Where Is Mass Attendance Highest and Lowest?

Which country has the highest Catholic Mass attendance? We can’t say for sure because surveys have not been conducted on the topic in every country in the world. The World Values Survey (WVS) is in its seventh wave (beginning in the 1980s) and has data for 36 countries with large Catholic populations. Among these, weekly or more frequent Mass attendance is highest among adult self-identified Catholics in Nigeria (94%), Kenya (73%), and Lebanon (69%). The next segment of countries, where half or more Catholics attend every week includes the Philippines (56%), Colombia (54%), Poland (52%), and Ecuador (50%). Fewer than half, but a third or more attends every week in Bosnia and Herzegovina (48%), Mexico (47%), Nicaragua (45%), Brazil (44%), Bolivia (42%), Slovakia (40%), Italy (34%), and Peru (33%). Click the image below to see a larger version.

Between three in ten and a quarter of Catholics attends Mass every week in Venezuela (30%), Albania (29%), Spain (27%), Croatia (27%), New Zealand (25%), and the United Kingdom (25%).

In CARA’s polling, about 24% of Catholics in the United States attended Mass every week or more often prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. In our most recent poll in late summer 2022, 17% of adult Catholics reported attending Mass this frequently with 5% watching Mass online or television from home instead. Other countries with similar Catholic Mass attendance as in the United States are Hungary (24%), Slovenia (24%), Uruguay (23%), Australia (21%), Argentina (21%), Portugal (20%), the Czech Republic (20%), and Austria (17%). The lowest levels of weekly attendance are observed in Lithuania (16%), Germany (14%), Canada (14%), Latvia (11%), Switzerland (11%), France (11%), and the Netherlands (7%).

One might assume that the more religious Catholics are in a country, the more likely they are to be frequent Mass attenders. Yet, there is not a strong correlation between the numbers identifying as a "religious" Catholic and frequent Mass attendance (an R2 of .097).

The WVS asked respondents, "Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are…  A religious person, not a religious person, an Atheist, or don’t know." The scatterplot below shows the relationship between the percentage of Catholic respondents in a country identifying as a religious person and the percentage indicating that they attend Mass once a week or more often.

There are countries where there is a close relationship between answers to both questions including the Netherlands, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, the Philippines, Kenya, and Nigeria. But for many other countries their placement is far from the regression line. Lebanon, for example, has very high Mass attendance, comparatively speaking, but the share of Catholics there considering themselves to be religious is substantially lower in comparison to other countries. Ninety-seven percent of Catholics in Uruguay consider themselves to be a religious person, yet only 23% of Catholics there attend Mass weekly or more often. Click the image below to see a larger version.

Other than Uruguay, the countries where Catholics are most likely to consider themselves to be religious are Nigeria (95%), Albania (94%), Slovakia (93%), the Czech Republic (92%), Italy (92%), Lithuania (92%), Kenya (92%), Colombia (92%), Bolivia (91%), and Poland (90%).

More than three-fourths but fewer than nine in ten Catholics in the following countries consider themselves to be a religious person: Croatia (88%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (88%), Slovenia (87%), Hungary (86%), Portugal (85%), Latvia (85%), Peru (84%), Philippines (83%), Ecuador (82%), Brazil (82%), Argentina (79%), the Netherlands (78%), Mexico (77%), and Nicaragua (76%).

Catholics in the United States come in just under this group with 74% considering themselves to be a religious person. The U.S. is followed by France (72%), Austria (69%), Australia (67%), Spain (67%), Germany (65%), Switzerland (63%), Lebanon (62%), the United Kingdom (59%), Venezuela (57%), Canada (55%), and New Zealand (55%).

In terms of identifying as a religious person, Catholics in the United States and France are quite similar (74% and 72%, respectively). Yet, only 8% of Catholics in France attends Mass weekly compared to 17% of Catholics in the United States (and 24% attending weekly prior to the pandemic).

While there seems to be a disconnect between identifying as a religious person and attending Mass weekly there is a third factor that may explain the comparative distribution of both of these attributes. If you’ve looked closely at the countries you might have noticed some economic clustering.

GDP is the total value of all goods and services produced in a country in one year. When you divide this by the population you get GDP per capita, which is the standard measure of the average comparative wealth per person between countries (data: World Development Indicators, World Bank). 

The fit between GDP per capita and frequency of Mass attendance is stronger than religiosity and Mass attendance (R2 of .6107), albeit in a curvilinear relationship. Mass attendance falls sharply as GDP per capita rises to $10,000 and then this drop slows and flattens as GDP per capita continues to increase. This scatterplot has some outliers. Lebanon, for example, is quite distant from the regression line with lower than expected Mass attendance and Italy has nearly the opposite with higher attendance than would be expected using GDP per capita as a predictor.  

Religiosity has a more linear, yet weaker, relationship with GDP per capita (R2 of .4365). There is a large cluster of countries with GDP per capita less than $25,000 that have among the highest shares of Catholics self-identifying as religious. In higher income countries, religiosity falls. There is a cluster of countries in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania with lower levels of religious self-identification. Switzerland, with the highest GDP per capita of the countries surveyed, has both low levels of weekly Mass attendance and relatively smaller numbers of Catholics self-identifying as religious persons. In this scatterplot, Lebanon is the most significant outlier with lower than expected levels of religious self-identification.

In this small sample of countries, we can surmise that Catholicism is strongest in what is often called the developing world where GDP per capita are lower, while it appears to be contracting in wealthier "developed" countries. The precise mechanisms associated with economic development and wealth that are impacting Catholics' participation in the faith and identification as religious are unclear. Whatever they are, they matter significantly.

Note: In survey research, self-reported frequencies of Mass attendance can be inflated by social desirability bias. However, this bias may be relatively similar across populations. Thus, the differences between countries in attendance are likely accurate although actual Mass attendance levels may be lower than reported. Nigeria has the highest share of weekly attenders at 94%. According to the Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae 2020, Nigeria was home to 32,576,000 Catholics and 4,406 parishes. With the reported frequency of attendance there would be 6,920 weekly attenders per parish. This would require numerous Masses each weekend. Kenya is home to 16,467,000 Catholics in 6,353 parishes. Taking account of their reported frequencies of Mass attendance this would result in 1,900 weekly attenders per parish, which is not unreasonable.

 Creative Commons image of a Catholic Mass in Abuja, Nigeria courtesy of Jeremy Weate.

Updated Catholic Populations for 2022

A decade ago, we posted about a “micro-scoping view of the Catholic population.” It has been enough time that we felt we needed to update this.

Both the General Social Survey (GSS) and Gallup estimate that 22% of U.S. adults self-identify as Catholic. As of July 1, 2022, the Census Bureau estimated that there were 332,838,183 residents of the United States and that 77.8% of them are ages 18 and older. Applying these two percentages to that population total we estimate that there are 56,968,583 Catholic adults in the country. If we assume the children of some of these adults have similar religious affiliations to their parents then we expect that there is likely 73,224,400 Catholics of any age in the country.

Some might note that you can’t be unbaptized and there are also those who no longer self-identify as Catholics. We can use the General Social Survey to estimate how sizeable this population is. A total of 33.9% of U.S. adults indicate they were raised Catholic. With 22% continuing to self-identify as Catholic that means 11.9% of U.S. adults formerly self-identified as Catholic but no longer do so. This is equivalent to 30,814,825 adults who were presumably baptized but no longer consider themselves Catholic (we cannot estimate the number of minors who have left the faith and are now former Catholics). That also means the total population of people baptized Catholics in the country is 87,783,408 (some were baptized outside the U.S. and later immigrated here). 

 

The next group you can zero in on are what we call “parish-connected” Catholics. These are self-identified Catholics who attend Mass with some frequency and most register with a parish. At Christmas and Easter there are approximately 52,721,568 Catholics who attend Mass in 2022 (this total includes those who attend more often). That is equivalent to about 3,180 people in the typical parish. A total of 41,957,581 are in households registered with a Catholic parish. Of the aforementioned Mass attenders at Christmas and Easter, 32,950,980 attends Mass at least once a month (this total includes those who attend more often).

The next group is the “very active and involved” Catholics encompassing 17,573,856 weekly Mass attenders and 8,944,068 who are “very involved” with their parish outside of Mass. Respectively that encompasses 1,060 weekly attenders in the typical parish with 540 being “very active” outside of Mass.

The final group includes those professionals involved in ministry (albeit not all in parishes). This includes 141,382 people who are priests, vowed religious, permanent deacons, and lay ecclesial ministers. Technically, that would mean there are 2.1 priests per parish with a total population of 34,923. However, some are religious priests who are less likely to be involved in parish ministry than diocesan priests. Among both these groups there is a significant number who are retired and no longer active in ministry today. When you break things down to active diocesan priests per parish it comes out to about 1.0. Yet these priests are not evenly distributed across dioceses so some do not have enough diocesan priests for there to be one priest assigned to each parish.

Using CARA Catholic Polls (CCP) we can estimate other populations estimates that may be of interest. Some 58.3 million Catholics were born in the United States and 14.9 million were born elsewhere. A total of 48.0 million adult Catholics received the Sacrament of Confirmation. Among Catholic adults, 23.0 million attended a Catholic school at some point when they were young (according to NCEA, 1.345 million Catholic minors are currently attending Catholic schools). There are 4.4 million self-identified Catholics who were not raised Catholic who later converted to Catholicism.

The largest generation of Catholics, currently, are Millennials (19.8 million) followed by Generation X (18.3 million), and then Baby Boomers (15.8 million). A total of 33.7 million Catholic adults are married or widowed, 8.2 million are divorced or separated, and 15.0 million have never married (of which 11.4 million are Millennials).

There are 16.2 million Catholic Democrats compared to 12.4 million Republicans. Yet, there are more Catholic conservatives than liberals (19.3 million compared to 13.7 million). Most adult Catholics are not affiliated with a political party (25.9 million) and 23.9 million consider themselves to be “middle of the road” when it comes to political ideology.

Correction 8/10/2022: A former version of this blog included an estimate for minors who had left the faith. This led to larger estimates of "former Catholics" than is likely. However, we cannot assume the share of minors who have left is similar to the share of adults. Presumably this is less common among children and teenagers.

Are Religious Sisters Headed for Extinction in the 2040s? (Spoiler… No)

Last Week ABC News published a story entitled “America’s nun population in steep decline” with five authors. The story’s lede starts by noting that young adults are becoming less religious. It highlights that fewer are identifying as Christian, including identifying as Catholic. As we’ve shown before, the decline in Christian affiliation is much steeper than in Catholic affiliation, which has been quite stable by comparison. Also many young adult Catholics are increasingly religiously active in unconventional ways.

The story then refers to studies that were profiled by a Catholic news source about the age distribution of religious sisters. The ABC News story concludes that the average age of sisters is 80. Yet, I don’t believe either of the studies cited indicate this. The survey of membership survey of the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious (CMSWR) found the average age of its members was 57. The second report, by CARA, reviews population trends and a survey of sisters. A 2009 survey cited in that report includes an age distribution for all sisters but no average age is given.

Then this paragraph appears in the story: “In 2022, there were reportedly fewer than 42,000 nuns in America, which is a 76% decline over 50 years. At the rate sisters are disappearing, one estimate said that there will be fewer than 1,000 nuns left in the United States by 2042, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.” This links to a Pew Research Center report that links to CARA’s Frequently Requested Statistics.

CARA has not projected that there will be fewer than 1,000 nuns in the United States in 20 years. If one took the data from our frequently requested statistics, from 1970 to 2021, and applied a rate of change and assumed “if current trends continue” then the assumption in the aforementioned paragraph might look like the best future estimate. But again, CARA did not say this and furthermore it is far from the best future estimate.

In 2014, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation commissioned the CARA to conduct an annual survey of women and men who enter religious life each year in a religious congregation, province, or monastery based in the United States. CARA surveys religious institutes annually asking for a list of new entrants. We then survey these men and women entering religious life annually. In 2021, for example, 136 women entered religious life. Their average age was 28 (median age of 25). Between 2015 and 2021, 1,279 women entered religious life and had, at the time of entry, a similar age profile to those entering in 2021. The average size of an annual entrance class during this period is 183.

The steep decline in the number of sisters is a result of an extraordinary period in the Catholic Church in the United States. The number of sisters in the United States peaked in 1965 at 181,421 sisters. This was far from the historical norm and the Church received decades of service from these women. After 1965, new entries began to slow. A sister who entered religious life at the age of 25 in 1965 would be 82 years old today. We are unfortunately seeing the passing of this extraordinary generation of women.

Yet, women have continued to enter religious life since 1965 and there will be many more than “1,000 nuns left” in 2042. The “current trend” in the data will not continue as the rate of decline will slow and stabilize around a population of sisters that numbers more than 10,000 rather than fewer than a thousand.