You're saying, look on this one stat, this one diocese is doing way better than this other diocese. That looks like you're just cherry-picking stats. But if you compare Brownsville and Nashville as kind of the outliers of the two extremes, it's not just one stat. This is not that small diocese are universally doing well or something like that. It's rather a story that large diocese are in trouble. Welcome back to Chamis Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire. And I want to take a deep dive in the numbers to see where we find America's most fruitful diocese, where we find America's least fruitful diocese, and why. Now, if you know me, you might have noticed by now on Thursdays, I like to do a longer episode and I often like

to do a little bit of a deep dive. Sometimes it's on Bible or theology or philosophy or spirituality

and sometimes it's just on data. And I like seeing how the numbers play out because I think

everybody has kind of a vibe for what works and what doesn't work in the

church. And it's easy to assume your anecdotal experience of like, man, we did this thing in my

parish and it was amazing or we did that and it really annoyed me and to kind of universalize that.

And so to check my own biases and hopefully yours as well, I like to occasionally step back and to say,

okay, but what do we know about the big picture?

Like, what do we know about the numbers?

And so to that end, I'm really pleased that recently J.J. Ziegler and Catholic World Report

came out with a thing that just crunches the numbers.

So there's something called the official Catholic Directory, and it reports things like number of baptism, number of weddings, number of

seminarians, that sort of thing. So Ziegler compiles all of that and then reaches out to the

diocese that didn't have complete data and then puts together a chart measuring how spiritually

fruitful each diocese is. Now, obviously, what do we mean by

spiritually fruitful? Like, how does one measure that? In the ultimate sense, we're not going to

be able to measure it perfectly because the best kind of fruit is somewhat invisible. It would be wonderful to have a chart that just said,

here are the number of saints per capita being produced by every diocese. Here's the percentage

of the Catholics in this diocese that are going to heaven. And here are those who are saints

because of the diocesan culture compared to these other ones and maybe are saints

in spite of the diocesan culture. Here are the initiatives that help get people to heaven.

Here are the ones that don't. But unfortunately, this side of heaven, we just don't have that

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