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	Number of N.E. Catholics Tumbles By Michael Paulson Boston Globe March 9, 2009 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/03/09/number_of_ne_catholics_tumbles/ The Catholic population in New England, long the most Catholic region in the country, is plummeting, according to a large survey of religious affiliation in the United States. The American Religious Identification Survey, a national study being released today by Trinity College in Hartford, finds that the Catholic population of New England fell by more than 1 million in the past two decades, even while the overall population of the region was growing. The study, based on 54,000 telephone interviews conducted last year, found that the six-state region is now 36 percent Catholic, down from 50 percent in 1990. In Massachusetts, the decline is particularly striking - in 1990, Catholics made up a majority of the state, with 54 percent of the residents, but in 2008, the Catholic population was 39 percent. At the same time, the percentage of the state's residents who say they have no religious affiliation rose sharply, from 8 percent to 22 percent. "It's quite an amazing change," said Barry A. Kosmin, one of the study's authors. He is the director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture, a research center at Trinity that was founded after two previous versions of the study, in 1990 and 2001, found a sharp increase in the number of Americans who say they are not religious. "You have a transformation of the Catholic population in two ways - one is a relocation, from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt, and the second is an ethnic transformation, a replacement of Irish-Americans by Latino-Americans in the Catholic Church," he said. The study confirms findings by other studies, particularly by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, that have found the size of the Catholic population in the United States to be relatively stable - about one-quarter of the nation's population - as immigration by Catholics, mostly from Latin America, makes up for a decrease in American Catholics whose families emigrated from Europe. The Trinity study finds that, even as the number and percentage of Catholics in New England are falling, the percentage in the Southwest and West is growing, so that in California the population is 37 percent Catholic, up from 29 percent in 1990, and in Texas it is 32 percent Catholic, up from 23 percent. The Vatican has recognized the demographic shift - in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI named Archbishop Daniel DiNardo of Houston the first cardinal in the American South. The study did not ask New Englanders why they ceased identifying with Catholicism, but the researchers said it was probably some combination of the general secularization of American society with alienation among some Catholics over the sexual abuse crisis and other issues. "You can't say this is entirely the fault of disgust at the hierarchy, because it was happening before 2001," said Mark Silk, director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values. Silk said the study found that Irish-Americans, along with people of Jewish ancestry and Asian-Americans, are disproportionately represented among those who report no religious affiliation. "The other thing is that New England Catholics have become sort of like New England Protestants - not particularly attached" to religion, he said. Northern New England is now less religious than the Pacific Northwest - long the nation's least religious region - the study found. Officials of the Archdiocese of Boston declined to comment yesterday, saying they had not seen the study. But church officials have repeatedly acknowledged a decline in Mass attendance and have been closing parishes throughout the state. Among the other highlights of the study is a finding that the United States is becoming less Christian overall - 76 percent of Americans said they were Christian in 2008, down from 86 percent in 1990. Fifteen percent of Americans say they have no religious identification, up from 14.1 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990. In one measure of what that means, the study found that 27 percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral when they die. A professor who has reviewed the survey said that it will be an important source of data for scholars of religion in America and that the New England data is the most significant finding. "The huge loss, in absolute terms and as a percentage, of Catholics in New England is the most striking element, as well as the fact that most of them didn't join another religion," said Ryan T. Cragun, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Tampa. "They didn't become Protestant, but they actually dropped out of religion and became nonaffiliated." Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com. The summary report of the studycan be found at www.boston.com/religion.
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