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A key take-away from the AJC article above is not about the need for Catholic schools, but the growing number of Catholics in the region.
From the article: "A decade ago there were about 311,000 Catholics in the metro Atlanta area, according to the Archdiocese of Atlanta, now there are about 850,000."
Georgia is still Southern Baptist country, but Catholics now outnumber all the other Protestant denominations besides Baptist: Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, etc.
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The Archdiocese estimates that there are 850,000 Catholics in the Archdiocese.
The number no doubt includes all the Catholics who are not registered anywhere (i.e. undocumented immigrants), because the official number of registered parishioners is lower.
Even more interesting is the statistics of Catholics per priest.
In 1959, on the eve of Vatican II, there were 223 Catholics per priest (24,414 Catholics and 109 Priests).
In 2010 there are 3,456 Catholics per priest (850,000 Catholics and about 246 or slightly more Priests).
To have maintained the ratio of 223 Catholics per priest, Atlanta would have had to increase its number of priests over the last 50 years to 3,812 priests. But since Vatican II and the sterile New Mass have left the Archdiocese in a severe state of crisis, only ordaining a handful of priests per year, most of them non-native, (but loads of married deacons instead), the number has only increased to 246.
We could say that, given these statistics, the number of priests has dropped in Atlanta by 84.5%. Vatican II has left the Archdiocese with only 15.5% of the priests it ought to currently have.
And they continue to call Vatican II an overwhelming success?
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/datla.html
Overwhelming yes, but success, no.
Atlanta's growth in Catholic population is maybe due to the influx of Northerners over the years - as IL and MI shut down, people move south... but their priests, many or few as they were, seemed not to come with them. Surely not all left the Church; where else were they sent I wonder?
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