Published June 26, 2025
The Pew Research Center (I served in an advisory capacity ) has a new report out that looks at Catholic life in the United States. The primary takeaway from the report is that nearly half (47%) of American adults have a significant connection to Catholicism. One in five (20%) Americans identify as Catholic. An additional 9% of Americans say they are culturally but not religiously Catholic. An equal number (9%) say they are former Catholics. And 9% have a Catholic parent, spouse, or partner – or say they sometimes attend Catholic Mass.
In actual numbers, this means that something like 53,000,000 American adults are Catholic and an additional 71,500,000 are connected to Catholicism in one of the aforementioned ways. Now, having a “connection to Catholicism” is not the same as being Catholic. And “being Catholic” is not the same as “practicing the faith.” But the reason the Pew report highlights the connections to Catholicism is simply that Catholicism has an outsized influence on the rest of American society.
We see this in lots of ways, from the overrepresentation of Catholics in Congress to the undeniable (if not always flattering) place the Catholic Church holds in the popular imagination. Catholicism matters more in America than our proportion of the population would suggest.
While Catholics may be a minority here, the U.S. Catholic population is large enough to make it the country with the fourth largest Catholic population in the world. Only Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, have more Catholics. American Catholics are a relatively small minority, but which nonetheless forms a critical mass of sufficient size to shape American society beyond what one might expect.
Simply put, we American Catholics punch above our weight.
Which is worth keeping in mind when considering some other interesting data from the Pew study. Among the questions Pew asked were two pertaining to the Traditional Latin Mass. Unsurprisingly, the number of American Catholics adults who attend TLM on a weekly basis is not large. Only 2% of respondents say they attend TLM at least once a week.
Here’s how Pew put it:
Very few Catholics report regularly attending a TLM today. Overall, 2% of Catholics say they do this at least weekly, 1% do so once or twice a month, and 2% do so a few times a year. An additional 8% say they either seldom or never attend a TLM “these days,” while 87% of U.S. Catholics have not attended one at any point in the last five years.
This result surprised me, not because the number of Catholics attending TLM is so small, but because a closer look at the numbers suggests that the TLM actually plays an outsized role among America’s practicing Catholics.
As a percentage of American Catholics TLM attendance is obviously small. But 2% of the Catholic adults in the United States is actually a lot of people. If 2% of America’s 53,000,000 Catholics are attending TLM weekly, as Pew’s data suggests, then the number of Catholics who attend TLM weekly is north of one million. I’m not convinced that’s the case. (And to be fair, that’s not a claim Pew makes.)
There’s more. Given that only 29% of all Catholics surveyed say they attend Mass weekly, the Catholics attending TLM weekly would seem to make up a significant portion of all weekly Mass goers. Is it really the case that 5% of all American Catholic adults (including those who never or seldom go to Mass) are attending TLM at least a few times a year? What are we to make of these numbers?
Reliable data about TLM attendance is not easy to come by. I have never seen an estimate that comes close to suggesting 2% of all Catholics are weekly TLM-goers. Most estimates I have seen are smaller by about one order of magnitude (i.e., around 100,000 weekly attend TLM not 1,000,000). Still less have I seen anything to suggest that 5% of all American Catholic adults are attending TLM at least a few times a year, even after Traditionis custodes.
Pew’s survey data, like all surveys, includes a margin of error based on several factors such as sample size. If a survey shows 20% of American adults are Catholic, and does so with a margin of error of +/- 3%, that tells us something. If a survey shows that 2% of Americans are attending TLM on a weekly basis but the margin of error is +/- 7%, that tells us. . .not very much.
The percentage of responses in Pew’s survey indicating TLM attendance are so small that they are similar to (or, in some cases, smaller than) the margin of error. This doesn’t mean the data is flawed, it simply means that, on those particular data points, we cannot, with anything approaching reasonable precision, extrapolate to an accurate calculation of the number of TLM attendees in the United States.
Nor does it mean that interest in the TLM, and its influence on liturgy more generally, aren’t growing. It just means that if they are, surveys like Pew’s latest are not how we’ll know.
The value in surveys like Pew’s is that they can demonstrate large-scale trends over time. They were designed to do just that, and in that regard, they can be very valuable tools. But they are not designed to capture tiny shifts in Catholic practice. One can hardly blame a tool for not doing what it was not designed to do.
Social science and spiritual discernment remain decidedly distinct undertakings. That’s as it should be. Those of us who are eager to discern where the Church in our country is headed – or to mount evidence in support of where we think it ought to be headed – should pay close attention to the large and lasting trends in practice, or demographics, or belief. But like Eljah at the mouth of his cave, we should always be listening for the whisper of the Spirit.
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
