Audio only:
In this episode Trent responds to feedback from his previous episode about the decline of Catholicism in America and how Catholics should revitalize the Church.
Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues
Transcription:
Trent:
Last month I released an episode about a Pew study saying Catholics are experiencing more of a decline than Protestants. I also gave some practical tips for what we can do as a church to help grow the body of Christ and avoid triumphalism or being lulled into complacency. The episode spurred a few responses on social media, including from my friend and colleague, Joe Hess Meyer. So in today’s episode, I want to go through some of their claims, not to double down on bad news, but to provide clarity on the issue, including some that I lacked in the previous episode, and discuss a solution to this decline that I didn’t mention previously. I also sent this script to Joe and he gave it his seal of approval. So I think you’ll like today’s perspective. So to help all of this stay clear, I want to focus on three questions related to the church in America, though this is happening in other parts of the world as well as I noted in a previous episode where I talked about how the church is losing Latin America.
So here’s the questions regarding Catholicism in America. One, how many people are becoming Catholic? Two, how many people are leaving Catholicism and why? Three, what are we neglecting right now? Before I answer these questions, I want to address some preliminary issues. First, I’m going to talk a lot about statistics, but don’t think I’m just obsessed with winning a numbers game. Every single figure I discuss in today’s episode refers to a person or persons with immortal souls, and I want all people to be in full communion with the church Jesus Christ, established. Second, don’t think my concern about Catholic decline means I’m not worried about overall decline in Christianity in America, which according to pew is hopefully leveling off. That’s why I will always be committed to defending the fundamentals of the Christian faith like God’s existence and Christ resurrection. It’s also why I have episodes scheduled soon on topics like Jesus’s status as the Messiah and religious pro-choice propaganda.
I’m also doing research for an episode devoted to the work of popular critical Bible scholar Dan McClellan. So stay tuned for that. But I also know that salvation is from the one holy Catholic and apostolic church Christ established. So it’s important to understand why people join and leave that church. So let’s begin. Question one. How many people are becoming Catholic? After my episode, a lot of people shared this article from the New York Post with me entitled Young people are Converting to Catholicism and Mass to dispute my claims, but I never said there weren’t many people choosing to become Catholic right now. There are and that’s a blessing, but that doesn’t mean everybody’s becoming Catholic or America will soon be a Catholic country. You have to compare this number of conversions against the number of people joining other belief systems, many of whom are former Catholics.
We also should be cautious about rushing to endorse headlines. The same author of this article, Ricky Sch Slott, also wrote back in 2024, an article entitled Young Men Leaving Traditional Churches for Masculine Orthodox Christianity in droves. But most Catholics aren’t enthusiastically endorsing this headline. Both articles rely primarily on anecdotes involving three to four conversion stories and sampling data from 10% of Orthodox and Catholic parishes, and it appears that some diocese are seeing a boost in adult baptisms and that’s great, but that doesn’t tell us the whole story. First, we have to be careful about making extrapolations from limited data. As I said, many diocese did not report data, and a 30 to 70% jump in adult conversions in one year among some diocese doesn’t mean we’ll always see this kind of growth. That’s like thinking because a baby doubles his weight at six months after birth, he will weigh a thousand pounds in kindergarten or 300 billion pounds as an adult.
Some of these conversions in the past few years are delayed because of the pandemic, but we may also be seeing a cultural shift in the acceptability of Catholicism and Christianity as a whole. Pew has noted a spike in recent years among teens and early 20 year olds in their religious fervor. How much of this will continue in increased conversions though remains to be seen, but it’s something to pray for and to be hopeful about. Second, adult conversions are only one small part of the Catholic church’s growth. According to statistics from Georgetown Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate or Cara, CARA adult baptisms in the US have declined from 77,000 in the year 2000 to about 30,000 in 2023. This parallels a global trend of about 18 million Catholic baptisms in 1998 to a little over 13 million in 2023. Some responses to me said that we could believe the Catholic church is growing even though the number of people leaving the church is fairly high relative to the number of people joining Cameron Riker made an analogy to how the church could be losing members and still have an upward trajectory similar to a rocket having positive thrust, even if it is temporarily going downward because of gravity,
CLIP:
Basically the velocity can remain negative while the acceleration can start to be positive. So you can be heading in the wrong direction but still accelerating in the correct direction. So whenever we’re looking at the numbers in the church, yes, right now our velocity, the rate at which the population of American Catholics is going, the velocity is negative. We’re heading in the wrong direction. It looks like the number of Catholics is decreasing, however, the rate at which people are entering into the church seems to be positive.
Trent:
Cameron does a lot of great work and I hope you’ll check out his channel, which is linked in the description below, but I think his analogy needs a few more elements to fully represent what’s going on. Consider not a rocket, but the space shuttle. As a millennial, I really miss the space shuttle. There’s just a classic aesthetic to it that I love. When the space shuttle would take off, about 30% of its thrust came from the shuttle’s own boosters in the tail of the craft, but 70% of the thrust needed to escape Earth’s atmosphere came from the solid rocket boosters on each side of the shuttle that were rejected in the upper atmosphere before the craft entered orbit. Cameron’s analogy is that even though the number of adherence to the faith is declining, steady growth in adult converts will eventually overcome the decline. Like how a rocket’s activated thruster will eventually reverse its orbital decline.
But that’s like thinking the space shuttle’s, small thrusters are enough by themselves to get the shuttle into space. Just as those thrusters make up only a small percentage of the shuttle’s overall thrust, adult converts make up only a small percentage of the overall number of people who become and remain Catholic. In 1965, the Catholic church baptized 1.3 million people in the United States, 90% of whom were infants. That means only about 10% of baptisms at the close of the second Vatican Council were for adult converts, and this percentage has stayed relatively constant over the past 60 years. In 2023, the church baptized or received in a full communion 80,000 people, most of whom were adults, but it baptized about 540,000 children. So in 2023, like in 1965, only about 10%, maybe 15% of people who became Catholic were adult converts. And yet there is a paradox in the data because while the number of infant baptisms in the Catholic church in the US has declined over the past 70 years, the number of registered Catholics in the US has increased during the same period.
Gallup polling likewise shows that the percentage of people who identify as Catholic has stayed constant at around 20% of the US population since the 1950s. Cara says the number of Catholics is probably boosted by immigration, which makes sense given that nearly half of all immigrants to the US are Catholic. Moreover, Catholics are living longer, and so this keeps the Catholic population from declining, but it’s not a good sign as the majority of people in a parish are in their elder years. I pray and hope for a Catholic revival in America and an increase in adult converts is a welcome site, but that by itself will not reverse Catholicism decline. What we really need is a revival of Catholic family life among loosely affiliated American Catholics. Since 2005, the American Catholic Church has held steady at around 65 to 75 million members based on official directories. 60,000 adult converts in one year represents 0.1% of the Catholic population.
It’s a tremendous blessing to welcome them to our huge Catholic family, but the family itself needs to get its house in order if we want to change our culture. In 1999, the American Catholic Church celebrated 260,000 weddings and almost a million child baptisms, but in 2023 it only celebrated 109,000 weddings and about half a million child baptisms a 50% decline. I haven’t seen news about these numbers reversing like the reversal we may be seeing in declining adult baptisms, so I’m praying that this is a lagging indicator that will catch up soon. The increase in adult converts is a good thing, but that alone does not make me want to celebrate like my favorite team scored an amazing touchdown. Instead, it makes me feel like I saw a loved one in the hospital get upgraded from critical condition to serious condition. I’m relieved, but I’m still praying at the patient’s bedside and asking the doctor about what other aggressive forms of treatment that we should be considering. Question number two, how many people are leaving Catholicism and why? My colleague Joe Hesh Meyer brought up a point I could have been clear about. When it comes to the ratio of people entering and exiting the Catholic church in America,
CLIP:
It’s actually not the case that for every 100 people who join the Catholic church, 840 people leave, that puts it too much in the present tense. It’s that for every 100 people alive and being surveyed now who have joined the Catholic church, 840 people have left the Catholic church. That actually matters a great deal because the whole point, and actually the point Pew is making in their overall study is that we’ve seen this massive shift of people leaving Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, but that massive exodus seems to have slowed quite a bit.
Trent:
It has been an historical trend, at least according to this Pew study, that for every 100 people in this survey who became Catholic 840 people left. Joe’s concern is that the data doesn’t tell us if this is the case for people switching religions today or right now. We have fairly precise numbers for people who became Catholic last year since it gets recorded in sacramental registries, but since you don’t have to go through an official ceremony to leave the church, we don’t have similar numbers regarding how many people left the Catholic church in America during that same time period. The evidence doesn’t seem like it got worse, but we don’t know how much it got better either. Even if the number leaving were 50% of what it’s been historically or 400 people leaving for every 100 people joining, that’s still really bad. Although I’m hoping that the preliminary data about younger generations more likely to identify as being religious means we are seeing a definite improvement.
In order to diagnose the problem, we also have to ask why people are leaving. In my episode, I address the belief that zealous Protestants become good Catholics and lukewarm Catholics become Protestants. This has also been called the quality versus quantity attitude, and it’s a bad attitude to have depending on how you frame it. If you frame it as a way of saying goodbye, good riddance, we didn’t want you in the church anyways and we’re better off without you, then that’s bad. I admit, I have been tempted with this attitude when I have seen far left and far right, Catholics constantly rail against the church before announcing their deconversions. Part of me wants to be a half-hearted Gene Hackman Willy Wonka who says,
CLIP:
Stop, don’t come back.
Trent:
But God wants the salvation of everyone, especially of the people who really annoy us. I mean, I annoy a lot of people, so I’m glad that God has mercy on me, hence why I should show mercy to other people and similar to a family that if you had a child leave the family, you wouldn’t rejoice that now the family is stronger. You would still weep over that lost child a real fast. At this point, a lot of people would say in a video, here’s the word from our sponsor, but I love that our supporters are so generous. We don’t need sponsorships. We can just focus on sharing and defending the Catholic faith. And if you want to help us to keep doing that, please hit the subscribe button and support us@trenthornpodcast.com, where for as little as $5 a month, you get access to bonus content and you make all of this possible without any sponsorships. And now back to the episode now in his response to me, Christian Wagner compared this situation to an army where 800 soldiers leave for every 100 soldiers who join, but this doesn’t show the church is declining if the soldiers who leave are incompetent and the ones who join are special commandos. Wagner then says this,
CLIP:
Who are the ones who are joining? That’s the question. So when we ask ourselves, okay, well 800 are leaving the Catholic church for every a hundred are joining. Obviously it is a great tragedy when any soul departs from external communion with the Roman pontiff, but we really have to ask ourselves in terms of the effectiveness of the church towards its end, the 800 that are leaving are these 800 people who are well-informed of Catholicism? Are these 800 people, people who are very studious, are these 800 people, people who were very dedicated and were donating money and time and engaging in Catholic action in the public sphere? The a hundred that are joining, are these hundred generally more serious? Are these hundred generally more orthodox? Are these hundred loyal to the church? Are they loyal to the bishops? Are they loyal to his holiness? Do you have individuals who are very happy to engage in Catholic action, who are very generous with their time, very generous with their money? Those are the questions that you need to ask yourself, and they are at least comparatively relatively indisputably. Yes, the answer is yes for these individuals compared to those that are generally leaving. So I think that the general point that Trent was making falls flat. It falls very flat and for myself empirically, because Trent said, oh, this is an online thing,
Trent:
I agree that there is a growth in converts this year relative to last year, and so this isn’t confined to the internet. My point was that if you only get your data from a social media algorithm, this data input can distort your view of the offline world. For example, if you only hear stories about packed Catholic Easter vigils, then you don’t hear about stories of people joining baptist churches every week of the year with a possibly higher cumulative effect. According to Pew, unlike even most Protestant denominations, the majority of people raised Baptist stay Baptist, at least according to past historical trends. My point was that more people are leaving Catholicism than are becoming Catholic and far from falling flat. This point is indisputable Wagner’s rejoinder is that we can at least say the church is growing in quality rather than quantity. Maybe now the church is blessed when the knowledgeable convert like St.
Augustine or John Henry Newman comes home to the faith, but the army metaphor isn’t the most helpful one for analyzing the church in this respect. A better metaphor is that of an army field hospital, which was a metaphor Pope Francis was fond of using. Shortly after his election in 2013, Pope Francis told America Magazine this. The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful it needs nearness proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle, so there is a benefit to converts, tending to have more zeal than cradle Catholics, even though some of the best apologists and theologians today are cradle Catholics and some converts only convert for social or cultural reasons like pleasing their spouse and some people who deconvert and leave the church are brilliant theological minds. They’re just misguided. But I agree though that if you have a lot of wounded people to care for and the new patient in your field hospital is a mildly bruised EMT, that’s helpful because now you have someone spiritually capable in the ranks to care for the many more seriously wounded people.
However, I would never say, wow, it sure is easier to run this field hospital now that the dying patients voluntarily checked out against medical advice. That’s tragic and I appreciate that. Wagner agreed in his response that anyone leaving the faith is tragic. The church growing in terms of an increase in the total number of Onfi members is a good thing, the more the merrier. But the church growing in terms of the average level of being spiritually on fire because large numbers of lukewarm or nominal Catholics left, that’s a bad thing. It represents in at least some respects, a failure of the church to provide spiritually life-giving care to its own members in celebrating conversions. I worry about us treating lukewarm and nominal Catholics as a lost cause. We just have to make up for with better converts. That’s neither sustainable nor acceptable. Frankly, one of the biggest mission fields we have as Catholics are the monthly and semi-annual mass goers.
Once when I went to an Easter mass in Colorado, it was snowing outside. The priest accidentally said, Merry Christmas. And then he said, well, I guess that was the last time I saw many of you. The church can utilize the gifts new converts bring to it in order to change the world and call the wayward sheep within its ranks to a deeper faith. It’s not an either or proposition. Also, please do not Revelation three 16 where Jesus says, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spill you out of my mouth. Some people take this to mean Jesus prefers people to be cold or reject him than them being lukewarm or a mediocre disciple, which is false. Jesus wants all people to be saved. You would even want someone to be saved even if they had the minimal requirements of what were necessary to be saved rather than to be lost.
Instead, this passage is referring to first century water uses where hot water was great for baths and cold water was great for drinking and lukewarm water wasn’t really great for anything. A lukewarm person should be encouraged but not told. It would be better if he had left the faith entirely. Now, I agree with Joe Hess Meyer that the observation about poorly formed Catholics being the ones who leave is a useful insight to help remedy the problem given the long process it takes to become Catholic. Most people who become Catholic are more thoughtful about the faith than those who leave Catholicism. In fact, one Pew survey asked people the reason they left the Catholic faith and most respondents said they just drifted away from the religion. The same survey says Catholics who become non-religious cite doctrinal issues, but Catholics who become Protestant say their spiritual needs weren’t met, which points to where better spiritual formation can address those issues.
I also agree with Joe that it’s easier to list off notable Protestant intellectuals who become Catholic than notable Catholic intellectuals who become Protestant. The former would include people like former Protestant minister Scott Hahn, Frank Beckwith, who was the president of the Evangelical Theological Society, and Doug Beaumont who taught apologetics at a Protestant seminary among many others. I can’t think of many examples of the latter except for maybe Michael Corrin, the author of Why Catholics are Right, who is now a very liberal Anglican priest. This also indicates that Joe’s point that the Pew data shows liberal Christianity loses more adherence than conservative Christianity, as can be seen in other Pew studies showing very little decline in evangelicalism. But Catholics need to be careful to not portray all Protestants as non-denominational when you’re making apologetic arguments and then portray all Protestants as dying mainline churches when you’re making demographic arguments. And we must also face the rampant liberalism in our own parishes in order to stem this decline on our end, which is why I wrote my 2022 book, confusion in the Kingdom, how Progressive Catholicism is bringing harm and Scandal to the Church. Joe also points out the median age when today’s young people have left the church
CLIP:
Among the people in that age range, which is most of the people who leave Catholicism, the median age at Disaffiliation from Catholicism was 13 years old. So this is going to be an important part of the equation because if you say, Hey, why don’t you focus more on those leaving the Catholic church? Well, for starters, there aren’t a lot of 13 year olds who watch shameless popery, and if there are, they’re not leaving the Catholic church probably these are not the ones you have to get. And so just understanding this as part of diagnosing the problem of why people leave is just recognizing, yeah, overwhelmingly people leave because they don’t know enough about Catholicism. They don’t find the church services interesting, they don’t understand that theology, they’re not connected, they don’t pray, et cetera, and then they leave. Now, those are problems that need to be solved, but those solutions are probably not going to come from something like a YouTube channel.
Trent:
While Joe and I can maybe remedy this problem with B roll of us playing Minecraft, I suspect this will come off as how do you do fellow kids? However, many of the people watching our channels have children of their own who are in 8, 9, 10, or their 13-year-old range right in the prime of where they form their identities. So channels like Council of Trent and Shameless popery can equip parents who in turn equip their children. That’s why Layla Miller and I wrote our book made this Way how to prepare kids to face today’s tough moral issues. So the quality over quantity attitude is good if we use it to determine how to stem the tide of people leaving the faith, the quality over quantity attitude is bad if we use it as an excuse to not worry about the huge loss of nominal members because we’ll have a healthier church overall.
A hospital is not worse off just because it has a lot of sick people and is strapped for resources to treat the patients. Now, maybe if a patient is dangerous, you isolate a K, a excommunicate him, but in general the answer is to ask for more resources, not fewer patients. Matthew 9 36 through 38 says this, when Jesus saw the crowds, he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Pray therefore the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. And that brings me to question number three. Number three, what are we neglecting right now? As I said in my previous episode, I don’t know what the best or complete answer is to reverse this decline. I propose some steps that you and I can take in our day-to-day interactions, including just asking people to come to mass with us, which is how my own conversion to Catholicism began.
But in praying about this issue, I felt like God made something very clear to me that I don’t really hear a lot from other Catholics either online or in person. It’s something I haven’t said also, so I want to be clear to share it now. We need vocations to marriage, religious life, and especially to the priesthood. For most people, the vocation they will choose in life is marriage. And as we noted earlier in the episode, we need strong marriages to revitalize the church. In a future episode, I’ll address the challenges, some cultural, other self-inflicted that are hindering young men and young women from pursuing this vocation. But more I want to talk about the priesthood because I remember when I was in my teens and early twenties, it felt like I always heard Catholic influencers or speakers talking about discerning a vocation to the priesthood, and now it feels like I don’t hear that as much anymore.
Now, maybe I’m not the target demographic, so that’s why I don’t hear this or see this happening. But regardless, I want to say it. If you are a young Catholic man watching this episode, then please ask God in prayer. Lord, do you want me to be a priest? If the church is a field hospital, then priests are the doctors. The field hospital cannot exist without them. But according to Kara, from 1965 to 1985, the number of priests in the US was steady at around 60,000. Today it’s closer to 30,000 starting the year in 1990, the number of Catholic parishes has declined. So now there are less parishes than there were in 1965. And 20% of Catholic parishes don’t have a resident pastor. A priest has to travel to serve them. The largest diocese in the US struggle to replace their aging retired priests, and there seems to be a feedback loop where there is a shortage of priests in large diocese, which means those priests have less time to mentor young men who might have a vocation which further contributes to the shortage of priests and creates a vicious cycle.
The parish where I became Catholic in 2002 had over a half a dozen vocations come out of it, as well as many lay vocations like my own call to do apologetics all within a very short time span. Part of that was due to Father Jim Wall, a super relatable priest who could just hang out with the guys and play basketball with them. A bunch of the guys even shaved their heads in solidarity with him when he was reassigned to a new parish. And now Father Jim is the bishop of Gallup doing great work in one of the poorest diocese in the country. In the absence of domestic vocations, though the church in America relies on foreign priests. Now, I love when there is an African priest saying mass because he might break out into a joyful dance or have no concern about saying homosexual acts are from the devil, and the Catholic church is experiencing its most growth in Africa, but Africa is far from becoming a Catholic continent.
Catholics make up about 20% of Africa, but Protestants still make up the majority of Christians there, and it’s expected by 2050 that the majority of Protestants on earth will reside in Africa. Also, 40% of Africa is Muslim, some of whom engage in ruthless persecution of Christians. This combined with the longstanding challenges of poverty and other sufferings plaguing the people of Africa, the explosive growth of the church there should really put us to shame. Personally, I feel spoiled that a priest from Africa comes to help the church in America when shouldn’t it be America, a nation blessed materially and spiritually with apostles like word on fire. Shouldn’t we be the ones sending priests to help there? Having more priests would also help young people, especially men who are considering leaving the church to be more likely to have an encounter with a priest who could encourage them as a genuine spiritual father to them.
In fact, the pillar conducted a survey which showed that priests had the most influence on Catholics who still attend weekly mass, even surpassing the influence of both parents. So maybe one thing we can do, not in an annoying way, but in a nonchalant way, is to encourage young men to pray about a vocation to the priesthood. And I hope lots of Catholic influencers will encourage the young men and their audiences to be the heroes the church needs right now. I know older priests who told me that vocation directors in the 1960s and the 1970s, they told young men to become priests because it was a good gig. Some men saw the priesthood as a worldly reward, a way to earn respect or to escape problems in the secular life. But today, if you want similar worldly rewards, you go on the internet or TikTok and you won’t have the cultural prejudice that comes with being a Catholic priest on those platforms.
However, if you see the priesthood not as a gig, but as a way to glorify God through humble service, then the baggage that comes with the priesthood today, including ugly stereotypes, well that baggage becomes a badge of honor to wear. And as Joe referenced in his response to me and in one of his previous episodes, I’ll link to below, the next generation of Catholic priests is way, way more theologically conservative than priester or ordained just a few decades ago, which bodes well for the future of the church. So if you are a zealous Gen Z man or gen alpha even who wants to make being Catholic your life’s mission, take a break from your online activities. Log off for a bit, pray for a while and talk to your diocese vocation director. If we want to see lots of God’s spiritual children entering and returning to the Catholic church, then we need a lot more spiritual fathers to welcome them home and that is something we can all pray for. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.