THE AMERICAN CHURCH TODAY

Over 17,000 American Catholic parishes serve a large and diverse population. 

In recent decades, the Church has faced a number of significant challenges, from a decline in membership to a shortage of Priests to continuing revelations that Catholic clergy sexually abused mostly young males.  In many cases, American Bishops covered up these actions.

Against this backdrop, I wish to highlight several additional facts regarding the Church in the United States at this time.  

The source of this information comes from the Pew Research Center which I find is perhaps the most balanced and non-agenda driven.

So, here is what we know about the American Church at the moment.

There are approximately 51 million Catholic adults in the U.S., accounting for about one-fifth of the total U.S. adult population.  The share of Americans who are Catholic declined from 24% in 2007 to 21% in 2014.

Catholicism has experienced a greater net loss due to religious switching than has any other religious tradition in the U.S. 

Overall, 13% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics – people who say they were raised in the faith, but now identify as religious “nones,” as Protestants, or with another religion. No other religious group analyzed in the Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study has experienced anything close to this ratio of losses to gains via religious switching.

Hispanics are growing as a share of adult Catholic population in the country.  Moreover, Catholics are racially and ethnically diverse. Roughly 60% of Catholic adults are white, 30% are Latino, and 10% identify as black, Asian American, or with other racial and ethnic groups. 

Compared with some other religious groups, Catholics are fairly evenly dispersed throughout the country: 27% live in the South, 26% in the Northeast, 26% in the West, and 21% of U.S. Catholics live in the Midwest.

A significant number (67%) of those who identify themselves as Catholics support changes in Church teachings and policies.  However, support for changes is lower among Catholics who attend Mass regularly than it is among those who attend Mass less often.

Politically, Catholic registered voters are evenly split between those who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (47%) and those who favor the GOP (46%). 

Large majorities of U.S. Catholics have admired Pope Francis throughout his tenure. But in a Pew Research Center poll conducted in September 2018 – shortly after recent reports about sex scandals in the U.S. Catholic Church – the share of Catholics saying this had fallen 23 points, to 31%. 

To the extent that these figures allow us to glimpse the makeup of the Church at the present time, the figures referred to in this article are interesting and enlightening.

They do not, however, shed light upon what I think is perhaps the greatest challenge facing the Church in the 21st Century and that is the loss of membership and the practice of the Catholic Faith by so-called Millenials, the next generation of Catholics.

I would welcome a specific study of this group to determine whether or not the Church will be able to function when its torched is passed to a generation of humanity whose values and moral judgments are the fruit of decades of secularist amoral indoctrination.

If such a study were done today, what do you think would be its findings?