Percentage of Catholics in the U.S. who are Hispanic declining, study shows

NEW YORK – A recent study on religion in America shows that while the percentage of the white, Black, and Asian adults in the United States who identify as Catholic has remained relatively steady since 2007, the percentage of Hispanic adults who identify as Catholic has steeply declined.

The 2023-24 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study found that between 2007 and 2023-24 the percentage of white adults in the United States who identify as Catholic has gone from 22 to 17, the percentage of Black adults from five to four, and the percentage of Asian adults from 17 to 14.

Meanwhile, the percentage of Hispanic adults who identify as Catholic has fallen from 58 to 42.

“The Catholic share of the Hispanic population in the United States has been declining rapidly for a long time,” said Gregory A. Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew, who has long led studies on religion in American life.

“There was a time when we first did the religious landscape study when we could look at the data and we could say that we may be on track to a day where the Catholic population in the United States is mostly Hispanic, even though most Hispanics in the United States are not Catholic, and now, we have not reached the point where most Catholics are Hispanic, but we have reached the point where most Hispanics are not Catholic, and we’ve been there for some time now,” he told Crux.

For context, 36 percent of Catholics in the United States are Hispanic.

“It’s not surprising to see those numbers,” Hosffman Ospino, a professor of Hispanic Ministry and Religious Education at Boston College, told Crux. “The larger the Hispanic population is, and the larger the portion that is U.S.- born, U.S.-raised, the more of a decrease we will continue to see.”

Ospino explained that no longer is it the 1990s when more than half of the Hispanic population in the United States were immigrants, who are more likely to be religious – 58 percent of U.S. immigrants are Christian, according to the Pew study.

Today roughly 64 percent of Hispanics are born and raised in the United States, Ospino noted. He expects that number will continue to grow, as well, which means more Hispanics will be born into the nation’s pluralistic and secularized culture, and therefore not be Catholic.

The other factor, Ospino said, is more so where the Church bears the blame. He highlighted Hispanics are drifting away from the faith in the United States in large part because “a lot of our pastoral outreach is inadequate,” meaning, the second generation – those born in the United States – are left behind.

“Most efforts in Hispanic ministry in the United States of America are geared towards the immigrant population – Masses in Spanish, and sacraments in Spanish, social services to serve the immigrant community. All of that is very important and very necessary,” Ospino said.

“However, we haven’t figured out how to accompany those two-thirds of Latinos who are U.S.-born, U.S.-raised,” Ospino said. “Many pastoral leaders either assume that they will live their faith as their immigrant parents and grandparents and siblings and so on, or that they will Americanize and just simply become part of the regular, the larger Euro, American, white, English speaking Catholic body, and the truth is that neither of those are happening.”

“We need better ways of reaching out to this community,” he said.

To make progress in this area, Ospino said the Church needs to focus on the local level, with parishes better supporting the youth and families. And on the national level, he said what’s needed are less “overarching” pastoral plans, and more pastoral plans that support the efforts at the local level – apostolic movements, parishes, catechesis, and family ministry.

2023-24 Religious Landscape Study – The Bigger Picture

Beyond the Hispanic aspect, the overarching headline for Catholicism out of the study was that the precipitous decline in the Catholic share of the population that was experienced in the early 2000s, and early 2010s has more or less leveled off over the last decade.

In 2014, Catholics made up 21 percent of the population. In 2023-24, Catholics make up 19 percent of the population.

Still, Smith said people should be careful to assume that this stability will remain. In fact, for the stability to become lasting he said that something would have to change.

“We know that the oldest Americans, who are highly religious on average, will constitute a shrinking portion of the population going forward because the oldest members of that group will pass away, and we know that today’s young adults are way less religious than today’s oldest adults, so we know that if nothing changes then the long term declines in American religion will resume,” Smith explained.

“For the stability to prove lasting, something would have to change,” he said. “Either today’s youngest adults would have to become more religious as they get older, or we’d have to have new generations of young adults come along who look more like today’s older adults than like today’s youngest adults.”

The question is how does the U.S. Catholic Church evangelize those young people? From Archbishop Charles Thompson’s perspective, it’s essential to continue the synodal path.

“As I look at these numbers I think ‘how does the Church transform the culture by addressing these issues?’ Not necessarily countering them, but as Pope Francis has said the intentional, synodal way of dialogue, of listening, or accompanying, of walking with one another on this journey toward salvation,” Thompson, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis, told Crux.

Tim Glemowski, the former CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress who now leads Amazing Parish, an organization that helps parishes evangelize, told Crux that efforts to grow the faith have to be rooted in the local reality of the parish, and that’s where the national Church should focus its efforts, as well.

“What is the best way for the national Church, by which we mean the USCCB, how do they best support evangelization that’s happening in dioceses and then ultimately dioceses supporting what’s happening in parishes?” Glemkowski asked. “I don’t have all the answers to that, but I think that’s the right way of looking at it.”

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