Mass attendance ticks back up nationa-lly after pandemic falter, data suggests

After years of uncertainty over whether in-person Mass attenda-nce numbers would ever rebound after plummeting during the COVID-era lockdowns, new data suggests that Mass attendance levels have quietly returned to 2019 levels nearly six years later. Despite the apparent uptick, however, a return to 2019 levels still means only a quarter of U.S. Catholics attend Mass weekly – despite weekly attendance being an obligatory part of Catholic life. The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, a premi-er Catholic research organization, recently used national surveys it conducted combined with Google Trends search volumes for Mass attendance-related terms to estimate weekly attendance across the United States.
In a Feb. 5 blog post, CARA explained that prior to the pandemic in 2019, weekly Mass attendance in the U.S. averaged 24.4%. Between May 2023 and the first week of 2025, meanwhile, attendance has averaged 24%, CARA estimated, representing an overall return to pre-pandemic levels. In addition, CARA said Mass attendance numbers for Easter and Ash Wednesday – the latter being one of the best-attended Mass days of the year, despite not being a holy day of obligation – actually returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023. Christmas attendance numbers, meanwhile, finally rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.