‘Precipitous decline’ in US Catholics levelling off, reports PEW study

John Lavenburg/Crux• March 4, 2025

A recent study by the Pew Research Center on religion in the US shows that the precipitous decline in the Catholic share of the population that was experienced in the early 2000s through to the early 2010s has more or less levelled off over the last decade.

However, that seemingly “good news” is offset by the fact that the proportion of Hispanic Catholics, often seen as a bulwark for maintaining Catholic numbers in the US, has reduced far more than was expected.

In 2014, Catholics made up 21 per cent of the US population. In 2023-24, Catholics still make up 19 per cent of the population. But 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 per cent, the percentage of Black adults from 5 to 4 per cent, and the percentage of Asian adults from 17 to 14 per cent. But the percentage of Hispanic adults who identify as Catholic has fallen from 58 to 42 per cent.

“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.

So while the overall levels might appear encouraging for Catholicism in the US, those involved in the 2023-24 Pew Research Center Religious Landscape Study caution that people should be careful to assume that this stability will remain. In fact, for the stability to become lasting, they emphasise 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,” said Smith.

“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 US Catholic Church evangelise 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 [with] 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 Evangelisation and Catechesis, told Crux.

Tim Glemkowski, the former CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress who now leads Amazing Parish, an organisation that helps parishes evangelise, 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 evangelisation 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 [in the parish is] the right way of looking at it.”

Regarding the shift in the Hispanic dynamic, Smith said: “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.”

For context, 36 per cent 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 US-born, US-raised, the more of a decrease we will continue to see.”

Ospino explained that no longer does the situation prevail that did in the 1990s when more than half of the Hispanic population in the United States were immigrants, who are more likely to be religious – 58 per cent of US immigrants are Christian, according to the Pew study.

Today roughly 64 per cent 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 secularised culture, and therefore less likely to be Catholic.

The other factor, Ospino said, is one in which the Church bears much of 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, 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 US-born, US-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 Americanise 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 at 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.

Photo: A seminarist waves the US flag before Pope Francis’s weekly general audience at St Peter’s square at the Vatican, 30 September 2015. (Photo by ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images.)