Interesting Facts about Catholics in the US

Pew Research does surveys in the United States regarding religious questions.  Here are some interesting facts about Catholics in the US taken from Pew Research’s website. 

There are roughly 51 million Catholic adults in the U.S., accounting for about one-fifth of the total U.S. adult population.  The share of Americans who are Catholic declined from 24% in 2007 to 21% in 2014. 

Catholics in the U.S. are racially and ethnically diverse. Roughly six-in-ten Catholic adults are white, one-third are Latino, and smaller shares, about 3%, identify as black, Asian American, or with other racial and ethnic groups. The data also show that the share of U.S. Catholics who are Latino has been growing and suggest that this share is likely to continue to grow. Indeed, among Catholic Millennials, there are about as many Hispanics as whites.

Catholics are evenly dispersed throughout the country: 27% live in the South, 26% in the Northeast, 26% in the West, and 21% of U.S. Catholics live in the Midwest. Since many American Hispanics are Catholic, the continuing growth of this community as a share of the U.S. population is gradually shifting the geographic center of U.S. Catholicism from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and the West.

Politically, Catholic registered voters are evenly split between those who identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party (47%) and those who favor the GOP (46%). In their partisanship, U.S. Catholics are deeply divided along racial and ethnic lines.

I thought that the following was the most interesting of the data from Pew Research:

Catholicism has experienced a greater net loss due to religious switching than has any other religious tradition in the U.S. Overall, 13% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics – people who say they were raised in the faith, but now identify as religious “nones,” as Protestants, or with another religion. By contrast, 2% of U.S. adults are converts to Catholicism – people who now identify as Catholic after having been raised in another religion (or no religion). This means that there are 6.5 former Catholics in the U.S. for every convert to the faith.  No other religious group analyzed in the 2014 Religious Landscape Study has experienced anything close to this ratio of losses to gains via religious switching.

Similar surveys were done in 2018 and 2021, though on a smaller scale, but showed the trends to be continuing.  The last point here, that Catholics are leaving faster than we are gaining them, means that we all have a lot of work to do.  Our task, it seems to me, is to continue to reach out and welcome people to faith in Christ and in his Church.  The great insight of Vatican Council II is that the Church must be missionary, it must evangelize, it must make itself known and welcome people to join in the our faith in Jesus and his message of salvation.