(I've always wanted to be the first to post this.)
Posted on 02/23/2007 10:45:40 AM PST by Alex Murphy
CINCINNATI, Ohio (St. Anthony Messenger) – Is it true that Sunday Mass attendance has fallen? Four sources – Gallup, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), USA Today and the National Catholic Reporter - say “yes” and can document the decline in numbers.
In fall 2006, CARA published an analysis of its 2005 findings, noting that some people do more than skip Mass – they lie about it! The Georgetown-based researchers kindly call it the “social desirability effect.” People don’t want telephone pollsters to think them less than faithful—so they give the same answer they would probably give their mothers: “I go to Mass every Sunday.”
CARA and other researchers can weigh such “white lies” against statistics gathered through more impersonal Internet or MSN TV (formerly WebTV) methods, as CARA’s Mark Gray explained in a recent telephone interview with St. Anthony Messenger.
Statistics gathered through online methods go down some eight to 12 percentage points! CARA can also correlate its results with Gallup polls (of the general population), which indicate that Mass attendance peaked in 1957-58 and has declined from a high of 74 percent in the 1950s to 40 percent in 2003.
While many Mass-attending Catholics are probably saying, “I could have figured that out by looking around on Sunday,” the reasons may be less transparent. CARA does not attribute the decline to any scandals, for instance, but to less “institutional loyalty.” USA Today’s late 2004 survey agrees, observing that these trends were in place years before scandals emerged to trouble the faithful. According to the National Catholic Reporter’s 2004 survey, a large majority of respondents said they could be good Catholics without attending Mass every week.
In a report published in January 2005 (http://cara.georgetown.edu), CARA comments, “Baby Boomers ... entered adulthood during a time of great questioning of civic and cultural institutions.” Declining Mass attendance, documented by all these polls, is due more to the death of older Catholics than to new disaffection among younger church members.
In summary, while Mass attendance is down by nearly half from highs measured in the 1950s, it has held steady at 33 percent since the year 2000, according to CARA. Why does Gallup report a higher figure of 40 percent? Gallup poses the question slightly differently: “Did you go to Mass last Sunday?” (rather than “Do you go to Mass on Sundays?”). Statistically, this variation in the question results in a higher number, because some of those who seldom darken the church door just happened to do so the week Gallup surveyed them!
What a waste of space.
That's not exactly a stunner of a conclusion.
(I've always wanted to be the first to post this.)
LOL! Is there a version of that in the form of a Magic: The Gathering or some such card? Maybe a Yu-Gi-Oh monster?
I know it's not a MTG. (that game helped buy our house)
Not Yugio (or however the heck you spell it).
You learn all sorts of things when you get married.
This was the Mass that was supposed to raise attendance even above 1950s level by being more relevent to "where people are at." And where are they again?
It all goes back to the horrible Catechesis of the last fifty years. Most Catholics don't think it's a serious sin to skip Mass (should have heard the backlash when I taught that to my confirmation class), without getting on to other issues that they have either forgotten or given up on.
(How's that for a "master of the obvious" all on it's own?)
What I'd like to know are how many Protestants go to Church on Sunday.
I'm pretty confident that Catholic attendance is now around 30-35%, compared to 60-65% 45 years ago.
But every time I've poked my head into one of those many Protestant Churches that dot the landscape, excepting only the occasional non-denominational Church, they seem quite empty or else are just tiny little congregations. Among the denominations keeping official counts, the Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans, attendance is only 1/3 of membership or less. Similar trends are also present with the Orthodox and Jews. To me, this implies a society-wide trend - slightly less than 50% of Americans are formally affiliated with a Church (and half of them are affiliated with the Catholic Church which is why so many people are "ex-Catholic" - there are a lot more Catholics to become "ex" than there are Evengelical Presbyterians or Old Order Mennonites), and 1/3 of them go to Church on Sunday. 16% attendance out of the overall population strikes me as about right from common-sense observations. There are far more traffic jams at the Mall or Stadium on Sunday than there are at the Church parking lot. And not too many people are out walking.
Look around your neighborhood. Do more than 1 in 6 people in it actually darken the door of the local Churches on Sunday? Make an informal count by how many cars leave the driveway before 11 am.
Exactly, in the 50s and 60s the majority of the people went to church, it was a social norm, I think, rather than a religious one though. MOst of the people who actually go to church regularly now are serious about their religion.
I don't believe a majority of people went to Church in the 50's and 60's. As far as can be determined, about 65% of Catholics, and 50% of Protestants went to Church in the late 1950's. However, even if 3/4 of the population were affiliated with a Church (compared to only 50% today), that would result in attendance at under 50% of the population. You need to keep in mind that even then, very large numbers of people were no longer formally affiliated with a Church. Just look at how many Germans (take 50% as coming from Lutheran areas), Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns, there were compared to the number of Lutherans. Or take the number of Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, Slovaks, Czechs, Germans (take 50% as Catholic), Belgians, and Irish (take 50% as recent Catholic immigrants) compared to the number of Catholics.
We have an increase at all our Masses. We will have to get an associate and add Masses!
**number of traditional Masses offered. **
Especially thos Novus Ordo Masses that are reverntly said and follow the GIRM.
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