Ushers, get your pencils and tally sheets ready. The leaves are changing, new school shoes are scuffed and Halloween decorations have been in the stores for ages. That means it’s October, and time for parishes and other institutions that hold Masses in the Archdiocese of Chicago to count the people in the pews. The Archdiocese of Chicago has asked parishes to count the people who come to Mass every October since 1986, when the practice began under Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, said Stephanie Hari of the archdiocese’s strategic planning and implementation department. To get accurate numbers, the archdiocese emphasizes that the count must be just that, a count, not an estimate. Parishes can send ushers up and down the aisles during the Liturgy of the Word, or they can count while they take up the collection. They can be stationed at the exits and use a hand counter to keep track of numbers as people exit, or someone can climb to a choir loft and count from there, according to a memo from the department. What’s more, she said, parishes can’t just skip it. The department insists on 100 percent participation, Hari said. Unlike other ways of measuring the Catholic population, the October count gives parishes and the archdiocese a picture of how many people are actually in the seats. What it doesn’t do is offer any demographic information, she said. Over the years, the number of Catholics participating in Masses on the average October weekend in the archdiocese has declined more or less steadily, from 581,000 in 1988 to 422,000 last year. Last year’s attendance was a little less than 20 percent of the 2.2 million Catholics believed to live in Cook and Lake counties, which make up the Archdiocese of Chicago, according to a report Hari prepared for pastors and archdiocesan staff. The main count includes parishes and missions, but not other institutions such as hospitals, nursing homes and campus ministries. Last year, about 16,000 people attended Masses in those settings. One exception to the declining numbers was in 2001, when Mass attendance jumped from 561,000 to 572,000 in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks. But after news of the clerical sexual abuse scandal spread, attendance made an even steeper decline in 2002, when attendance fell to 538,000. The 5.9 percent decline is the largest one-year drop since the count has been taken. While the numbers help the archdiocese with planning, it’s also helpful for the parishes to know their size for parish needs and local planning efforts, Hari said. Msgr. George Sarauskas, who headed the Office of Research and Planning in 1990, told the Chicago Tribune that year that the count “is the strongest figure we have” for planning purposes, including assigning priests and figuring out language needs. At the same time, he said, the church’s obligation is to serve all Catholics, not just those who come to Mass regularly. “If you’re a baptized Catholic, you’re a Catholic,” Sarauskas said then. That hasn’t always stopped pastors from presenting their parish Mass attendance in the best possible light. “I have heard that some pastors counted pregnant ladies as two people,” Hari said.