The "19 Million" Thought Experiment Print
Written by Sherry   
Thursday, 25 February 2010 14:47
Thought experiment courtesy of the 2010 Vatican Yearbook. :

19 million additional Catholics entered the Church in 2008:
Most are baptized infants. But perhaps a million could be older children or adult converts.

If brought together they would produce a Catholic Mexico City, the second largest city on earth:

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That means 52,055 additional Catholics or a new Durango, Colorado every day

That means 2,169 additional Catholics every hour





36 additional Catholics every second

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In the 22 seconds that it took me to read the lines above out loud, an additional 795 Catholics joined us on this earth in 2008.

19 million immortals
19 million people created by God
19 million people redeemed by Jesus Christ
19 million members of the Body of Christ
19 million people who need to encounter Christ personally and respond to his call to follow him
19 million people anointed by Christ himself for a vocation, to play a unique part in his redemption of the world
19 million people given charisms for the sake of others (and most people are given more than one!)

19 million people who need to be loved, prayed for, fed, housed, clothed, educated, evangelized, catechized, to receive the sacraments, have a place to attend Mass regularly, receive help in discerning and answering God's call, and to be encouraged along the journey.

At the current 0.03508% ratio of priests (3.5/100ths of 1%) in the Catholic Church
those 19 million would include 6,650 priestly vocations.

Can we take this in? What is God doing? What are we called to do? What implications do you see?

It's worth thinking about. Cause we are going to find that another 16 - 20 million entered in 2009. A conservative estimate would put our numbers at 1.2 billion by the end of 2010.