January 2010 – Page 2

Doing the Math

Over at CatholicCulture, Uncle Di has an interesting post about conflicting poll numbers in Massachusetts concerning which candidate is likely to win Ted Kennedy's former seat.

He writes:

Last week, a Boston Globe poll of likely voters show the Democratic candidate, Martha Coakley, leading the Republican, Scott Brown, by a comfortable margin: 50- 35%.

A Public Policy Polling survey of likely voters, released the same day, showed Brown ahead, 48- 47%.

The Globe poll claimed a margin of error of +/- 4.2%; the PPP poll said its margin of error was 3.6%. Go ahead: try the numbers. They don't work.

Wait; there's a possible explanation. The Globe poll was taken January 2- 6; the PPP poll was January 7-9. So you might say that as a Little Christmas gift, Scott Brown got 13% of the likely voters.

Alternatively, you might say that there's a margin of error to the pollsters' margin of error.

Di is exactly right that there is a "margin of error" to the pollsters' margin of error–a margin that pollsters very seldom talk about.

What pollsters mean when they say that a poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points (or whatever number) it does not mean that the true figure is really within 4 percentage points of the figure they name. They have no independent way of knowing what the true figure is. All they can do is estimate what the true figure is based on the sample of data they got.

But sometimes you get unrepresentative data, which is what the margin for error is supposed to allow for. It's a fudge factor that means, in essence, if we ran the same poll a bunch of times, the result would vary but would tend to remain within the stated margin of error.

Yet sometimes you get really unrepresentative data, and this is what pollsters don't generally point out.

In standard polling, the margin of error is based on what the result would be approximately 95% of the time, or nineteen out of twenty times. ( . . . keeping this simple so we don't have to get into standard deviations and normal distribution and confidence intervals and other technical minutiae).

So, for example, if pollsters went out and polled the right number of people to give them a 4 percent margin of error, and 48 percent of the people said that they'd vote for Candidate X then what this means is that if you re-ran the poll that nineteen out of twenty times the result you would get back should be between 44 and 52 percent, all else being equal.

But one time out of twenty the result you would get back would be wildly off, either below 44 or above 52.

So . . . bear that in mind when looking at poll numbers.

Even when the poll is properly done, one in twenty polls produces a reading so anomalous that it falls outside what the margin of error would be if you ran it another nineteen times.

On average.

We think.

Decent Films Doings: The Reluctant Saint on DVD

Good news for Catholic movie fans! The Reluctant Saint, starring Maximilian Schell as Saint Joseph of Cupertino, comes to DVD next week from Ignatius Press. (A previous DVD edition from Nostalgia Video is out of print. You can still get it on VHS — for $45 at Amazon. The new IP DVD sells at Amazon for $19.95. What’s more, the VHS edition lops off the coda, a real crime in my opinion. Don’t know about the previous DVD ed.)

My essay on the the film

I first saw The Reluctant Saint something like 18 years ago in Philadelphia with a group of friends who met regularly for Catholic movie nights — a formative time in my life as a new Catholic.

I enjoyed it at the time, but on rewatching it recently I found it to be a more sensitive and enjoyable film than I remembered. Films can surprise you when you haven’t seen them in a long time; sometimes they disappoint you, but other times the opposite happens.

Among other things, I appreciated the film’s beauty more than I did nearly two decades ago. Perhaps that’s partly because I saw it this time on a new DVD transfer rather than VHS, but I think it’s also because in 18 years I’ve seen a lot more movies and learned to appreciate beauty in a new way.

I also have a new appreciation for the film’s spiritual milieu. Looking back today, I can’t be sure, but I suspect that in those days I may have judged all saint movies by A Man for All Seasons. The Reluctant Saint is a very different kind of film. I don’t know if anyone else has connected it to Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis, but I think there is a connection to be made, and I talk about that in my essay.

Has anyone else seen this film? (It doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of attention outside Catholic circles.) What do you think of it?

Anyone else had that experience of revisiting a film after a bunch of years and being surprised, either positively or negatively?

Big Doings at Decent Films! Plus: St. Lucy Nativity

Well, here’s one big reason why I’ve been missing in action here at JA.o: I’ve been hard at work on the latest renovation of the Decent Films Guide. It just went live this Sunday.

There are a lot of things about the new Decent Films site that I’m excited about, but you can read about ’em at the Decent Films Blog. (Yes, Decent Films Blog!) OTOH, if you want to comment on the changes at the new site, you can do it here at JA.o (no blog post comments at Decent Films).

BTW, for my second Decent Films Blog entry, I posted a video that I shot a few days ago on my iPhone at St. Lucy’s Church in Newark, NJ, where my family sometimes attends weekday Masses. You can read more about the video and the subject matter at the blog, but the subject matter is worth cross-posting here for anyone who may not click over. Enjoy!

Padre Pio & Three Days of Darkness

A reader writes:

Somebody asked me in regard of this article: is it true or false, is it authentic or just regular pious writings to threaten people?

http://www.divinemercyinc.com/St%20Padre%20Pio%20Prophecies.htm

To me, any document not published by the Catholic Church is not authentic.

Nevertheless, I need to hear from you, what do you say in regard of this article?

First a clarification: It is true that any document not published by the Church is not “authentic” in the sense that this term is used in magisterial statements. In Church documents the term “authentic” typically means “authoritative,” and it is true that documents not published or endorsed by the magisterium are not authoritative for the faith of Catholics.

This is particularly true with regard to alleged or apparent private revelations, which at most receive an endorsement from the Church indicating that they are credible, but not that they are binding or authoritative.

This is not to say that any document not published by the Church should be dismissed out of hand. Current canon law does not require that material can be published only for approved apparitions. Under present law, seers may publish legitimate private revelations even though these have not received ecclesiastical approval.

So I wouldn’t dismiss something simply because it hasn’t been published by or approved by the Church.

Now let’s deal with the site in question. It features quotations attributed to Padre Pio regarding the supposed “three days of darkness” that have been discussed among some students of private revelations.

The first thing that leaps out regarding the Padre Pio quotations is that no identifiable literary source is given for them. They are simply introduced by the statement “Words of Christ to St Padre Pio” and concluded with “(Blessed Padre Pio).”

Just when and where did Padre Pio record these words? How do we know that he claimed to have received them from Christ at all?

Without a trackable source, we don’t know anything of the kind.

So let’s go a little further and see what we find. If we Google the opening words of the revelation we find that it only has three hits: the page the reader is asking about, a forum inquiry asking if the revelation is genuine, and a Google Books hit for a book by the psychic medium Sylvia Browne (MORE INFO).

This does not inspire confidence in the alleged revelation. If this were an authentic quote, it should have a bigger cyber-footprint than that, with some sources directing us to a traceable source (something that none of the hits do, including Sylvia Browne’s book).

I haven’t done a great deal of research on the “three days of darkness” literature, but someone who has is Desmond Birch, author of Trial, Tribulation, & Triumph, a 600-page book on prophetic ideas. I can’t assess the book as a whole (because I haven’t read it), but I would note the following section. The author (who himself seems to favor the idea that there will be a “three days of darkness”) writes:

“1. Padre Pio Did Not Predict Three Days of Darkness [emphasis in original]

“. . . There are printed materials containing prophecy of three days of darkness which attribute such a prophecy to Padre Pio. But the author [i.e. Birch] has in his possession sworn documents from the Capuchin Order stating that no such prophecy ever emanated [sic] from Padre Pio. All the author’s attempts to track down an authentic source from Padre Pio have led to the conclusion that; [sic] some person(s) either accidentally or willfully created these attributions of such a prophecy to Padre Pio” (Trial, Tribulation, & Triumph, p. 283).

It would be nice if Mr. Birch had included the full text of the documents he refers to, perhaps as an appendix, so that the reader could evaluate them for himself. That’s the purpose of 600-page books, after all. Were they written by someone qualified to speak for the Capuchin Order as a corporate entity? Were they really sworn? Why? And just what do they say?

While I’m not sure that Mr. Birch phrased himself in the best way, and while his publisher definitely should have provided better copy editing and proofreading for his text, I want to commend him for looking into this matter and reporting back what one would suspect from the use of the quotation on the Internet–that Padre Pio does not appear to have made such predictions.

In the absence of better sourcing, I would conclude that the quotation on the page linked above is most likely a fake.