8,000 Members?

There has been some note of an interview Bp Lopes gave on Canadian TV, in which he asserts that there are 8,000 members in the OCSP. A comment at Mr Murphy's site sums things up:

“I’ve just watched Bishop Lopes’ interview for the Canadian Salt and Light TV.

The statistics stated around 12.30 of the video material have come as a shock for me! I’m an incurable optimist, but I would never imagine that the CSP Ordinariate has already grown that much. Only a year or two ago, the numbers cited oscillated around 2,000 – 2,500 at the best. Now, we know first hand that there are 68 priests and… 8,000 (sic!) canonical members alone! That means much more, if cradle Catholics actually attending Ordinariate parishes are included. That’s a fantastic growth rate – contrary to what all those malcontents have predicted. . ."

The clear implication here is that somehow the OCSP grew by 5,500-6,000 members in the space of about a year -- or those who were doing the most conscientious job they could of estimating the 2,000-2,500 numbers were wildly off.

Let's try to figure out how this might have happened, and how we could tell. (A parallel issue might be the failure of the conventional wisdom to predict the outcome of the US election this past November. Certainly there was received groupthink that was wrong, but there were in fact numerous malcontents, conspiracy theorists, bloggers, and such who got things pretty close indeed.)

The first question I would have is whether we would have seen note anywhere of large numbers being received during this period. Keep in mind that those canonically eligible to be OCSP members are former Anglicans or Catholics who haven't completed the sacraments of initiation. There would need to be a special mass, at the Easter vigil or some other time, where all these candidates were confirmed. And this would have been primarily in the past year.

Somehow, no matter what exceptions or workarounds we might allow, we would be looking for several thousand receptions in recent months, spread among existing groups and parishes in the US and Canada. Wouldn't we expect some publicity about these remarkable events? No headlines, at Mr Murphy's site or elsewhere, announcing 600 Receptions at St Anselm Podunk!

I simply cite Fermi's Paradox writ small: There should be 100000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them? Let's keep in mind as well that the total of OCSP entities, i.e., groups and parishes, has declined net in the past year, losing (or at least losing track of) six, while gaining only one.

I posed this question to my regular correspondent, who replied,

We have a pretty good idea of their numbers, and they don't add up to half this figure. I suppose former Anglicans, etc who worship in diocesan parishes might have made the effort to register as OCSP "members-at-large," although this means they cannot serve on parish councils, among other, presumably minor, restrictions. If so, they have shown remarkable pertinacity, because there has been no obvious publicity encouraging them to do so.

Given the problems with the ParishSoft system I don't think we can be confident that the OCSP actually knows how many people are card-carrying members, but if one is going to pick an optimistic, blue-sky number and comes up with [only] 8,000 I think we can say that things are still fairly fragile. We also recall that this article gave the membership as 20,000---not a number we heard from the lips of Bp Lopes, of course, but a number somebody got from somewhere.

My correspondent later mused,

In terms of the target amount for this year's Bishop's Appeal, [St Thomas More], Scranton was in the number 5 spot, the top eight positions being occupied by the eight full parishes. There is not an exact correlation between income and membership, but there is a relationship.

I believe Fr Bergman's most recent count of membership there is roughly 200. Discussion within the past month of membership at Bridgeport, also now a full parish, places it at about 100. This means that almost all of the 8,000 membership Bp Lopes cites must be among the top four parishes. With something like an 80-20 or bell-type distribution, we would expect the top parish, presumably Houston, to be about 4,000, with another 3,500 or so distributed among three others. The last estimate I've seen for Houston is in hundreds, not thousands.

Someone might be able to prove this estimate wrong, but they're going to have to come up with more than I've seen. And I continue to say it's appraisal time for Bp Lopes.