Gallup: Drop in U.S. Catholic Church Attendance Under Pope Francis Sharpest in

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Well morality is at it’s lowest, so…:roll_eyes:
He didn’t cause all that.

This won’t end well, These threads never do

Someone please just pray for the Pope. We did that for centuries and survived.
He’s attacked from all sides.
We don’t need to pile on with the haters.

peace.
 
I pray for the Pope every day. In fact, I pray for both the Pope and the Pope Emeritus.
Sometimes I pray for all the past Popes back to Blessed Pius IX who aren’t yet saints.

I’m willing to bet that a good bit of this decline is the pre-V2 elderly generation, many of whom were regular church attendees, dying off.
 
Here’s the original write-up from Gallup, without Breitbart’s anti-Francis editorializing:


Interesting that the 30-39 group has had an upswing in Catholic attendance, while for Protestants the only upswing is in the 60+ age group. I wonder if raising children is part of the 30-39 group’s return.
 
While I don’t think this drop can be solely attributed to Pope Francis, he definitely isn’t helping matters. With his constant attacks on “rigoriststs” and “legalists” and with many Catholics viewing the requirement to attend mass each week as “just another rule to follow”, I wouldn’t be surprised if some Catholics use what they perceive as his new relaxed tone towards rules as justification to skip mass. Other comments he’s made such as “even athiests can be saved” contribute as well, even if they are taken grossly out of context. Of course, people who don’t really want to go to mass will find a reason to skip it no matter what, but now excuses are even easier to come by in the Pope’s statements.
 
tseleehw said:
While I don’t think this drop can be solely attributed to Pope Francis, he definitely isn’t helping matters.
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For all you know, the decline might have been sharper if it weren’t for Pope Francis. That’s the trouble with this sort of data. You don’t have a control group, so you can’t say what would have happened in the absence of any particular factor.
As Gallup first reported in 2009, the steepest decline in church attendance among U.S. Catholics occurred between the 1950s and 1970s, when the percentage saying they had attended church in the past seven days fell by more than 20 percentage points. It then fell an average of four points per decade through the mid-1990s before stabilizing in the mid-2000s. Since then, the downward trend has resumed, with the percentage attending in the past week falling another six points in the past decade.
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The clergy sex abuse crisis broke in the Boston Globe in 2002 and then went world wide in the next few years. This coincides precisely with the downward trend in Church attendance. As older people were dying out, the younger generation wasn’t stepping in to offset the numbers.
 
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I agree, I can’t understand criticizing someone for being ‘too catholic’. I think the continued downturn has a lot of causes and will take a holistic approach to correct.
 
jagged said:
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Mark121359:
Uh-huh. And you can just as easily substitute the words left and Democrat to achieve the same results…no?
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Sure, except for I can’t really remember Catholics talking about how you can’t vote for Republicans because of their politics.
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So true.

Anthony Spadaro, S.J., calls political divisions, such as between “evil” Democrats and “good” Republicans, a dangerous form of Manichieism that developed from an “ecumenism of hate” on the part of white Evangelical Protestants & alt-right Catholics.

Of course, this makes heads explode among the more-Catholic-than-the-Pope fringe.
 
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Expect attendance to drop much lower, as the number of marriages and baptisms has plummeted. This trend started well before Francis.

Also, I recently read an article detailing the trends between men and women leaving the church have evened out. It used to be that more women than men remained practicing Catholics; but now, the rates of women leaving appeared to match or exceed men’s rates.

No women, no mothers of the next generation.
 
Luke6_37 said:
For all you know, the decline might have been sharper if it weren’t for Pope Francis.
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The question remains as to why Catholic Church attendance is dropping, but Protestant Church attendance remains steady.
 
AlNg said:
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Luke6_37:
For all you know, the decline might have been sharper if it weren’t for Pope Francis.
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The question remains as to why Catholic Church attendance is dropping, but Protestant Church attendance remains steady.
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The measure is based on the proportion of self-identified Catholics and Protestants who regularly attend church. Catholics have a stronger sense of religious identity, so they will continue to identify as Catholics, even if they don’t go to church regularly. Protestants who drop off are more likely to adopt a secular identity, so they are not counted in the statistic. The higher proportion of Protestants is an artifact of their increasingly shrinking pie.
 
jagged said:
Sure, except for I can’t really remember Catholics talking about how you can’t vote for Republicans because of their politics.
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Are you serious? How long have you been a member here? On the old CAF, I recall threads around voting time where other Catholic members here said just that. How Republicans are against immigration, and against women’s health, and pro NRA and don’t care for the poor and on and on and on. And so as a Catholic voter, one should have serious reservations casting a vote for the RP. So indeed it did work both ways. So, your reasoning is seriously flawed.
 
QContinuum said:
Expect attendance to drop much lower, as the number of marriages and baptisms has plummeted. This trend started well before Francis.

Also, I recently read an article detailing the trends between men and women leaving the church have evened out. It used to be that more women than men remained practicing Catholics; but now, the rates of women leaving appeared to match or exceed men’s rates.

No women, no mothers of the next generation.
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You are definitely on to something here, and I agree that the consequences could be catostrophic. Mothers far more likely to be the primary directors of their children’s faith formation. I have encountered excellent fathers as well, but if mom isn’t interested, it makes it much harder for dad to do the job than the other way around.

My sense from talking to young people is that men and women are leaving for different reasons. Young women love Jesus, but are repulsed by the notion that they are barred from proclaiming the Gospel or delivering the homily during Mass because of their gender.
 
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jagged said:
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Mark121359:
Are you serious? How long have you been a member here? On the old CAF, I recall threads around voting time where other Catholic members here said just that. How Republicans are against immigration, and against women’s health, and pro NRA and don’t care for the poor and on and on and on. And so as a Catholic voter, one should have serious reservations casting a vote for the RP. So indeed it did work both ways. So, your reasoning is seriously flawed.
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I’ve been a member for a few months. I’m not talking about here, but in general. So, this place isn’t populated with the “vote for a Democrat and you’re going to hell” types. Great. It makes it easier to have more intelligent conversations.
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You are correct to be wary. Catholic Answers got into trouble several years back for promoting a voters guide that basically said “vote for a Democrat and you’re going to hell”. I believe they were at risk for losing their nonprofit status over it.

There are still folks on this forum who try to pull it out come election time, even though Catholic Answers has removed the document from their official website.

Here are the details from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Answers#The_Voter’s_Guides_controversy
 
AlNg said:
Protestant Church attendance remains steady.
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This is because of Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic churches and denominations are generally stable in attendance. Without them, US Protestant attendance stats would be the same as those in Europe (very low), where such churches and denominations are few.
 
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Maybe because a lot of Protestant churches are “easier”?
That what most former Catholics I know say. The choose non-denominational churches with upbeat music, multi- media presentations, coffee bars and lots of fellowship opportunities, but no real doctrine except accept Jesus as your savior then you’re good! No guilt, no sin, it’s all good!
 
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