A brief report from the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., offers some statistics worth worrying over. For only the second time period since 1947, the annual number of people entering the church has dropped below one million. The Great Recession appears to have had a significant effect on U.S. fertility, and infant baptisms have tracked that overall decline. And now hastening the descent below one million has been a still unexplained collapse of “non-infant entries” (teens and adults) into the church that began in 2001. A CARA researcher noted that “something happened” the following year, beginning the decline. That something may not have been the crisis of sexual abuse by clergy, because numbers of non-infant entries actually went up briefly during the height of that trauma in 2002 and 2004. But the decline has been just about constant since then.
Church Membership Trends Downward
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Around the affluent world, new hostility, resentment and anxiety has been directed at immigrant populations that are emerging as preferred scapegoats for all manner of political and socio-economic shortcomings.
“Each day is becoming more difficult, but we do not surrender,” Father Igor Boyko, 48, the rector of the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, told Gerard O’Connell. “To surrender means we are finished.”
Many have questioned how so many Latinos could support a candidate like DonaldTrump, who promised restrictive immigration policies. “And the answer is that, of course, Latinos are complicated people.”
Catholic voters were a crucial part of Donald J. Trump’s re-election as president. But did misogyny and a resistance to women in power cause Catholic voters to disregard the common good?