I have recently been reading David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters’ Covid by Numbers: Making Sense of the Pandemic with Data (Pelican, 2021). It’s chock-full of sound information and judicious interpretation on all manner of pandemic-related metrics. Missing, however, is one I’m sure has been uppermost in many Herald readers’ minds for much of the past two years: what will the likely long-term effects be on Mass attendance?
This seems a good time to embark on what, I hope, will be a regular segment in this august magazine. What I’d like to do is to use this column to (re)consider topics of real pastoral relevance, in an informed, interesting and perhaps even entertaining way. The French Dominican Yves Congar once wrote that “The Church learns from contact with facts.” It would be nice to prove him right.
