Today I learned a disturbing statistic that roughly 60 percent of RCIA converts stop practicing Catholicism.
Yeah, there’s some people who change affiliation two or three times (usually not more than that), but I usually tend to think the double-bounce people from each side will roughly cancel each other out, and that the one-time converts at least represent the big numbers that can be compared in order to look at trends.
There’s quite a few Catholics who drift away from Catholicism for awhile and eventually return to it, too, but I tend to think of them and those 60% of RCIA converts as groups that offset. Roughly, anyway. Enough, at least, that one of them isn’t going to completely throw off the big picture.
I think we need to work harder at evangelizing, but more at being charitable. The Catholic Church is not growing by leaps and bounds in the U.S. Immigration is creating the increase I’m told.
From what I’ve heard, Catholicism in America is technically increasing in raw numbers of people, but as a proportion of the US population, it’s fallen to about 24%, and it would have fallen closer to 20 already if not for immigration demographics that are northwards of 40% Catholic. That’s what the Pew Forum said, anyway.
Unfortunately, while it did have information on other conversion trends, it did not have anything on Protestants who convert to Catholicism. And now I see that USCCB puts the Catholic population of America at 22% (thank you for the link RebeccaJ), so…let’s look at the date on that. Oh, through 2009. I think that’s more up to date than what I had in front of me earlier. Thanks for these stats!
It looks like 75,724 were received into full communion, but that was just in 2009…87k for '08, almost 93k for '07, then 73, 81, and 75k (each with some change) for '06, '05, and '04. So it looks like over the course of each year, the Tiber Swim Team gets a bit under 100k new members. Can anyone help me translate that into an estimate for the total number of Tiber swimmers currently in America?
There’s ~15 million Catholic converts to Protestantism that have gone the other way (about 5% of the US population), and I think I heard something a few years back about the ratio being 3 to 1 when comparing converts going both ways. That ratio might be a bit out of date, though, and while it might be generally accurate of the gradient that we see, I don’t really know how precise it is. It seems like it’s in the right ballpark, though- if we figure on an average age of conversion in the neighborhood of 30 (maybe more? maybe less?), a “shelf life” of 50 years or so (on average, at least) and round up to about 100k for converts each year, extremely round numbers of 100k * 50 gives us about 5 million. That’s all round numbers and estimates, though- I’m just spitballing here and going a little beyond what the numbers can actually tell me straight out.
