United States: An increasingly Hispanic Catholic Church

The Catholic Church in the United States is becoming more and more Hispanic.  But in a parallel trend, the Hispanics are becoming less and less Catholic:  raised in the Catholic faith, they become Protestants or profess no religion (the “nones”).  This was revealed by a new study published on May 7, 2014, by the Pew Research Center on The Shifting Religious Identity of Latinos in the United States, reviewed by the American weekly newspaper, National Catholic Reporter (NCR) on May 9.

 “Both trends can occur at the same time,” the Pew Research Center explains, “because of the growing size of the Hispanic population, which has increased from 12.5% of the total U.S. population in 2000 to 16.9% in 2012.  Indeed, if both trends continue, a day could come when the majority of Catholics in the United States will be Hispanic, even though the majority of Hispanics might no longer be Catholic.”

Since 2012, one-third of American Catholics are Hispanics, but the percentage of Hispanic Catholics has fallen from 67% in 2010 to 55% in 2013.  Of the 12% that left Catholicism, 4% became Evangelical Protestants and 8% abandoned all religious identity.  If this trend does not change, Catholics will make up less than half of the Hispanic population in 2015:  45% of young Latinos (aged 18 to 29) are Catholic, but 70% of those who leave the faith do so before the age of 24.

The study explains that these departures from the Catholic Church by Hispanics are an international phenomenon.  The main causes for leaving mentioned by the Hispanics are a gradual detachment from the religion in which they were raised (55%) and the fact that they no longer believe in the teaching of their childhood religion (52%).  Thirty-one percent say that they were looking for a community that was closer to its members and offered more support, and 23% associate their departure with a “profound personal crisis”.

In October 2012, the Pew Research Center announced that during the past five years, those who are religiously unaffiliated (the “nones”) increased by a little more than 15% to make up a little less than 20% of all adult Americans.  This study on persons with no religious affiliation revealed that one-third of adults aged 30 or over have no religious affiliation (32%), as opposed to only one out of ten aged 65 or over (9%).  In conclusion, today’s young adults are much more likely to be unaffiliated than preceding generations were at the same age.

(Sources:  apic/ncr/pfc – DICI no. 297 dated June 6, 2014)

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