Eighty priests currently serve 45 ordinariate parishes in the U.S. and Canada. Approximately 20,000 worshippers attend Sunday Mass. When Lopes was ordained bishop, the ordinariate had no seminarians. Today there are six in formation.The eighty priests must represent a total including retirees, those excardinated, military chaplains, and quite possibly even those on the path to laicization. There are 42 parishes currently listed on the parish finder for the web site, though in most cases they aren't full parishes, and the level of activity varies widely. But the number that caught my eye was the 20,000 who attend Sunday mass. I remarked that if you were to multiply the number of scheduled Sunday masses over the entire ordinariate by the maximum capacity of each venue, you couldn't possibly reach 20,000.
My calculator says, in fact, that 20,000 divided by 45 is 444. This means that the average venue -- a mixture of storefronts, basement chapels, cafeterias, and other provisional accommodations in most cases -- would need to have a capacity of 444. Even distributed between two Sunday times, each mass would have to have an average attendance of 222. I don't believe that any but a few full parishes in the North American ordinariate has anything like that as a Sunday attendance, even leaving canonical membership aside. 2-400 wouldn't even fit in the space.
So an estimate of 20,000 is wildly inaccurate with just a few moments' reflection. But what's a more realistic estimate? Yet again, the ordinariate doesn't publish statistics, other than the unrealistic estimates we see here. But let's apply rules of thumb like the 80-20 rule, where one might guess that 20% of the parishes have 80% of the attendance. My regular correspondent says,
Approximately 1,000 people attend Our Lady of Walsingham on a Sunday. But other numbers I have seen recently are Mt Calvary 100; St Luke 150 (including diocesan parishioners); St Alban 65; St Thomas More, Toronto 70 (a record, I believe—-swelled by AC conference attendees); St Aelred 40; Good Shepherd 27.I've been told that with the cancellation of the Sunday evening Latin mass at Our Lady of the Atonement, Sunday attendance is down about 100, with the current number in the 3-400 range for all masses. My regular correspondent added,
[T]here are only eleven full parishes, a designation which requires a minimum of 100 members. The other 31 groups (going by the list on the website, there are 42 OCSP communities) must therefore have fewer than 3,000 members total (I am sure the actual number is far less).So without more explicit information from Houston, applying a reasonable standard like the 80-20 rule to the best numbers we have, it seems pretty plain that we're still in the mid four figures at best for either canonical membership or weekly attendance. My regular correspondent also noted, while browsing the St John the Evangelist Calgary website,
I looked further down the page, to “Volunteers Needed” and noticed the request for people to help with “identifying Catholics and Anglicans in the Inglewood neighbourhood to invite them to worship at St John’s.” Frankly I prefer to leave doorstep solicitation of those who are currently happily worshipping anywhere to Mormons and JWs, but I would have thought that even those who regard current Anglicans as fair game for active recruitment might draw the line at practising Catholics. But obviously I thought wrong.Another visitor noted,
The Annuario Pontifico 2019 came out in March and is being distributed in Italian. It shouldn’t be too much longer before some of the online sites that track this data can get it translated and uploaded and the true numbers for the Ordinariates will be readily available. Bishop Lopes and his Ordinariate Bishop brothers already know the numbers because they had to report them. Perhaps that is pushing this “add some people quick” drive.
UPDATE: A visitor comments, "You haven't taken into account that they’re including the angels and archangels who are said to attend every mass."
