The number of Catholics who say they go to Mass in US every week has dropped by 14% since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to The Pillar’s new Survey on Reli-gious Attitudes and Practices.
That decline could explain a proportional decline in parish collections: In March, The Pillar found parishes experi-enced a 12% average decrease in collections during 2020 as compared to 2019, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown orders implemented in many localities. New information about Mass attendance is available from The Pillar’s Survey on Religious Attitudes and Practices, which aims to better understand the religious perspecti-ves, identities, and perspectives of American adults. We’re reporting the results of that survey this week in a series of special reports.
In part one of this series, The Pillar looked at America’s changing religious landscape. In part two, we look at what factors influence lifelong Catholic religious practice, and why people say they leave the Church. In part three, we took a look at what can be learned about religiously dis-affiliated Americans.
In this installment, we look at the COVID-19 pandemic has begun reshaping parish life. If you’re interested in the technical details of our survey work, here they are: The Pillar worked with research firm Centiment to conduct the survey, which was conducted online with 2653 members of Centiment’s nationally repre-sentative research panel. This included a nationally repre-sentative sample of 1564 Americans and an oversample of 1089 additional respondents who had been raised Catholic, which we used in order to better understand those raised Catholic who still identify as Catholic, and those who now call themselves members of other faiths or of no faith at all. We’ll publish our full-data set later this week.