Which is more difficult, closing a parish or establishing a new one?

Today, the Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership project will be releasing the first report from their ongoing landmark study of parish life in the United States entitled, The Changing Face of U.S. Catholic Parishes. A significant piece of the first findings are on the issue of the growing scope of parish life. As the Church has closed parishes in the last decade, those that now remain, on average, include more individuals and are celebrating more Masses. These changes may begin to take a toll in the future as the study, conducted by CARA, also finds that larger U.S. parishes tend to have lower rates of attendance, lower levels of sacramental activity per household, and less giving per registered household than what is reported in smaller parishes. There appears to be a size limit at which the parish community begins to become less active and less giving.

Much of the recent focus in the news on these topics has been on parish closings. For example, it has been reported that Bishop Richard Lennon has requested the Vatican to evaluate recent decisions to close parishes in the Diocese of Cleveland. Yet it has not been uncommon for dioceses in the Midwest and Northeast to close parishes in recent years (some of these are typically maintained as worship sites). Many parishes in these areas were established 70 to 130 years ago to meet the needs of new and growing immigrant Catholic populations (often speaking different languages) in urban centers. In the post-World War II era, Catholics (along with the population in general) shifted to the suburbs and South and West into the growing Sun Belt economy. As emotionally difficult as it must be to close some of these parishes, it is also sometimes necessary to do so given the maintenance costs for these aging physical plants in light of smaller numbers of parishioners and priests often being in shorter supply than they were decades ago (note I have no knowledge of the specific decisions or data in Cleveland so I cannot say whether those closings generally fit the broader patterns).

An equally challenging question for the Church is how will it address the needs for all the Catholics in areas where there really never was a “local” neighborhood parish? As we have shown in a previous post, there are not a lot of dioceses building new parishes in areas where the Catholic population moved and is growing strongly. I understand there are challenges to building a new parish including capital campaigns, planning commissions, architects, and construction companies to deal with. This was all I imagine much easier to do in the 19th century. But a parish building boom will likely be needed in the U.S. Sun Belt in the 21st century.

The migration trends I note above are long-term but just look at the short-term effects below of the recession on mobility for two counties. The top image is for those leaving (red) and coming to (black) the county which includes the city of Cleveland in 2008 (the source is IRS data and the image is generated from Forbes). The bottom image shows the same for the county including the city of Atlanta. As one can see some of Cleveland’s population loss has been Atlanta’s gain (note we do not know the religion of any of the individuals in the IRS data).

In 2001, the Archdiocese of Atlanta had more than 320,000 Catholics, 131 active diocesan priests, and 77 parishes (note in 1991, the Archdiocese had 176,000 Catholics and 65 parishes). Moving a decade ahead, the diocese now has 900,000 Catholics, 141 active diocesan priests, and 87 parishes. Thus, the number of Catholics increased by 181% in the last decade but the number priests only increased by 8% and the number of parishes by 13%. This means the number of Catholics per parish in the Archdiocese has grown from 4,156 in 2001 to 10,345 in 2011. Ten new parishes have been added to accommodate 580,000 additional Catholics. I certainly do not mean to sound critical in any way of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. In fact this Archdiocese is one of the few that has added significant numbers of parishes in recent years. Thus, even where the needs are recognized and growth is occurring, the arch/dioceses doing the most to focus on new construction still tend to be a bit behind the pace of the rapidly changing distribution of the Catholic population in the United States.

The Church should take great care in dealing with the future of parishes in communities with diminishing Catholic populations. The decision to close a parish must always be very difficult. Yet, it may also be time to ask, with great care as well, when and how do we open new parishes where they are needed? After moving, will Catholics always have a new Catholic home to “come home” to?

An Italian American Mystery

In previous posts we have looked at shifts in the racial and ethnic identities of American Catholics as well as changing identifications with national ancestry groups. Within these changes is a mystery that many may not have noticed. The percentage of adult Catholics claiming Italian ancestry has fallen off a bit in recent decades (from 18% in the 1970s to 13% in the 2000s). However, the percentage of all American adults claiming Italian ancestry has been relatively stable at about 5% to 6% from 1972 to 2010. Reading between the lines, the proportion of Italian Americans who self-identify their religion as Catholic must be falling. As the graph below shows, it is.
 

This is not an easy group to study, given its overall size in the total population. Generally, samples for Italian Americans are small in the General Social Survey (GSS). However, the GSS provides repetitive independent samples that can be tracked over time. Even when accounting for margins of sampling error (the bars extending out from each data point on the graph) a clear pattern of decline is evident.

If one takes the point estimates literally (ignoring margin of error for a moment), Catholic affiliation among Italian American adults has fallen from 89% in 1972 to 56% in 2010 (-33 percentage points). If you’re an optimist you can assume the higher margin of error estimates are more accurate and if you’re a pessimist go with the lows. Either way, the decline in percentage points is essentially the same. Note as this drop has occurred the overall Catholic affiliation percentage for U.S. adults has remained unchanged at 25%—where it has been for decades.

Is there anything similar happening among Italians in the “home country?” No. Although the Mass attendance of Catholics in Italy has declined in recent decades, affiliation among Italians has remained in the high 80% to low 90% level (i.e., World Values Survey estimates).

It is clear that the changes in the U.S. are gradual. There is no mass exodus moment in the trend. These types of trends often speak to generational replacement. This would entail older Italian Americans who self-identify as Catholic passing away and being replaced in the adult population by younger Italian Americans who do not identify as Catholic. The socialization of Catholicism among the Italian American population appears to be breaking down.

It does not appear to primarily be an issue of children of Italian American Catholics being raised Catholic and leaving the faith. The retention rate (the percentage of those raised in the faith who remain Catholic as adults) for Italian American Catholics is actually quite high and has fallen more slowly than the overall U.S. Catholic retention rate. In the 1970s, the Italian American Catholic retention rate was 88%. This dropped a bit to 85% in the 1980s and a bit more, 82%, in the 1990s. Yet, even in the 2000s it averaged 77% (the retention rate for all Catholics in 2010 was 68%). The fall in the Italian American Catholic retention rate is not as extreme as the drop in Catholic affiliation for Italian Americans in general.

Instead, some Italian American Catholics must be choosing to raise their children in another faith or no faith at all. Why would this happen? I think (just my opinion; no real data) it has something to do with many post-World War II Italian Americans moving out of the “Little Italies”—those urban ethnic enclaves of their immigrant ancestors and into the suburbs. Here they were less likely to be around other Italians and/or Catholics and became less connected to Italian culture, language, and tradition (CARA parish surveys indicate the number of Masses celebrated in Italian have dropped by a half or more in the last decade). 

Data on the religion and ancestry of the spouses of this sub-group of the population are hard to find (i.e., even smaller samples). What is available does indicate that Italian American Catholics are increasingly likely to be married to spouses who do not share their faith. Many of the Italian American Catholics who left the old neighborhoods are no longer with us, but their kids and grandkids are. Some of them don’t share the faith of grandma and grandpa.

In the 1970s, only 11% of Italian Americans self-identified their religion as Protestant. In the 2000s this had nearly doubled to 19%. A similar increase in the non-affiliated or “Nones” has occurred, with 7 percent of Italian Americans self-identifying as Nones in the 1970s and 14 percent identifying as such in the 2000s. Again these changes exceed the pace of the drop in Italian American Catholic retention so it’s not primarily and issue of leaving. Instead it’s a story of a faith failing to be reproduced among this ancestry group.

The mystery is by no means solved and I’m no detective, but these are my deductions and data on this topic so far. Regardless, as the grandson of an Italian Catholic grandmother (the family name was Filippini) it makes me sad to see the link between this ancestry group and the Catholic faith weaken.

Above photo courtesy of nmcbean at Flickr Creative Commons.

Some Odds and Ends

It is a busy time at CARA. We hope to get back to more regular posting soon. Here are a few asides from recent data, posts, and publications, as well as a note of some awards.

Mass Attendance Continues to be Extraordinarily Stable
Despite “conventional wisdom” or anecdotes one often hears, there continues to be no evidence in survey data of a decline in Catholic Mass attendance nationally. Yet, it isn’t increasing either. For more than a decade now CARA has tracked Mass attendance in its national polls of self-identified adult Catholics (representative surveys using random selection/probability sampling). The figure below shows the percentage of Catholics attending every week (which is always smaller than the percentage attending in any given week).

In the 20 surveys shown here since 2000, there are no differences across time that exceed margin of sampling error. More so the regression trend line is essentially zero (-.0001) meaning absolute stability. In our most recent survey, conducted in May and June 2011, the percentage of Catholics attending every week is estimated at 24%. As we’ve noted elsewhere with growth in the Catholic population over the last decade, even a stable Mass attendance trend line means more Catholics attending in real numbers (i.e. 24% of the adult Catholic population in 2011 is larger than 24% of this population in 2000).

Men Leaving and Marriage
Last week in OSV, CARA had a piece on the decline in the number of marriages in the Church. As we note some of this change may be related to an increase in the number of Catholics choosing to marry non-Catholics (and choosing to marry in another house of worship or a secular setting). We do know that the likelihood of a Catholic marrying a non-Catholic in the Church is strongly associated with the larger presence of other Catholics in their diocese. Numbers and proximity matter.

But something else is going on as well. Males raised Catholic are slightly more likely than females raised Catholic to leave the faith as adults. The retention rate among male Catholics in the last two General Social Surveys (GSS) is estimated to be 66% (i.e., two-thirds of males raised Catholic self-identify as Catholic as adults). By comparison, the retention rate among Catholic females is 71%. The end result of this is that there are now fewer Catholic men who have never married than Catholic women who have never married.

This circumstance was not evident as recently as 1980 when there 4.4 million Catholic never married adult (age 18 or older) men and 4.3 million Catholic never married adult females (extrapolating from survey and Census data).  Thus, at that time there was nearly one Catholic never married women for every one Catholic never married man.

With the male Catholic retention rate dropping more steeply in recent years than the female Catholic rate, there are currently 7.6 million never married Catholic adult men and 9.1 million never married Catholic adult women. Or in other terms, there are now 1.2 never married Catholic women for every one Catholic never married man.

Further evidence for this emerging distribution can simply be seen in the demographics of visitors to Catholic dating sites. For example, on CatholicMatch.com (via Quantcast) visitors are estimated to be 53% female and 47% male or about 1.13 female visits for each male visit.

Thus, it appears some of the increase in Catholics choosing to marry non-Catholics is in part a result of Catholic never married women being less likely to meet never married Catholic men (even a bigger issue in dioceses with small Catholic population percentages). The resulting increase in marriages between Catholics and people of other religious identities may in turn be leading to a drop in the total number of marriages in the Church as some choose to marry in other religious settings (or a secular venue).

Can Catholics Eat Chicken During Lent?
In a previous post, I commented on an indicator of apparent falling interest in anything Catholic online, as measured by Google’s search trend data. Here is another interesting aside using some of these data. As many are aware from their own experience (depending on your browser settings) Google makes “best guesses” to complete questions or statements using an autocomplete function. As Google describes:

As you type, Google's algorithm predicts and displays search queries based on other users' search activities. … All of the predicted queries that are shown in the drop-down list have been typed previously by Google users. … Predicted queries are algorithmically determined based on a number of purely objective factors (including popularity of search terms) without human intervention. The autocomplete data is updated frequently to offer fresh and rising search queries.

So what happens when you start asking a question or making a statement in Google about Catholics, Catholicism, and the Catholic Church?

The first question is simple: Can Catholics…

There is apparent interest out there online in what Catholics can eat and when. Marriage and death also come up. Altering slightly to: Do Catholics…

We see Mary appear twice in the top five questions along with the rapture, Lent and evolution.

Some also seem to wonder if Catholics are Christians (or pagans). There is a bit there about hypocrites and being wrong as well. Anti-Catholicism is alive on the Internet.

When we turn to the institutional Church things get a bit more negative.

Some are concerned about the Catholic Church changing the Bible, apologizing for the Inquisition, and about just generally going mad.

Chicken is not the only question on the menu. Some also wonder if the Catholic Church is like a thick steak (see G.K. Chesterton), corrupt, or a force for good.

I am not sure if I am more distressed by the drop in Catholic searches on Google or by those who are using Google to ask questions about Catholicism tending to have some unusual curiosities.

Ireland Census 2011
In April we noted that the Census in Ireland will be an important barometer of sorts for Catholicism in Europe. The first report from that Census is out today. It does not include any information on religion. Reports scheduled for release next year will include this information. But the release today does note that Ireland has experienced strong population growth since 2006 : “The total population enumerated on census night 10th April was 4,581,269, an increase of 341,421 on the 2006 census.”A substantial part of this growth was through natural increase (births far outnumbering deaths).

This new total means that the Catholic population percentage will need to be at least 80.4% for Ireland to maintain the total number of Catholics counted in the 2006 Census. The Catholic population percentage in 2006 was 86.8%. Some expect this percentage to fall in the 2011 data. I don't think it will fall anywhere near the 80.4% mark. It may even grow given immigration patterns and the economic troubles of the country. But we will have to wait longer to see which is the case. I'd bet on a growing Catholic population in Ireland. If the Catholic population of Ireland did grow at the same rate of the overall population one would expect there to have been nearly 4 million Catholics in Ireland in April 2011 (...here is a March 2012 update on the numbers).

Awards
Finally, CARA expresses gratitude and thanks to the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada for bestowing two awards related to our work.

This blog won first place for “Best Online Blog” with the comments: “Strong use of hard data. Blogger interprets data for the reader and proves stats are relevant to faith.”

A CARA piece in OSV entitled “Steady Change: A Future with Fewer Catholic Priests” won second place for “Best In-Depth News/Special Reporting” with the comments: “A good look at one of the greatest challenges facing the church today. Fine reporting and analysis.”

We are honored to have received these awards.