Fascinating Statistics

The Latin Mass Society has just compiled and published some fascinating statistics about the state of the Church in England and Wales over the last 100 years or so.

Presumably this is a reaction to the dodgy ordination stats that were being touted recently to prove that the Church was stronger now than in the 50s, or whatever the rather dubious claim was.

These stats certainly suggest something different: and the Catholic Herald has picked up the story.

Joseph Shaw, on his blog, focuses on the conversion stats: the extraordinarily high rates in the first half of the last century, and the collapse in the second half.

There is a comprehensive set of graphs on flickr showing baptisms, marriages, ordinations, conversions., and also a downloadable spreadsheet of all the data, complete with the graphs, here.

Here is just one example, to whet your appetite:

All in all, this is a wealth of information, and I am very grateful to Mike Lord of the LMS for sending it to me, and to the Latin Mass Society itself, of course, for compiling and publishing it.