Last year I ran a series of posts at the end of the year listing a number of “Top 10′s” from this blog. I thought I’d continue that tradition this year. So I’ll start with my Top 10 Most Popular Posts from this past year, based on traffic:

1. Most Popular Catholic Blogs ^[1] – What happens when you find the first relatively objective way to rank the popularity of Catholic blogs? You get just about every Catholic coming to your blog! This post, in which I ranked Catholic blogs by their Google Reader subscribers, was easily the most popular post I had this year, more than tripling the traffic of the 2nd-ranked post.
2. Benedictine monk, and Ignatius Press author, converts to Orthodoxy ^[2] – This post might have been popular due to the “controversial” nature of its title, linking the faithfully Catholic Ignatius Press to someone who left the Catholic fold.
3. Catholic man adopts fifty children to save them from abortion ^[3] – These are my favorite type of stories: ones that fly under the radar of the mainstream press but are headlines in Heaven. Apparently, based on the popularity of this post, many people agree with me.
4. Biggest biblical blind spots of ‘Bible Christians’ ^[4] – I have found that Catholics are often insecure about their Bible knowledge, assuming that Protestant Christians are more deeply versed in the Scriptures. So when I posted the ways in which supposed “Bible Christians” misinterpret the Bible, I think I hit a nerve.
5. Shocking: biblical scholar says something idiotic, CNN declares him a genius ^[5] – Noting the religious ignorance of the mainstream media is liking shooting fish in a barrel, but sometimes it has to be done.
6. What’ll it be? Schism or heresy? ^[6] – I’m actually surprised this post was so popular, as it was a somewhat theoretical discussion of the difference between the Eastern and Western Churches in handling heresies in their midst.
7. Understanding the churches and rites of the Catholic Church ^[7] – I have found that very few Catholics realize that the Catholic Church is actually made up of over 20 churches, only one of which is the “Roman Catholic Church”. So I was happy that this post explaining the structure of the Church got so much traffic.
8. Every Catholic jerk’s motto ^[8] – This recent post lamented the inability of some orthodox Catholics to have basic human manners. In the comments there was an interesting debate on the meaning of the term “jerk”.
9. The Nine Levels of Prayer, Part VII ^[9] – This was the last of a seven-part series, and if you added the traffic from all the posts in this series, it would probably vault up to #2 on this list. I got more emails thanking me for this series than any other, and I hope it helped some people to deepen their prayer life.
10. Replies to five objections about the new Missal translation ^[10] – Compared to many blogs, I actually don’t comment a lot on recent events in the Church, but I thought the new Missal translation was an important enough event to give some commentary on it. It seems that many of you agreed.

I am very thankful for all my readers this past year and I hope to provide more helpful content in the coming year. This year I received over 150,000 visitors to this site and I am thankful for every one of them! I want to especially thank New Advent ^[11] for picking up many of my posts – much of my traffic this past year came through them.

Tomorrow I’ll post my Top 10 Most Commented Posts of 2010.