no longer) Catholics, and I entirely understand why they might want explicit acknowledgement of that from the Catholic church. But the importance of defection, and the consequences of defection, are entirely personal. The notion is abroad that by not defecting, or not being allowed to defect formally, a nonbeliever is somehow inflating the number of Catholics in Ireland and so giving the church more weight in public policy formation. There is no foundation for this notion.

PickledLime

I think he's right to be honest.

I would identify myself as an atheist, but i know far more about Catholicism than most so-called Catholics (reason being that i investigated Catholicism/Christianity and rejected it).