Poll shows that being baptised doesn’t necessarily make you a Catholic

The Vatican likes to claim that there are over a billion “Catholics” around the world. But just how many of them are really “Catholic” in any meaningful sense of the word?

According to a poll from the Catholic Youth Ministry Federation (CYMfed) released last week, just over one in 10 young people baptised into the Catholic Church attends Mass every week. The poll asked 1,000 baptised Catholics aged between 11 and 25 about their faith. It revealed that even among those who readily identified themselves as Catholic, only 17 per cent went to Mass.

The researchers concluded: “If Catholicity were measured by practice, there seems to be some distance between the perception of what faith should look like and the lived reality and experience amongst our young people.”

Similar research by Cafod published last year found that only 9 per cent of 25–34 year old Catholics attended weekly Mass; the CYMfed findings showed that the numbers going to Church were far lower than the 54 per cent of young people who said it was important to attend Mass regularly.

However, although the Church took some comfort in the fact that 82 per cent of Catholics thought belief in God was important, it quickly became clear that no-one really knows what is meant by “belief in God”. Only a third of those questions had any orthodox view of “God”. The rest either said they had no idea what God meant or they simply believe in some undefined “higher power”.

Perceptions of the Church itself were revealing. Asked to choose five adjectives from a list of 43 to describe the Catholic Church, 83 per cent selected at least one among the following: “Authoritative, boring, cautious, conservative, established, exclusive, traditional”.

However, nearly a third also chose one from “heroic, bold/direct, independent, campaigning, outspoken, challenging, passionate”. For those who continued to practise their faith in their twenties, the research found a “deeper engagement” with Catholicism. A third of mass goers between 20 and 25 claimed that they “prayed daily”, and 39 per cent rather unconvincingly said read the Bible every week.