The U.S. Catholic Church is plummeting in membership, with nine out of 10 cradle Catholics abandoning it to become religious “nones,” a bombshell study has revealed.
“More and more of those raised Catholic are leaving,” the study published in the University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal on August 12 concludes.
Examining church attendance figures from 1973 onward, philosopher Michael Rota and sociologist Stephen Bullivant, both committed Catholics, note that “while many religious groups in the U.S. have experienced decline over this period, Catholics are doing particularly poorly.”
For Catholics hoping Leo XIV’s election as the first American pontiff would spark an increase in churchgoing, the survey presents challenging findings. The survey also calls into question the credibility of recent reports detailing widespread conversions of youth to Catholicism.
Data from the General Social Survey over the last 50 years “reveal a major problem — indeed, arguably the single biggest problem — for the Catholic Church in the United States,” write Rota and Bullivant. “In 1973, 84% of all those raised Catholic still identified as Catholic when surveyed as adults. In 2002, that figure was 74%. By 2022, it had dropped to 62%.”
“For every one Catholic convert, about nine or ten Catholics leave. That translates to roughly 15 million Catholics gone from the Church,” the authors lament. While some Catholics switch to white evangelical and Hispanic Protestant churches, the “biggest winner is the category of the religiously unaffiliated — almost a 16% net gain.”
The authors describe how significant levels of Catholic immigration has been “masking” the domestic decline in U.S. Catholic church numbers. Neverthless, “no realistic amount of evangelizing new people, or bringing back those ‘prodigals’ who have left — mission-critical as both those apostolates are — can make up for these kinds of losses.”
Decline of Sexual Morality and Gospel Preaching
“I recently left the Catholic Church. It is a festering rat’s nest of skittles [gay] men and a small remnant of cowardly heterosexuals. I wish it weren’t so. I really do. Yes, there are a few solid trads out there. I respect them a lot. But they are about 1% of the total,” Michael Ramsey comments in response to a YouTube podcast discussing the Notre Dame study.
“I simply had to leave. The last straw was going to confession and having an octogenarian in rainbow stole lecture me on the new Jesuit theology. I left that confession booth knowing I was a Protestant in search of a conservative mainline church. I happily attend a PCA [Presbyterial Church of America] church,” Ramsey explains.
On the same podcast, Protestant apologist Myles Christians remarked, “I often wonder if a lot of why those individuals end up leaving is because they’re not being fed Christ through Word and Sacrament, meaning they’re not receiving the Gospel.”
Christian, who runs the channel Canon & Creed, reports that many of his Roman Catholic friends “say stuff outright like, ‘Who even cares about the sermon? I don’t go to Mass for that. I go to mass to receive the Eucharist and then I get the heck out of there.’”
“That’s a very truncated view,” Christian observes. “Word and sacrament go hand in hand.”
Study Suggests Creating Protestant-like “Community” to Retain Leavers
The authors, however, don’t attribute the decline to a lack of pulpit catechesis but blame the spike in Catholic disaffiliation to the breakdown in the failure of parents to transmit Catholicism to their children and in the collapse of “faith-supportive networks.”
The rise in interreligious marriages are also responsible for cradle Catholics leaving “since children are more likely to accept religious claims with a high level of confidence when both of their parents are united in making those claims.”
Moreover, “as American society has become more pluralistic over the last century, people’s local social networks have become less religiously homogenous, hence consensus on religious matters among the average individual’s social network has declined,” Rota and Bullivant argue.
Further, “religious affiliation is no longer the default setting for an American citizen” and “the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and other social changes, have led to an increasingly large values gap between traditional Catholic morality and the ethics of mainstream American culture.”
The authors suggest that the Catholic Church could solve the problem by using a “single key: community,” which is a major factor in drawing converts and religious switchers to Evangelical, Pentecostal, and mainline Protestant churches.
“That Catholics do not do community well is disheartening, but it is also very useful information — there is low-hanging fruit here,” the study acknowledges.
Study Omits Ramifications of Clerical Sex Abuse Crisis
Monsignor Gene Gomulka, a former Navy chaplain and clerical sex abuse investigator, told The Stream that the study had failed to account for large numbers of Catholics who leave because of the clerical sex scandals and the recent doctrinal deviations on sexual morality in the Catholic Church.
“So many members of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregation in our city are baptized Catholics who reject pro-LGBTQ same-sex blessings being carried out by the Catholic priests in the city who are all believed to be closeted homosexuals,” Gomulka noted. “The pro-family, pro-life LCMS congregation believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and their service is almost identical to a Roman Catholic Mass.”
The U.S. Catholic Church spent over $5 billion on victim compensation and attorneys’ fees in cases of clerical sex abuse of minors between 2004 and 2023, according to a study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, The Stream reported.
Released on January 15, the 106-page study records a total of 16,276 “credible allegations” of abuse of minors by priests, deacons, and religious brothers, which were reported by dioceses, eparchies, and men’s religious communities in the U.S. over the last two decades.
The clerical sex abuse crisis has also led to the closure of hundreds of parishes as many dioceses across the U.S. have declared bankruptcy to avoid paying compensation to victims. As of December 2024, 40 U.S. Catholic organizations had sought bankruptcy protection, according to a database created by Pennsylvania State University Law School professor Marie Reilly.
The costs of sex abuse have also devastated individual parishes. For example, every single parish in Long Island in the diocese of Rockville was forced to pay amounts ranging from five figures up to $1 million. Every one of the 136 parishes belonging to the diocese filed for bankruptcy and contributed $53 million toward the settlements, the National Catholic Reporter revealed.
The Notre Dame study confirms the Pew Research Center’s “Religious Landscape Study” (RLS) published in late February, which highlighted a precipitous decline in the Catholic Church, even though the decades-long decline in Christianity across the U.S. has stalled, The Stream reported.
“For every U.S. adult who has become a Catholic after being raised in some other religion or without a religion, there are 8.4 adults who say they were raised in the Catholic faith but who no longer describe themselves as Catholics,” the RLS report stated.
By contrast, only 1.8 people have left Protestantism for every person who converted to it after they were raised in another religious group or in no religion. Conversely, only 1.5% of U.S. adults converted to Catholicism after being raised in another denomination or no religion, bringing the Catholic population among U.S. adults to 18.9%.
Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.
