The days between Christmas and New Years seem to be the prime time for retrospectives with many secular news outlets airing year-in-review pieces featuring what they see as the significant events of the preceding 12 months. (This one from Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News struck me as especially poignant, as nearly all of the 57 recently deceased personalities mentioned were more like household names than historical figures to me.)

CARA’s Mark Gray has also taken a look at the year almost finished and has come up with some “statistical nuggets” that have recently come to light.  A few of the more interesting ones follow.

The U.S. Catholic population continues to grow and is projected to exceed 100 million by 2050.

At the same time, the number of infant baptisms and marriages in the U.S. Catholic Church has declined in number each year since 2001. In 2009, there were 12.7 infant baptisms and 2.7 marriages in the Church per 1,000 Catholics. [The 2001 numbers were 15.4 and 3.9, respectively. -Mike] Although nearly all Catholic parents continue to baptize their children in the Church (as the birthrate declines) many Catholics are choosing to get married in non-Catholic houses of worship or secular settings.

Yet even as the recent trend in infant baptisms is down slightly, there are still more than enough people joining the Catholic Church each year to sustain population growth. In 2009, The Official Catholic Directory reported 857,410 infant baptisms, 43,279 adult baptisms, and 75,724 receptions into full communion in U.S. dioceses. This totals 976,413 in one year. To put that in context, the number of new Catholics in 2009 would make this one-year cohort of new Catholics approximately the 26th largest membership Christian church in the United States.

On the institutional side, if the current trend in parish closures were to continue and current priest projections bear out, there will likely be only 12,520 active diocesan priests and 14,825 parishes in the United States by 2035 (also in OSV).

There has been no measurable decline or increase in Mass attendance percentages nationally in the last decade. Just under one in four Catholics attends Mass every week. About a third of Catholics attend in any given week and more than two-thirds attend Mass at Christmas, Easter, and on Ash Wednesday. More than four in ten self-identified adult Catholics attend Mass at least once a month.

The average tuition for the first child of Catholic parents attending a parish Catholic primary school for 2008-2009 was $3,383. For that same child the per-pupil cost of education for 2008-2009 was $5,436. This means that only 63% of this child’s per-pupil cost was covered by their tuition.

A majority of U.S. Protestants express a belief in the Real Presence and those who believe the Bible is to be taken literally word for word are most likely to do so.

22% of Nones in America (those without any religious affiliation) were raised Catholic.

There is more here, including a glimpse at what CARA is working on for 2011 and Gray’s apologia against charges that he and/or CARA “spin” the data to put the Church in a more favorable light than it deserves.  He concludes by making this point:

There are measurable doses of “unreality” in Church discourse these days. Much of it fashioned around anecdotes and agendas. My promise now and in the year ahead to readers of this blog is that you’ll find none of this unreality here.

Tags: Catholic Stats

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2010 at 4:13 PM . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.