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Jan. 3rd, 2017 02:41 am
The Mystical Body of Christ, Quantified
via http://ift.tt/2iYEZUj:
lambdaphagy:
One thing that my Catholic and Catholic-adjacent friends often bring up in conversations about prayer is the notion of communion with all those who are praying at that moment, have ever prayed, and ever will pray. My ancestors have prayed this way for forty generations, hundreds of millions pray with me now, and so too will my descendants for forty generations more. We’re all together on the world-historical party chat line with Jesus.
Let’s put aside the past and future and just ask: how many others are on the line right now? An exact answer is of course impossible to obtain, but let’s try a Fermi estimate.
There are supposedly 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. Let’s round that down to a cool billion. Let’s also assume a uniform distribution of Catholics throughout time zones, which of course is not quite right.
Of those, how many are sufficiently pious to pray at least one Hail Mary every day? (Or equivalently, one rosary every 1-2 months?) I would estimate not less than 1%, if only because the size of the average parish implies that the priesthood has to be about 1% of the total Catholic population.
(I double-checked this and found that my estimate would have been pretty good up until about 1970, whereupon I lost a factor of two on account of the priest shortage. Makes u think.)
One Hail Mary takes about ten seconds to say. So if 1% of Catholics spend about 0.01% of their day praying Hail Marys, that works out to slightly more than 1,000 people praying with you at any given time.
lambdaphagy:
One thing that my Catholic and Catholic-adjacent friends often bring up in conversations about prayer is the notion of communion with all those who are praying at that moment, have ever prayed, and ever will pray. My ancestors have prayed this way for forty generations, hundreds of millions pray with me now, and so too will my descendants for forty generations more. We’re all together on the world-historical party chat line with Jesus.
Let’s put aside the past and future and just ask: how many others are on the line right now? An exact answer is of course impossible to obtain, but let’s try a Fermi estimate.
There are supposedly 1.2 billion Catholics in the world. Let’s round that down to a cool billion. Let’s also assume a uniform distribution of Catholics throughout time zones, which of course is not quite right.
Of those, how many are sufficiently pious to pray at least one Hail Mary every day? (Or equivalently, one rosary every 1-2 months?) I would estimate not less than 1%, if only because the size of the average parish implies that the priesthood has to be about 1% of the total Catholic population.
(I double-checked this and found that my estimate would have been pretty good up until about 1970, whereupon I lost a factor of two on account of the priest shortage. Makes u think.)
One Hail Mary takes about ten seconds to say. So if 1% of Catholics spend about 0.01% of their day praying Hail Marys, that works out to slightly more than 1,000 people praying with you at any given time.
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