What are Mass Attendance rates in the United States? (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, May 12, 2012, 14:55 (372 days ago)

Faz placed a post on the True Catholic discussion board which perplexed me a little at first as it seemed to show this continual growth in Catholic Mass participation rates continually rising from 1925 to 2004. His contribution over there has certainly stirred them up (with some classic swipes at Catholica from our mate Exy). Here's the graph that confused me along with a link to Faz's post on True Catholic and a link to the original source of the statistic.

This led me to do a little further research and I ended up on the Gallup site with a recent poll that gives a better indication of the participation rate across the United States. It seems the graph Faz displayed is the overall growth of numbers in America of those claiming to be Catholic. It is NOT a graph of the participation — the number actually attending Mass and being involved in their church. We have a very similar situation in Australia as can be seen by the blue line showing the growth in the number of Catholics in Australia in one of the graphs below. While the rate of decline in the United States has not been as steep as the decline in Europe or Australia it is still significant. For comparison I will also include below some graphs from Peter Wilkinson's report showing the decline in Australia.

Now here's the Australian statistics...

It is interesting that the Mass participation rate in the United States and Australia were level-pegging in 1954-55 (74% in Australia and 75% in the US. In Australia the participation rate had dropped to 13.8% by 2006 (the last official statistic — a new set of statistics should be released in Australia in the next month or so), but is still a lot more bouyant at 45% in the United States.

Obviously this is why Michael Voris has been brought to Australia to gee things up in the land down-under! More seriously does anyone know if there are some more "official" statistics kept in the United States by, for example, the Conference of US Bishops?

I should add it is interesting considering these US statistics in conjunction with the Niall Ferguson documentary, Civilization: Is the West History? Episode 6 – The Impact of the Protestant Work Ethic – recently shown in Australia and which you can still view for about another 12 days on SBS Television or on Catholica at:
http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?id=102424

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]