Shopping mall foot traffic

Between 2005 and 2021, trained Catholic exorcists in the United States multiplied while shopping mall foot traffic declined, producing an inverse correlation of -0.9663 that raises the alarming possibility that the exorcists are the ones driving people out. The Church has been training demon-fighters at an accelerating pace—over 100 practitioners by the 2020s—while the American mall has been losing visitors with the inexorability of a retail format that forgot to adapt. One imagines the exorcists striding through abandoned food courts, aspergillum in hand, blessing the former Sbarro location. The demons, in this reading, were never supernatural. They were just market forces.

The growth of trained Catholic exorcists in the US reflects institutional expansion following Vatican encouragement in the 2010s and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops establishing formal training programs, growing from roughly a dozen practitioners to over 100. Shopping mall foot traffic declined steadily from its peak in the mid-2000s as e-commerce, particularly Amazon, captured an increasing share of retail spending, and demographic shifts moved consumer activity toward mixed-use developments and online shopping. Both trends reflect independent institutional and economic trajectories—one religious, one commercial—that happened to move in opposite directions across the same 17-year window.

An institution expanding from a tiny base and an industry contracting from a massive one will produce an impressive inverse correlation regardless of domain. The exorcists did not empty the malls; the malls emptied themselves.