Jeanie Hannaman

By Francis X. Maier, The Catholic Thing - Here’s a fun fact:  In December 1990, the planet had exactly one website, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web.  A year later, total global websites numbered 50.  By December 1993, there were 623; by January 1996, 100,000; by April 2008 (around the time The Catholic Thing started), 162 million.  Today the number is north of 1.1 billion.  About 4 percent of those websites are pornography-related.  Predictably, given the potholes in human nature, porn-related web searches are sharply higher. 

Fr. Robert McTeigue, SJ, Crisis Magazine - Inevitably, in the face of dire statistics about the Church, someone will try to rally us, explaining that if we just start synodaling more earnestly, then all will be well... Such images are on my mind because of recently released data illustrating the demographic collapse of the Catholic Church in the United States. From 1999-2022, the yearly number of adult Catholics coming into the Church in the United States has declined 58 percent. A recent Pew study indicates that for every 100 adults coming into the Church in the United States, 800 people leave.