Nineteen Sixty-four is a research blog for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University edited by Mark M. Gray. CARA is a non-profit research center that conducts social scientific studies about the Catholic Church. Founded in 1964, CARA has three major dimensions to its mission: to increase the Catholic Church's self understanding; to serve the applied research needs of Church decision-makers; and to advance scholarly research on religion, particularly Catholicism.
I wondered if they had anything to say about media reports that the number of people participating in OCIA had greatly increased.
Conclusion
So, are people flocking to Catholicism in the United States?
The available data do not yet allow us to answer that question definitively. What they do show is a more nuanced and interesting picture than either optimism or skepticism alone would suggest.
After years of steady decline prior to the pandemic, total entries into the Church returned to their expected trajectory by 2022 and then exceeded that trajectory in 2023 and 2024. Whether this reflects delayed participation during COVID or the beginning of a new pattern remains uncertain.
At the diocesan level, the story is uneven. Some dioceses appear to be experiencing something genuinely distinctive, while others look much as they have for years. Differences in population size, demographics, and institutional structure all shape what entry patterns look like on the ground.
When the 2025 data are finally released, they will matter not because they confirm a headline, but because they will tell us whether recent increases represent a short-term rebound or a more durable shift in how people are entering the Catholic Church in the United States.
For now, the prudent conclusion is simple: something may be happening, but the data are still catching up
Much more interesting was the following post on June 12 2025
I asked ChatGPT to describe the recent conclave to me in the following way:
How was Pope Leo elected:
Answer, as of now (June 2025) there has never been a Pope Leo XIV
It's not that ChatGPT won't tell you who the current pope is if directly asked, "Who is the current pope?" You can see the response below:
The current Pope is, as of June 2025, Pope Leo XIV elected on May 8, 2025 .....
With one query Pope Leo XIV has never existed and in the next he does. Notice in the second ChatGPT is relying on searching the internet and returning information from the Vatican, Crux, ... and Wikipedia! Welcome to the "event horizon" of the age of internet regurgitation packaged in a narrative that sounds fairly human. Is that AI? Is it even intelligent? Is it any better than Google circa 2000? I know my answer, for now.
Yet, we are now more than a month past the conclave and ChatGPT cannot correctly explain the selection of Pope Leo XIV and instead claims he may be a fictional character. This is the technology corporations are relying on and human beings are losing their jobs to? Seriously?
I asked ChatGPT in June 2025 to "Please generate a painting of the current pope." It responded:
ChatGPT says that the current Pope is Francis and that this needs to be confirmed before it can proceed with various options for a painting.
How does CARA currently use AI? For now, you just read it. It's not ready or useful to us as a reliable and factual research resource (we're not alone). It may be in the future. I am confident of it. For now, its hype is bigger than its utility. Perhaps when we get to a point where we have future iterations of AI models running on quantum computers we will have something truly special as Altman is currently trying to sell (...or not).
We'll surely at least wait for ChatGPT to catch up with the rest of humanity and become fully aware of Pope Leo XIV's existence (...and maybe until it can beat an Atari 2600 at chess).
.n update from July 10, 2025. I decided to upload a picture of Pope Leo XIV and ask GhatGPT to identify the person in the photo. I already knew it did not know of Pope Leo XIV but I thought it might be able to identify him as Bishop or Cardinal Prevost. What I got is below. It's comically bad...
..An update from August 7, 2025. ChatGPT has been updated. It's most recent training now includes information up to this month. So I checked again. Same routine. I asked how Pope Leo XIV was selected and got the same response indicating no awareness of the current pope. I then told the model to check again about the current pope using search (i.e., equivalent to any Google search you or I could do) and to ChatGPT's surprise Pope Leo XIV does exist! I then asked ChatGPT when it thought it would have an awareness of Pope Leo XIV without relying on search. Here is the response:
Basically when they issue a revision of ChatGPT probably late 2025 or early 2026
...An update from February 5, 2026. To this day, when asking ChatGPT about everything it knows about Pope Leo XIV based on its training data, it responds:
ChatGPT still does not know Leo XIV from its training data
I think I would like to know from CARA not just how many people are entering the church but what kind of people they are. I suspect that most may not prefer Jesus’s teachings to trump’s.
ReplyDeleteI have played around with Gemini. I have been looking for a new estate planning lawyer to update our plan. Everything has changed a lot since 2008. I asked for information about three lawyers, one of whom was my late sister, who passed away more than two years ago. It gave information about law schools, firms, years in practice and that all three had top ratings on various lawyer ratings services. But it added that they weren’t sure if my sister was still in practice. There was a long and detailed obituary of my sister, complete with photo, in the WaPo that it obviously didn’t find. When researching updates on breast cancer surgery I learned about a new technique that is less invasive. I asked it if Johns Hopkins was using it. It said “yes” and named several doctors at Hopkins using the new technique, including my surgeon. So I messaged her and she replied “No” - Hopkins wasn’t using it - not just her but nobody else either at Hopkins. It is still in clinical trials elsewhere.
I don’t trust Gemini AI any more than a normal google search.
I have been using Microsoft's AI product, Copilot, quite a bit at work. (Microsoft technology still reigns supreme in many categories in corporate America, even when those products aren't best-in-class.) Copilot knows who the pope is, but when I asked it when Leo was elected pope, it said 2024. It could have sourced the correct answer from Wikipedia, but it is more than, and in many ways quite different from, a search engine.
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