Yesterday I listed the most popular posts of this blog by traffic and today I’ll be listing the posts with the most comments from this year. Number of comments is, of course, related to a post’s popularity, so a lot of posts are on both lists. But highly-commented posts usually are also controversial in some way – why else would people take the trouble to make a comment? It can be tempting for a blogger to make purposefully provocative statements in order to gin up traffic, but I tried to avoid that trap as much as possible this past year (although I once thought about writing a post titled “Glen Beck weds Barack Obama in same-sex marriage ceremony at Ground Zero Mosque” just to see what kind of traffic and comments I would get).

Without further ado, here are the most commented posts of 2010:

1. The parish “shop and hop” – Every Catholic lives their faith through their local parish, so discussing when it is legitimate to “parish shop” is sure to generate comments.
2. Benedictine monk, and Ignatius Press author, converts to Orthodoxy
3. What’ll it be? Schism or heresy?
4. Most Popular Catholic Blogs
5. Is John the Baptist greater than Mary? – I thought this was a fascinating discussion, as we considered what Jesus meant when he called John the Baptist the “greatest” of those born of woman.
6. Replies to five objections about the new Missal translation
7. Every Catholic jerk’s motto
8. Biggest biblical blind spots of ‘Bible Christians’
9. If infant baptism is acceptable, why not infant communion? – I usually don’t have any interest in the Church changing her traditional practices, as I figure tradition has the benefit of long experience. But I do think it would be great to move the First Communion age down, although I respect the fact that many might disagree with me (as can be seen from the comments on this blog – although a surprising number of people agreed with me).
10. I’ve never seen Catholics evangelize! – In my experience, the word “evangelize” is like a four-letter word in many Catholic parishes. It clearly generates strong feelings, as can be seen by the number of comments to this post.

The number of comments on my blog are actually pretty small in relation to my traffic, and I think one reason is that I only rarely comment myself in response to other comments. I often wish I could respond more often to people’s comments, but I don’t always have the time. Next year I’ll try to make a better effort to respond to people’s comments.

Up tomorrow: My Top 10 favorite posts!