There are one million more Catholics in the United States than the previous year, the 2009 Official Catholic Directory statistics indicate.
A press release from the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference affirmed Wednesday that the total number of Catholics in the country equals 68,115,001, or 22% of the population.
I’m interested in what % is that is hispanic/born outside the US, and if they are increasing their market share. My guess is 35% are hispanic/born outside US, and it’s growing.
I suspect that Kendall put this item on partly out of general interest, partly to contrast with the shrinking Episcopal numbers. I want to add a comment, if I may, to stop you guys beating yourselves up. I love being a Catholic pastor. I love being pastor of a big, multi-ethnic parish (for the record: last year, 109 baptisms, 25 weddings, 40 funerals, ASA around 1100). But there is a downside too. I struggle to get to know all these people, and often wish that I could visit more often, and generally be better acquainted with my people – just like an Anglican vicar would, in fact. The numbers also make it pretty exhausting. So … I would not want to be anything else, but I still want to say to you, numbers ain’t everything.
That may be a conservative estimate, Chris (#1). But I’ll let others who may have reliable data speak to that.
I’ll just register my high degree of skepticism about the official claim that there are over 68 million Roman Catholics in this country. I think that’s preposterous; it’s way too high. For it fails to take into account the many millions of RCs who’ve left the Catholic Church, either because they’ve joined another denomination or religious group, or simply because they’ve become lapsed and drifted away from Christianity altogether (like the new Hispanic Supreme Court nominee).
Unfortunately, the RCs still basically refuse to acknowledge that problem, on the basis of the dubious conviction that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.” Even if you’ve been attending a Baptist or Pentecoastal or Episcopal Church for years!
Still, taking the numbers at face value, I find some of the statistics revealing in highlighting some of the difficult challenges that the Catholic Church faces, not least due to the severe and growing shortage of priests. For example, if it’s true that there are over 68 million RCs in the US and only 41, 489 priests, then that creates a huge pastoral care problem, since if every single priest was assigned to parish duties (and of course some have other assignments), then each priest would have an average of 1,642 parishioners to care for. Obviously, no one can possibly care for that many people well.
Or consider this, if there are indeed over 68 million RCs in this country, then with 18, 674 congregations, the average RC parish would have 3,647 people in it. Again, that’s plainly an impossible burden in terms of providing adequate pastoral care, but also for accommodating worshippers, giving instruction in the Christian faith and life, and so on.
Finally, there’s little reason to doubt the reliability of the numbers claimed for adult baptisms (42, 629) and for those received into full communion through the RCIA process in the last year (81, 775). But with 18, 674 parishes, that means that the average RC congregation only baptized 2 or 3 adults last year, and only welcomed 4 or 5 new adult members into full communion from other churches.
Obviously, the vast bulk of those over 1 million new members the RCs picked up last year came from the 887, 145 infant baptisms they did. All this suggests to me that without the massive Hispanic influx, the Catholic Church in America would be in serious decline, like the so-called “mainline” Protestant churches. So thank God for the Hispanics!
David Handy+
Fr. Tee, may the Lord bless your ministry.
Thanks David, I would also be interested in the ASA trend lines for the Catholics and how they compare to ECUSA. I would think the Catholics are doing better – but then, that does not necessarily say much.
the average RC parish would have 3,647 people in it.
Well within our scale, at least in the urban areas. We have [url=http://www.fwdioc.org/directory/parishDetail.aspx?parishID=128]a parish [/url]a parish with ASA of just under 8000. My own mid-sized parish is listed at 1900 ASA, our of 1900 registered families, which probably translates into 4000-5000 souls (?). And, interesting, we have 2-4 adult baptisms per year, and anywhere from 6-12 adult converts. Actually, what we have most of (40-50) is folks finishing their sacraments – confirmation and Communion. The problem in our diocese is that ASA is about 100,000 against a registered membership of 550,000. There are spiritual renewal efforts in the diocese, and we hope they bear fruit.
… on the basis of the dubious conviction that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic.†Even if you’ve been attending a Baptist or Pentecoastal or Episcopal Church for years!
Practice probably varies, but I’ve never un-registered from a parish when I moved and have only had one continue sending me stuff. One parish told me that if they didn’t give money over 6 months, I was off the roles. On the other hand, I’ve know people active in parishes for years who never bothered to register. So who knows.
There really is no incentive to clean off the parish roles: diocesan taxes are assessed on income, not the roster (as far as I know). Episcopalians (at least when I was on vestry) cleaned roles because diocesan assessment did include membership as a factor. Baptist congregations tend to hang onto members, since it means more representation at denominational meeting. Go figure.
It’s true (we believe) that “once a Catholic, always a Catholic”, but that’s due to two factors, at least. First, the mark of baptism is indelible. It’s not a get-into-heaven-free pass, but you just can’t get unbaptized. Second, it’s quite common that a lapsed Catholic calls for a priest at the end. Fr. Andrew Greeley, in The Catholic Imagination makes the point that you are only an “ex-Catholic” if you formally join another religion. Otherwise, you are a practicing or a lapsed Catholic. Or, I suppose an “excommunicate” Catholic, though that’s rare.
I do suspect that folks who request to be removed from the parish roster because they join another church will have that request honored. Of course, if they don’t notify the parish, that’s on them.
We cross-posted, Chris. No we aren’t doing much better. The Catholic Church in the U.S. has ASA about 40% of membership, which is in the range of protestant churches.
New Reformation Advocate:
“…each priest would have an average of 1,642 parishioners to care for. Obviously, no one can possibly care for that many people well.” and “…if there are indeed over 68 million RCs in this country, then with 18, 674 congregations, the average RC parish would have 3,647 people in it. Again, that’s plainly an impossible burden in terms of providing adequate pastoral care, but also for accommodating worshippers, giving instruction in the Christian faith and life, and so on.”
I am agreeing with Words Matter above, that a membership of about 3,500 would not be at all unusual for RC churches, especially in urban areas. Why do you think it is impossible for such a parish to meet its people’s needs? One thing you may not realize: tremendous amounts of work in the RC Church, including pastoral care and education, is now being done by lay ministers.
It’s where I’m headed unless the Anglicans set up a see other than Canterbury.
I agree with Fr. Neuhaus more and more every day…
Thanks to Fr. Tee and Words Matter for their helpful contributions to this thread. Perhaps I should clarify a couple things to prevent possible misunderstanding from my earlier comment.
When I calculated the average size of an RC parish above as 3, 647 people, based on the figures given in this official Catholic report for last year, my primary point wasn’t to cast doubt on the claim that the Catholic Church actually has 68 million members in this country (which would probably be hard to either prove or disprove), but rather I wanted to emphasize how difficult it is for such huge congregations to adequately serve so many parishioners, especially with so few priests and a diminishing number of nuns. Fr. Tee spoke eloquently to that from his own experience (#2) in a parish with an ASA of around 1100.
On the other hand, we Anglicans have a similar problem in Africa, where the congregations may generally be much smaller, but the clergy shortage is also very severe, with one priest often trying to serve several thousand people. And the problem is aggravated by the added difficulty that the faithful are spread out over a large area and scattered among multiple churches (in one regional “parish”).
Second, I hope my post didn’t come across as motivated by some kind of anti-Catholic animus. Many denominations engage in what seem to outsiders like very peculiar ways of counting members. For example, I live in Virginia and among Southern Baptists here it’s common for SBC congregations to claim large numbers of “non-resident” members. And due to failure to clean their membership rolls and the lack of centralized data keeping, it’s not that unusual for all the Baptist churches in a Southern town to collectively claim more members than there are people in that town. It seems that many people switch churches without their former church recognizing their departure, and thus their names appear on the membership rolls of two or more Baptist churches.
But Anglicans certainly have nothing to boast about in this area, for we have huge numbers of merely nominal members, and the Anglican Communion’s official claim to have around 80 million members worldwide is a joke. The real number is closer to 55 million, since there are at least 20 million “members” of the Church of England who can’t be said to be believers, much less disciples of Jesus Christ. It’s hard to even call them “lapsed” since there is little evidence that they were EVER really Anglicans in the first place, apart from the mere fact that they were baptized at a CoE parish, since they virtually never went to church or practiced the Christian faith and way of life.
So my implicit criticisms about the way church membership figures are often counted weren’t intended to single out the Catholic way of doing that for special ridicule or condemnation. When it comes to “preposterous” counting systems, I’m quite ecumencially minded. I think there’s a lot of silly numbers put forth by all kinds of Christian groups: Catholic, oldline Protestant, and conservative free church Protestant denominations alike.
David Handy+
The Catholic Church is taking on the issue of priests having so many Catholics to provide pastoral care for. The solution is not just using lay ministers but to also ordain married men as deacons and give them tremendous pastoral responsibility (much more than in most other Christian churches where deacons do not usually preach, baptize, officiate at weddings , funerals, wakes and at graveside as well as officially provide instruction and education in doctrine, etc.)
This growth in one of the major ordained orders of the Church is providing solutions to many problems harped on by the media and some Catholics as the media almost totally ignores the growth of the Catholic diaconate in numbers, influence, and responsibility in the Church while it obssesses about priests and celibacy.
In fact, because married men may be ordained deacons, the Catholic Church (Latin-rite) now has an ordained married CLERGY within its hierarchy—and not just through some special rare dispensation as with Protestant married clergy being ordained Catholic priests.
amdg1 (#8),
I’m glad you asked for clarification, as I indeed made some sweeping statements without explaining my reasoning. Yes, I know some very large parishes in the Richmond area (that I know best) that would certainly have more than 4,000 members registered on the church rolls, though it’s hard to imagine that the national average for all RC churches is that high. And yes, I’m also well aware that more and more ministry is being delegated to laypeople, by sheer necessity.
But I guess the real question is with regard to what constitutes “adequate” pastoral care, spritual formation, etc. And I think that issue in the end comes down to this: By what criteria do you judge the adequacy of the services that parishes provide, and who gets to decide that anyway?
My initial comment above reflects my own bias that the levels of pastoral care, Christian education and discipleship, evangelism, social outreach and so on, in your typical oldline Protestant or Cathoolic church are woefully inadequate, and even downright pathetically so. And that’s because their standards and usual expectations have been shaped by the long centuries of the Christendom era, with its minimal standards in those areas that are so abysmally low. In other words, what we’ve gotten used to as “normal” church life is actually miserably subnormal, if the New Testament or early patristic era is what sets the standard.
That is, IF we were to take the New Testament or the pre-Constantinian church as our guide to what “normal” discipleship and pastoral care looks like, then an awful lot of what is typical in European and North American Christianity is just plain unacceptable. After all, until the Constantinian Revolution, Christians met in house churches, which kept them pretty small. And more importantly, their small size fostered both a closely-knit degree of intense bonding and fellowship that’s hard for many of us to even imagine, and a degree of rigor in terms of high expectations for radical discipleship (including martyrdom) that may be even harder for most of us to conceive of in our wildest dreams.
That’s not to say that monster size churches can’t do a very good job of pastoral care and discipleship. For instance, the two most famous Protestant mega churches in America, Bill Hybel’s Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago (which averages over 25K in weekend attendance) and Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church in suburban LA (which averages well over 20K in average weekend attendance) each employ well over 100 paid staff, and delegate primary pastoral care and Christian formation to the many hundreds of weekly small groups that help those giant churches to thrive the way they do.
So I guess I’m saying that you can’t just go by whether the average Catholic (or Episcopalian or Presbyterian etc.) is satisfied by the level of services their parish offers them. In many cases, in a church hopping era like ours, if they weren’t, they’d be going elsewhere. What I’m presuming is that the whole Christendom era model of church life is totally inadequate for making the kind of mature and fully committed disciples of Christ that are needed for the Church to survive, much less thrive, in our increasingly secularized, relativistic, and even hostile social environment.
The call to a radical, extremely demanding form of Christianity is a core feature of the New Reformation I keep advocating here at T19, and anywher else I can. And it implicitly underlies comments like the ones I’ve made above. I just want to make clear that my fervent commitment to such ideals isn’t anti-Catholic, but anti-Christendom style, anti-state church, anti-“folk kirche” Christianity in all its various forms: Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox alike.
David Handy+
My former parish in Newport News, VA had IIRC 3000 or so members, the parish in Williamsburg VA (my parent’s parish) where I was married has about 10,000.
Now I attend a Latin Rite chapel administered by the FSSP (is part of St. Gregory the Great) with maybe 200 members. My parents are attending a Byzantine Catholic Church with half that (my Dad converted from EO to marry my Mom, so he loves it). It is nice to be in a small community.
Incidentally, we’ve had 5 vocations in less than that many years at my current chapel; if we were representative of the Church at large in America we’d have no clergy (or religious) shortage. The opening to the Zeitgeist had the opposite intended effect, for certain, when it comes to vocations. Or maybe for some it was the intended effect – at my last parish the Spirit of Vatican II types are thrilled at the prospects for increased lay control of the Church due to the priest shortage.
Latin Rite here = traditional Latin mass
TridentineVirginian (#13),
Out of curiosity, could the Newport News parish you’re talking about be Our Lady of Mt. Carmel? It’s a block from the evangelcial retreat center where I work (LivingStone Monastery, where the Franciscan nuns used to be), and I go there fairly often for the Saturday night mass. In fact, I was there tonight. And yes, it’s big enough to have 3K-4K members. Big enough to have 4 well-attended Anglo services each weekend, plus a Spanish service. Big enough to operate a parochial school. Big enough to have TWO priests.
But it’s a Christendom style church through and through, with all that implies. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s deadly. Completely inadequate. But again, the same could be said for an awful lot of oldline Prostestant and Anglican churches too. As far as my intense dislike of Constantinian religion goes, I’m an Equal Opportunity Offender. I offend people across a very wide spectrum of traditional churches.
David Handy+
Well, there is one lay group -[http://www.siena.org/] The St. Catherine of Siena Institute[/url] – who mission is to form intentional disciples, probably in the mold of which you speak Fr. NRA, and their work is primarily in the parish. There are many other groups and movements: Opus Dei, Communion and Liberation, and Regnum Christi come to mind. Most of the religious orders have Third Orders for lay folk (my parish has Lay Carmelites and Lay Marianists); monasteries typically have associated Oblate groups, and so on. All of which is to say that the parish isn’t the only place for spiritual formation. For the interested Catholic, there are many options.
As to the numbers, I don’t have trouble believing there are 68 million people in this country baptised in a Catholic Church. If ASA is 40%, you’ve probably got 27.4 million at Mass each Sunday. If my parish is any indicator, I’ll bet no more than 10 million, probably less, are adults. I know that “active members” is different than ASA, but I don’t know what factor to use to calculate it.
And, of course, there are all of the polls which show dissent from various important Catholic doctrines. A generation of poor catechesis and “relevant” priests will do that, eh.
Numbers are what they are. I would love to see the Catholic Church, and all Christian communities, thrive. In my opinion, the size of our parishes as a sign of weakness’ i.e., we don’t have the priests and the dedication to make it in smaller communities. There is, I think, some merit to you comments on “Christendom-style” church life, although I could (were it not late) add some contrary comments. The effects of society and culture should not be completely counted out, as though it all depended on our individual experiences.
Well, yes, Fr. NRA, I did read your first post as mildly negative, and glad you didn’t mean it that way (I generally enjoy your comments), I do think some of what you wrote is inaccurate (from my experience), but not anti-catholic. I just went through a bruising, genuinely anti-catholic thread on another site and am (arguably) over-sensitive. (there would be a smiley here if they were working).
Your last post just came through, and I’m curious by what criteria you judge the parish to be “Christendom style”. If you haven’t spent time with the priest and met some of the daily Mass regulars, you may be judging incompletely. Which is not to say that it’s not a Christendom-style parish. (another smiley goes here).
The assistant priest is taking the 10 am Mass, which happens to be a First Communion Mass, so I took the opportunity to log on (which may be a sin on a busy Sunday morning) to say thank you to David Handy who got a rare laugh out loud from me for I offend people across a very wide spectrum of traditional churches. Ecumenism takes many forms …
>”I’ll just register my high degree of skepticism about the official claim that there are over 68 million Roman Catholics in this country.”
Our Catholic parish conducts a formal census every few years . If you don’t fill out the census card and return it, you aren’t counted. I have no logical reason to doubt my parish or diocese’s statistics.
>”Again, that’s plainly an impossible burden in terms of providing adequate pastoral care, but also for accommodating worshippers, giving instruction in the Christian faith and life, and so on.”
Then, come help and be part of the solution. Catholics have many small congregations that lack a full-time priest. You are needed. Just talk with you local bshop.
God bless… +Timothy
#7, thanks for the ASA % – does that mean that Catholic ASA is going up, since I’m assuming the rolls continue to grow?
Also, is the Catholic Chruch experiencing growth in the South and Mountain West, and contraction elsewhere (i.e. mirroring overall population shifts)?
Words Matter has mentioned the ecclesial movements in the Catholic Church. It sounds to me as if The Neocatechumenal Way, especially, is the sort of thing for which David Handy is advocating?
I violated one of my own rules on #16: never comment before coffee or after bedtime. I hope it wasn’t offensive. Like Fr. Handy, I certainly meant no offense. And, of course, I failed to make my main point: numbers are what they are; what they mean is a whole other thing. If I were still Episcopalian, I would be concerned that my denomination had decline consistently for 35 years, at an increasing rate. I wouldn’t be concerned that any particular parish grew or declined (except, of course, as a pastoral matter regarding the folks of that parish).
As a Catholic, I am concerned that even under the leadership of John Paul the Great, and despite dramatic growth in Africa, the percentage of Catholics world-wide remains at 18%. I am concerned that my diocese has an ASA of less than 20% of membership. NOTE: Chris, if the 40% holds, then yes, ASA goes up, but that number is a couple of years old and may have dropped. I’m not concerned that our parish religious education dropped from 900 to 700 kids, because I know Father invited a questionable group to find another place to meet (it was a “discipling group, btw, that got into some very weird stuff).
Benedict, while still Card. Ratzinger, opined that the Catholic Church of the future would be much smaller, but more vital. Myself, I welcome the decline of the U.S. Catholic Church. Those who leave because they support abortion and other hot-button issues, or because they don’t believe, are welcome to remove themselves. For those who join protestant and evangelical churches, I wish the best as they search for a deeper relationship with Christ. The sex scandals have done much to focus attention on weaknesses in the Church and set up a purification process that can only strengthen us in the long term.
A good site for Catholic numbers, though it lacks ASA:
http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/
And, Fr. Handy, let me offer you my best wishes on your new ecclesial affiliation. We certainly disagree on many things theological and ecclesial, but I think the groups such as yours will preserve and extend that which I loved about the Episcopal Church. You will be in my prayers.
Thanks for everyone’s helpful comments. As an Anglican, it’s been particularly instructive to have several Roman Catholics participate in this discussion. I know I have a lot to learn about the Catholic Church, and I’m sorry if I sometimes spouted off as if I was a know-it-all about a church to which I don’t belong.
David Handy+
#15 – that’s the place. Howdy, neighbor.