A sign that the Protestant are coming home.
A sign that the Catholic Church is hemmoraging members, and needs to trumpet every conversion to mask the problem.
"Roman Catholics, the largest U.S. church with a reported 69 million members, start counting baptized infants as members and often don’t remove people until they die. Most membership surveys don’t actually count who’s in the pews on Sunday. To be disenrolled, Catholics must write a bishop to ask that their baptisms be revoked..."
....it is possible, for example, to be born Catholic, married Methodist, die Lutheran and still be listed as a member of the 1 billion-member Roman Catholic Church....
"...The Catholic understanding of membership is that a person becomes a member upon baptism and remains a member for life," Gautier said. "Whether you show up at church or not is not what determines whether you're a member."
-- from the thread When It Comes to Church Membership Numbers, the Devil's in the Details
.... Catholics still account for just under a quarter of the population, as they have for many years. That's because the surge in Hispanic immigration has offset the steady decline of white Catholics. Roughly 2 in 3 Latino immigrants are Catholic, according to Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. He also notes that Hispanic fertility rates are higher than those of white Americans, ensuring more Latino Catholic growth in the United States.
.... from the thread Does the American Catholic Church Have a Numbers Problem?
Catholics are leaving the faith at four times the rate that newcomers are joining. "Religious change is not simply a function of retention; it's a function of recruitment. It's both sides of the ledger," explains the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life's Greg Smith. "In no other religious groups we looked at did we see this high a ratio people leaving versus joining."
.... from the thread Does the American Catholic Church Have a Numbers Problem?
No other religion in the United States has lost more members to other faiths, or to no faith at all, than Catholicism, according to the new survey released by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The survey, conducted in 2007, found that 31 percent of Americans were raised Catholic, but less than 25 per cent of them still identify as Catholic. Roughly 10 percent of all Americans have strayed from Catholic roots, the study reported.....The Hidden Exodus: Catholics becoming Protestants
....“It’s our mission to evangelize and we are failing that,” said [The Rev. Allan Figueroa Deck, S.J., executive director of cultural diversity for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops], explaining that the term ‘evangelize’ includes the “conversion of the human heart and the promotion of social justice.”
.... from the thread Study: Catholics losing the faith