WINNIPEG (CCN) — If someone is raised Catholic in the United States, there is a 75 per cent chance that as an adult they are no longer Catholic — or they are still a Catholic, but hardly ever attend Mass.
Ryan Burge, an American political scientist who specializes in research about religion in American life, published these findings and others on his website titled Graphs About Religion.
Using information from the U.S. General Social Survey and the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, Burge found that in 2024 nearly three-quarters of Americans raised Catholic were either no longer Catholic, or they identified as Catholic but never or seldom attended Mass.
How does that compare to Canada? Catholics in this country retain more of their identity than Americans, but how they practice their faith is similar to what is happening in the U.S., says Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, who teaches sociology and studies religion in Canada at the University of Waterloo.
“Catholic identity is important and is retained by many in Canada, but the practice for many started disappearing in the 1990s,” she said. “This is definitely true in Quebec, but also, to a lesser extent, in the rest of Canada.”
Wilkins-Laflamme said her research shows retention rates for Catholics are higher in Canada, but mostly as a cultural expression.
These are people who “value the identity of being Catholic, they see that as strongly tied to their family heritage, maybe their regional and national identity, like in Quebec,” she said.
“But for the most part, they have no practical ties with the church. They don’t like the church that much. And they don’t really agree with any of its policies.”
These Catholics might go to church services on special occasions or holidays, like Christmas or Easter. For the most part they are “very detached from the institution, but even that is now disappearing,” she said.
Only ten per cent of Catholics in Quebec say they practice their religion “with any regularity, let alone weekly,” Wilkins-Laflamme added, noting that in the rest of Canada “it’s not much more than that.”
Overall, Canadian Catholics have a good retention of their Catholic identity, but not of practice, she stated.
“It’s kind of, yes, there’s some religion, maybe like some vague beliefs in God. But it’s essentially a cultural identity, a tie to your family heritage. And even that is going down in Canada, although not by the same numbers as in the U.S.,” she said.
One source of the decline, Wilkins-Laflamme said, is that Catholic parents are not raising their children in the faith.
“Parents might say they’re Catholic, but if they don’t bother raising their kids Catholic, the children will remember their childhood as non-religious,” she said. “They’ll just look like cradle non-religious, raised non-religious.”
Where the Catholic Church might have gained from immigration in the past, the federal government now is limiting the number of newcomers, she observed. “So they might not be getting as much from that source in the future, and their birth rates are quite low. They’re aging,” she said.
Joel Thiessen studies religion as a sociologist at Ambrose University in Calgary and is director of the Flourishing Congregations Institute. He agrees with Wilkins-Laflamme.
“I think Catholic parents in Canada are not terribly Catholic themselves,” he said. “So that’s part of the reason for the challenges of retention.”
Catholic schools and parishes could play a role in helping with religious transmission, but “there isn’t a lot of integration happening between those different institutional spaces, despite their best attempts,” he said. “And I think that weakens things.”
One of the challenges is a lack of youth workers in parishes, compared with Protestant churches, where many churches hire youth pastors to work with teens, which aids with higher retention among some Protestant churches.
“I think that in part helps to account for why Catholics are haemorrhaging more than Protestants,” Thiessen said.
Since personal ties to someone like a youth worker make a big difference for retention, that is a crucial piece, Thiessen said. “The current infrastructure doesn’t support it,” he said.
John Longhurst is a freelance religion writer in Winnipeg. He was the religion reporter at the Winnipeg Free Press from 2019-2026.
