The Polish National Catholic Church also reports that few of the new Polish immigration seem interested. In their case, it appears that the Polish National Catholic Church still uses the liturgical translations of a century ago, and newly-arrived Poles find these texts, and probably also the spoken Polish of the US-born clergy, strange to them.

Several clergy of the Pittsburgh Metropolia tell me that Greek-Catholics from Slovakia who arrive in America usually attend Slovak Roman Catholic Churches (if they attend Church at all), because they find the language to their taste, while Greek-Catholics from Transcarpathia usually attend Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Churches, because they find the language understandable and because the Ukrainians make them feel more welcome.

This makes hash out of one of my favorite convictions: that Prostopinije is the key to the Carpatho-Russian identity.

Fr. Serge

It seems that membership-numbers inflation is common to both Slav Byzantine Catholic and Orthodox churches. :|

It's an observable fact that in America the Greek Catholics leave and assimilate often by going Roman. (Sometimes, as in the case of somebody who literally was beaten at 'Russian school', it's the local church's fault.)

Regarding the PNCC...

I'm guessing at least some of the new immigrants are secular like Russian ones.

Those who are religious are served well by Roman parishes that are Polish-language. Rome learnt its lesson from the Hodur and other schisms that started the PNCC.

For the most part the original reason for the split no longer exists!

But there's a lot of water under the bridge; the Nats after four generations, even though obviously an RC breakaway, are a small (tens of thousands like America's Slav Byzantine Catholics and Slav Orthodox) but real church with a culture all their own, big on congregational ownership of churches (originally a hedge agaist the hostile Irish RC bishops) and with married bishops and priests, no Confession for adults and lax rules on birth control and divorce-and-remarriage. (Americanised.)

(BTW the RCC in England is turning Polish because of immigration. Like Latin-American immigration in the US they're keeping that church afloat as the Irish are ageing and no longer go.)

For decades the PNCC did the Tridentine Mass in Polish (Bishop Hodur was more liberal as on lots of things but his people weren't) but they've been a Novus Ordo clone for some time now. So their Polish texts wouldn't necessarily be 100 years old.

And like the American Greek Catholics almost all of their people are fourth-generation Americans. (Some of their priests are Polish immigrant ex-RC priests... perhaps changing to be married.) They speak and liturgically use English now, again a close copy of the Novus Ordo.

I take these numbers to stand only for active churchgoers. How about those who are no longer active churchgoers, but who have not left their church either, still attend from time to time, are married in church and have their children baptized/chrismated/communed in it? I think they should still be counted, perhaps in a separate counter. IN any case, many do not go to church due to the lack of an accessible church, or the lack of outreach, or simply due to the demands of modern life.

The problem with counting only active churchgoers is that it can have the effect of giving up the uncounted as "lost". For example, there may be only 20,000 in the BCC -- but surely there are tens of thousands out there who still consider themselves as BCC, who have not altogether switched to the Latin rite, and who have definitely not converted to another church or religion. Same with OCA -- those descendants of St. Alexis Toth's converts, not to speak of the old Russian immigrants couldn't all have disappeared into evangelical Protestantism or secularism.

Incidentally, there are said to be 800,000 Russian immigrants and 3 million descendants of Russians in the USA and perhaps half a million in Europe west of the former Soviet Union. Granting that the "first wave" (the largest of all) of the Russian emigration to the US was made up of non-Orthodox religious and ethnic minorities fleeing persecution, there should still be millions of these Russian descendants gathering around the Orthodox church. Obviously, the vast majority of them are neither in ROCOR nor OCA nor the MP Exarchates. Another pastoral catastrophe for the Orthodox, perhaps?

Back to the Polish National Catholic Church for a moment. At a generous estimate, they have perhaps as much as 10% of the Polish-American population. But the credit union they run attracts about 25% of the Polish-American population.

Evidently from ecumenical to economical is not a vast difference!

Similarly, despite what is happening to the Pittsburgh Metropolia, the Greek Catholic Union continues to be one of the most successful credit unions and fraternal insurance companies in the USA>


Fr. Serge

I am dismayed by these "corrected" numbers for the BCA. Even if they are only approximations!

I thought all along only the 1990 base figures submitted to Rome as data for the Annuario Pontificio were "guesstimates!

As it is, the figures for 2000, 2005, 2006, and 2007 reflect a downward spiral but are, also, incorrect because of the 1990 base figures. However, these initially reported numbers should have been rechecked and corrected accordingly by now, 18 years later.

CNEWA gets its numbers from the Annuario, which in turn gets the reports from all dioceses and eparchies throughout the world.

Amado

I wonder if John or Fr. Deacon Lance (or anyone else in the know) might comment on a striking observation--that the number of Ruthenians in the 1980s had been intentionally inflated "in order to get us raised to Metropolitan status." (quote from Fr. Deacon)

I have been meditating over this yesterday and today. Is the backstory here that officials in Pittsburgh intentionally misled Rome by reporting numbers they knew to be false? I understand the desire to paint the best possible picture, and I also understand that there are different ways to count church members--from baptized and still living to shows up every Sunday, and the whole range in between. But Fr Deacon Lance's observation, combined with the astounding differences in magnitude over a brief 18 year period, suggests that there was more going on here than just unbridled optimism then and utter disaster now.

John's estimates by Eparchy sound reasonable to me. One possible comparison measure would be to get the dollar value of the annual appeal, and divide by 25 or so--that would give a reasonable, ballpark estimate of active members. I haven't been able to find the annual appeal figures though.

John Murray

John,

I think it was probably a combination of beefing up the numbers as well an an ability to come to a reasonable determination on who to count, as you say: anybody ever baptized, those who show up Sunday, those who use envelopes, those who come a few times a year but get married and their children baptized, etc. In addition, Byzantines attendning Latin parishes, which might possibly be our biggest loss, would be included in the count because without a change of Church they remain under the jurisdiciton of the Byzantine bishops although they are not parishioners in a real sense. Perhaps it was decided to drop them from the report.

Fr. Deacon Lance

As to the PNCC, it would not be expected that it would benefit greatly from immigration, as the immigrant base likely reflects that of Poland itself - which is predominantly Latin.

The counterpart in Poland itself is relatively small and, unless there has been a recent change, it has not been in communion with the PNCC for several years now (a split that resulted from the body in Poland maintaining communion with the Old Catholics, after the PNCC broke with the latter over female ordination).

Many years,

Neil

Father Deacon Lance has written:


Amazing, since the Pittsburgh-Passaic jurisdiction had attained Metropolitan status in 1968 or 1969. Still, it is not totally incredible that chancery workers continued to regurgitate the same numbers rather than make the effort to seek accurate information, which would have been regarded as "bad news".

Fr. Serge

right you are, Padre (oops, I just did a Latinization!). I am of the suspicion that the numbers are not so much the problem as the Diaspora. in the Pittsburgh Metropolia, there are a number of mission parishes outside the North. I dare say a majority of the folks there are from shrinking parishes in the Rust Belt. and what of the isolated Byzantines who, as I said in my previous post, need to learn of the existence of these Sun belt parishes?
Much Love,
Jonn

Where does that guess come from?

I know that our parish just made the $200/family goal for the first time.

hawk