Crisis magazine has published a study of the "health" of dioceses in the United States, based on three factors: the "morale" of the presbyterate, the number and rate of vocations; and the effectiveness of evangelization (measured by RCIA rates and numbers).

The study is linked on the front page of the site and is a pdf file, and the focus really is on bishops – do they make a difference in a diocese?

Several folks were asked to respond to the study including, er, me. Those responses are here, and all I can say in retrospect about my response is: I agree with Russell Shaw. He’s the man. I said in my response that I thought they’d made a valiant effort to factor out demographic shifts, but I remain unconvinced that they were completely successful, (long time readers know this – I cannot mourn closures of Catholic schools and parishes in abandoned neighborhoods of the Northeast and Midwest when I know from personal experience how both institutions in the Sunbelt are bursting at the seams) and Shaw states those concerns well, as well as the problem with a measure of the health of the Church that focuses on the clergy.

I know it is difficult to measure the spiritual "health" of us laity, and, as I said in my response, I don’t think RCIA is a valuable way to do it because on the ground, as it is practiced, RCIA programs corrall in a bunch of different folks with varying motivations for "going through," including marriage. It is a good thing when someone gets interested in the Catholic Church because of marriage, but I don’t know if that’s the fruit of evangelization, exactly.  It certainly can be – no doubt! But is it always in any deep sense? Ask people involved in RCIA and marriage prep. They’ll tell you.

So..there you go.

Terry Mattingly has a column on the study, setting his sights on the demographics issue:

To gauge the effectiveness of evangelism efforts, they charted the number of adult converts in each diocese. Once again, Wagner and Hunter-Hall stressed that Catholicism is experiencing rapid growth in some regions due to immigration and, as always, many people enter the church through intermarriage.

However, that kind of growth "isn’t the same thing as people making decisions to convert because of the faith itself," said Hunter-Hall. "If you see converts streaming into the church, that almost always tells you something about the spiritual climate in a diocese. That usually has something to do with the bishop."

Finally, the researchers combined these three factors and determined which dioceses that they thought had improved and declined the most during the past decade. The top 20 list was dominated by small dioceses _ including a stunning number in the Bible Belt. The sharpest declines were in the Northeast, especially New England.

Thus, Wagner and Hunter-Hall noted: "The church is … most healthy in that region that is traditionally the least hospitable to it, and is least healthy in that region where it has the longest history, and in which are found the greatest concentration of Catholics (as a percentage of the population) and the largest number of Catholics."

Size is not always a virtue and, it seems, the first may become the last.

Small dioceses _ especially in "missionary" regions _ consistently attracted more converts and more new priests.

"It sounds strange, but if you’re a Catholic and you want to go where the action is you need to go to places like Alexandria (La.) Tyler (Texas) and Biloxi (Miss.)," said Wagner. "Catholics all over America are facing unique challenges. It seems that some people are handling them better than others."