But Trads may tend towards the other extreme, which is why I thought it might be fun to poke at them with that little post.

it all depends where you look and how you look at the data. some good signs, some very bad signs–the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack, the pollution problem in china, our country’s wasteful unsustainable lifestyle, the rise of islam in europe, the attacks on christians by islam, resistant staph infections in hospitals, globalization, the power of the industrial military complex, secularization, poor catholic catechesis…. etc.

i wouldn’t say things are getting worse, but they are not getting better.

Also, long-run trends in church membership are positive in America: it’s increased from 20% or so in the colonial period to 60% or so in the 1980s. I’m not sure of the most recent numbers or specifically for Catholics. Europe has definitely moved in the other direction, with a collapse of religion, and of birthrates, although birthrates are recovering in a few countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands.

Maybe I’ve been reading The Economist too long…

Happy New Year!

Ah! Tomorrow night I will sit at my own computer again… and watch the college football national championship on my own television. I can hardly wait!

I think the Economist must have gotten some bad or outdated figures on teen age birth rates.

Centers for Disease Control
Childbearing by unmarried women rose substantially in 2006, reaching record high levels. The birth rate rose 7 percent in 2006 to 50.6 per 1,000 unmarried women aged 15–44 years; the number of births to unmarried women increased by nearly 8 percent in 2006 to 1,641,700.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_07.pdf

Lastly, as a Cradle Catholic Irish American it’s taken 5 generations of doom, gloom, and poor cooking to develop such a highly skilled level of guilt.

Nothing is more depressing that not having anything to be depressed about, one can only be happy when your feeling guilty.

On the positive side, not to mention that the George Washington Bridge is still standing, I feel a lot more safe these days, now that the Homeland Security Act is in place. And you really feel protected while traveling, especially at the airports with all of the security and surveillance. Schools, too, are doing a better job in educating—at least schools with x-ray scanners and police at the doors. Industrialization, once responsible for devastating the countryside and concentrating the population into the cities, is on the wane and people are now fleeing cities like Detroit looking for jobs elsewhere. Fortunately, they can find them in the tourist industry, especially as the dollar weakens, making the visiting of the U.S. an attractive deal—kind of like a Third World Country. And as crime decreases, we may see the day when prisons are closed and sold at a faster rate than Catholic Churches.

No, seriously, I agree there are a lot of signs for hope but we can’t become complaisant. The battle still wages. The youth now attending the Traditional Mass in increasing numbers need to be injected with the spirit of a Church Militant. Too often they fall in line with our decadent society. But yes, Happy New Year!