By Patrick Downes
Hawaii Catholic Herald
It’s October, the month Hawaii parishes count the people in the pews. Alas, like last year, with fewer people in church, conveniently spaced, the pandemic has made the job easier for ushers.
Each October every parish is asked to count heads at each Saturday vigil and Sunday Mass. The numbers are recorded on a form that is sent to the office of the diocesan chancellor where the average weekend tally is calculated.
Add up all the parish numbers and you get the number of Catholics going to Mass in Hawaii.
Adults and children 12-and-under are counted separately and then added together for a total.
The final parish count is the average of all the weekends — the weekend totals are added and then divided by the number of weekends. This year, October has five weekends, which means two additional days of counting than usual.
The resulting figure —the “October count” — is submitted to the diocese for its records.
October is chosen because it is considered a neutral month, least affected by vacations and high-attendance feasts like Christmas and Easter. However, October has its own variables, like football season. It is also a slower month for tourist-oriented parishes.
The count isn’t perfect. Manual tallying is imprecise and occasionally a parish will fail to report. And parishioners who attend Mass less frequently than every week will skew the average.
And as long as the pandemic is around, the count will be acutely affected.
The pandemic compelled Bishop Larry Silva to stop public liturgies last year on March 17. In-person Masses resumed the weekend of May 30-31 with strict rules that included the mandatory face masks, social distancing, the sanitizing of pews and other precautionary measures.
During this time, the bishop dispensed Hawaii Catholics of the obligation to attend Sunday Mass, while encouraging those who could go safely to do so. He ended the dispensation on April 3, 2021, the vigil of Easter.
Last year’s October count took place seven months after the bishop’s dispensation. While Catholics could still attend Mass, fear of the virus kept many away. The shrinkage of worship space caused by social distancing led many parishes to require Mass reservations or tickets.
COVID-19 caused Mass attendance in Hawaii to drop 27,146 from 46,141 in 2019 to 18,995 in 2020, a difference of nearly 60%.
While last year’s decline was unprecedented, the number of Mass-goers has been shrinking for decades.
In the 1990s, the count averaged around 60,000. That number went down by about 5,000 during the first decade of the 2000s.
Five years ago, in 2016, the October count was 49,884.
