The Catholic Church’s American Downfall: Why Its Demographic Crisis Is Great News for the Country

By Patricia Miller
The Salon
May 21, 2015

http://www.salon.com/2015/05/21/the_catholic_churchs_american_downfall_why_its_demographic_crisis_is_great_news_for_the_country/

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Rick Santorum (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig/Nati Harnik/Photo montage by Salon)

The big news out of the new Pew poll on Americans and religion was the precipitous drop in the number of Americans calling themselves “Christian” and its potential impact on the Christian Right and future religion itself in the U.S.

But there’s another number lurking in the poll that may prove just as consequential: there are 3 million fewer people calling themselves Catholic today than in 2007, the last time Pew conducted their extensive poll. As a result, the share of the U.S. population that identifies as Catholic dropped from approximately 24 percent to 21 percent.

Why is this such big news? Because despite unpopular popes and still-simmering pedophilia scandals, the percentage of Catholics in the U.S. has remained remarkably steady for decades. The relative stability of the Catholic population allowed many on the Catholic right to dismiss calls for reform in the church and gave the Catholic bishops political clout when it came to opposing things like no-cost contraception in the Affordable Care Act in the name of “Catholics.”

But now it appears that the Catholic Church is in a demographic free-fall, as it sheds adherents faster than any faith other than the mainline Protestant denominations, which have been in decline for decades. Nearly one-third of all American adults were raised Catholic, but a stunning 41 percent—four in ten of those who marched to the alter in their little white First Communion dresses and suits—no longer identify with Catholicism.

Why is the Catholic Church suddenly crashing? The reality is that the Catholic Church has been shedding adherents for a long time. But it was gaining new parishioners just as fast, thanks to the dramatic increase in Hispanic migration to the U.S. The influx of Hispanics, who are overwhelming Catholic, helped make up for the departing white, native-born parishioners and masked their continued defection from the church. As a result, one-third of Catholics in the pews today are Hispanic.

But now the Hispanic influx into the church has slowed, largely as a result of a decline in Hispanic migration to the U.S., which since hitting a peak in 2007 has dropped as a result of the recession. And Hispanics too are increasingly abandoning the Catholic faith. The Pew survey found the percentage of Hispanics calling themselves Catholic dropped below 50 percent for the first time, from 58 percent in 2007 to 48 percent today. And while nearly 20 percent of Hispanics now identify as Evangelicals, that’s only up three points since 2007. The big jump is in the number of unaffiliated Hispanics, with 20 percent of Hispanics saying they don’t have a religion, up six points since 2007.