Let’s immediately get past why I’m reading an article by Linda Chavez and move straight on to her impressive inability with numbers:

Since 1978 when Pope John Paul II became pontiff, the Catholic Church has nearly doubled in membership from 757 million to some 1.1 billion, keeping rough pace with the growth in world population.

Well, the growth in the world population in that time is a hair under 50%, which is more than the growth in the Catholic Church (around 46% percent). So growth in membership hasn’t even kept up with growth in population, never mind the fact that an increase of 46% falls quite a long way short of ‘nearly doubled’. In fact it’s closer to having stayed exactly the same than it is to doubling.

Now if you’re trying to argue that the growth in the Catholic congregation shows that the late Pope was, to borrow a phrase ‘a uniter, not a divider’, the fact that in relative terms the church has shrunk just might be seen as a bad statistic to quote. I’d actually consider it largely irrelevant; there are enough pressures on traditional Christianity out there that such a small shrinkage is quite impressive. But flat-out lying to make your point is, well, it’s downright un-Christian.