Sometimes, an important high-level finding warrants some additional reflection. I have several of these rolling around in my head at any given point. The one I wanted to zero in on is from a post that ran over a year ago on this Substack. Simply put—Catholic Mass attendance is way down. About half of all self-identified Catholics said that they attended Mass nearly every week in 1972. In the most recent data, it’s about half that rate (~25%).
How is that possible? Well, when you track a statistic like that over the course of fifty years, there are two primary drivers of such a drastic trend line.
Catholics just stopped attending Mass as they got older. This theory is really an individualized one. A couple million Catholics go from weekly attendance to yearly attendance, and the overall Mass attendance rate just plummets.
Generational replacement. Older Catholics are more religious than younger Catholics. Over time, the older devout Catholics die off and are replaced by younger adult Catholics who are much less active in their faith. The result is the same—Catholic Mass attendance declines significantly.
Well, I wanted to try and figure out if that second explanation actually makes any sense in the data because it’s much harder to test the first explanation, honestly. You would need panel data, which I explain in detail here about why that’s so hard to get:
I wanted to start this one quite simply—I broke the sample down into generations of Catholics and then just tracked the share who were weekly Mass attendees from when they entered adulthood through to the end of the time series. The GSS began way back in 1972, so those early waves have a whole bunch of the Greatest Generation, Silents, and Boomers. The more recent data has Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z.
It’s interesting to me that the Greatest Generation actually saw a slight increase in Mass attendance as they aged. They went from ~58% weekly attenders to ~65% near the end of their lives. The Silent Generation line is also fascinating because of how steady it was for a very long time. About half of them were at Mass on a regular basis from 1972 through the late 2000s. There was a pretty significant decline from that point forward but I am betting that a big chunk of that is health-related.
Boomer Catholics were never as religiously active as the prior generations. Mass attendance was around 40% in the early 1970s, then dropped to 33% during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. It then began slowly dropping again after 2000. Now, just a bit less than 30% of Boomer Catholics are regular Mass attenders.
Gen X and Millennials are each lower than the previous generation. But Gen X Mass attendance may be the same today as it was in the 1990s—around 20% are weekly attenders. For Millennials, the trend line is slightly lower—with Mass attendance vacillating between 15% and 20% during their adult lives. Interestingly, the estimates for 2022 for Millennials and Gen X are exactly the same—about 18%.
Let me take another look at this with a bigger (but newer) dataset, though.
Here, it’s pretty clear to me that there’s a big gap between Silent Generation Catholics and every other generation. Those born between 1925 and 1945 are way more active than anyone else. About 37% have been attending Mass weekly for the last decade or so. In comparison, Boomers are much lower (about ten points, in fact). And Boomer attendance has slipped about five points since 2008.
The CES estimates for Mass attendance among Gen X and Millennials are incredibly similar, especially in the last decade of data. Both trend lines are pointed downward since 2012. The numbers of Gen Z Catholics were higher when the oldest members of the cohort became adults, but they are also moving downward very quickly. According to this estimate, about 22% of Catholics who are from Gen X, Millennials, or Gen Z are attending Mass every week.
Let me give you one more look at this, but split the sample into white and non-white groups.
Yeah, it’s readily apparent from this angle that white Catholics are much less active than their non-white counterparts. For instance, among Boomers in 2012, about 40% of non-whites were weekly attenders. It was only 27% of white Boomers. The gap has narrowed a bit recently, but it’s still close to ten points.
For Gen X that gap never got that large and it seems to have narrowed in the last few years. About 25% of non-white Catholics in Gen X attend weekly compared to only 20% of white Catholics of this generation. For Millennials, the racial gap is almost non-existent. About 23% of non-whites are weekly attenders compared to 20% of whites. But, again, the trend lines for both are pointing downward in recent years.
The Catholic Church is In Trouble in Places Where it Used to Dominate
But what about Catholic identification? That certainly is another metric worth tracking, too. So, I just looked at the survey from 2008 and 2022 and calculated the share of folks who self-identified as Catholic by birth year. This helps us answer the question: are people shedding the Catholic label?
The answer is that they seem to be less likely to identify as Catholic today as they were in 2008. For instance, look at folks born around 1960. In that early sample, about 22% of them said that they were Catholic. Among people born that same year but surveyed in 2022, only 18% said that they were Catholic. Thus, there is relatively strong evidence that not only is Mass attendance declining, but so is Catholic identity.
You do see that this narrows a bit among people born around 1980 or later. The gap there is 2-3 percentage points. But, again, there’s evidence that the Catholic label is less popular today than it was a few years ago. And, if you track the red line all the way through people born around 2000, there’s more evidence that Catholicism is even less pervasive among the youngest adults. Just 14% of college-aged folks identify as Catholic now.
But here’s where things take a bit of a weird turn. Sometimes the data tells a story that is a bit muddier, and I would be remiss not to point out some of the contradictory analysis that I generate. Here’s the setup—I restricted my sample to just Catholics and then I calculated the distribution of those Catholics on two metrics—religious attendance and religious importance. I did this using the 2008 and 2022 data. I was just trying to see if I could parse out a simple question—are Catholics less religious today than they were fifteen years ago?
And, in light of what I just showed you all, I was pretty surprised to see these results. Catholics are about as religious today as they were back in 2008. The top right square (high attendance, high importance) contained 25% of all Catholics in 2008. It was 23% of Catholics in the most recent data. The bottom four squares on the left made up 14% of Catholics in 2008, and it was 16% of Catholics in 2022. In short, I just don’t see a huge shift in the overall religiosity of the Catholic sample over time.
This may be because a lot of non-religious Catholics left the label behind along the way. That seems like a pretty plausible explanation, but I just can’t test it out with this data.
To return to the two theories at the top of this piece—I’m pretty sure generational replacement played a bigger role in Mass attendance declining than individual changes in religious activity. Silent Generation Catholics are just way more religiously active than Millennial Catholics. Those in that Silent Generation are dying off now and younger Catholics are just less active.
It’s a really mixed bag here for the Catholic Church. Some of the long-term trends are pretty rough, but that last heatmap could provide some hope. The average Catholic today is not much less religious than a Catholic from 2008.
Code for this post can be found here.
the Catholics may be a little more complex than that. While their parishes and parochial schools struggle, their universities and hospitals remain attractive. As a personally observant Jew, I received much of my medical training at Catholic universities and hospitals. At my final position, a multi-campus Catholic medical center, the institution was strongly Catholic but the employees and patients mirrored the composition of the national community, and among the physicians people of all religions took care of the patients. While the hospital was funded by patient revenue, my Jesuit university, along the esteemed Jesuit university near my current home, were more dependent on voluntary donations from the loyal Catholic community. I do not know any overwhelming political imbalances at either my alma mater or the local Jesuit campus. I do know from my alumni newsletters that people very loyal to Catholicism have done well economically and shared their treasure with the university, and often with its feeder Catholic high schools. The kids may not go to mass. They apply to Notre Dame, SLU, Georgetown, BC, Fordham, and St Joe's in numbers large enough to require pretty good grades to gain admission. The local parishes do not seem to be the feeders as much as the reputation of the schools and the resources that the generous donors enable. As the parish attendance declines, it may be the affiliated institutions, university and medical, that provide the best window on how the Catholic church is really faring this decade.
I know someone who recently left her Catholic Church for the Methodist Church because her Parish was assigned a new priest, and his sermons/messaging was way too conservative. I wouldn't be surprised if some people are leaving the church as a result of local priests taking sides in the ongoing culture wars within the Church. If you are a normal Catholic, you don't necessarily want a priest in your face week in and week out talking about political issues.