Some recent figures on mass attendance in Ireland

Boom__Boom

There was a cross-border poll commissioned by RTE and BBC NI recently in relation to the whole issue of Northern Ireland devolution/unification and all that jazz. It also asked about attitudes to various social and religious issues.
They also asked a question about attending mass/services and the frequency of the same (outside of weddings/marriages/baptism)

The question asked was Apart from special occasions such as weddings, funerals, communions or baptisms, how often do you attend religious ceremonies or services, nowadays?

The answers are broken out by age/location(ROI v NI)/social class/gender and whether of not there are kids in the household.

Some of the takeaways

The number who go weekly or more frequently is 29% while the number who never attend is 23%.

The amount who go less frequently than weekly but do sometimes go is 48%

There seems to be very little difference between north and south overall.

The biggest difference between north and south is in the north 28% never attend while in the Republic it is 22%

Females go slightly more than males.

Age seems to be a massive factor in terms of mass attendance - the percentage of those over 65 who go weekly or more often is 66% while for those 18-24 is 11%.

If someone is 50 or older there is a 49% chance they go to mass weekly or more frequently. If someone is 49 or younger there is only a 16% chance they go to mass weekly.

The percentage of those over 65 who never go to mass is 10% while for the 18-24 age category it is 35%

Household with kids in them are less likely to attend mass than households without kids (I'd imagine this is strongly related to the age issue)

The detailed breakdown is on Page 119 at the link below
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/tv/nolanshow/RTE_BBC_NI_Cross_Border_Survey.pdf

Weekly or more frequently is 29%? I find that pretty hard to believe.

PopePalpatine

Deleted User wrote: »

Weekly or more frequently is 29%? I find that pretty hard to believe.

Not really, I've seen estimates of c.30% for weekly (or more frequent) mass attendance amongst Catholics in the Republic.

BoJack Horseman

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

Boom__Boom

Deleted User wrote: »

Weekly or more frequently is 29%? I find that pretty hard to believe.

The older part of the population pushes this up significantly and the age profile of the population is probably higher than you imagine as a lot of older folk don't tend to be very visible.

18-24 11%
25-34 14%
35-49 19%
50-64 37%
65+ 66%

Once the older cohort die out that figure will drop a fair bit. Some might argue that people will get more religious as they get older and while there may be some drift back to the church it's not going to be sufficient to replace the chunk of those who die off.

A key finding is that households with children are less likely to attend mass than households with children - which is a serious blow in the long-term - the number of adults who are likely to become mass attenders as this age is going to take a serious hit if they weren't regular church attenders as they grow up. Then it becomes a case of ever decreasing numbers as the generations pass.

Odds are the 66% who go weekly or more often over 65 started attending mass at a time when there was pretty much 100% mass attendance.

Shrap

BoJack Horseman wrote: »

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

Ha, be fairly easy to do a head-count around here. Taking out the few known non-religious families and the even fewer protestant/other families from the parish population, should be doable to figure it out from the number of cars outside mass every Sunday! If I could be bothered......*


*sorry, that makes it a pointless contribution! Anyone else want to count cars outside of mass?!

Boom__Boom

BoJack Horseman wrote: »

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

Even if they do there's no way they are ever going to release them into the public domain as they won't want to have the real attendance numbers out there as it would be clear evidence of how the general public has stopped attending.

seamus

Actually pretty incredible that a third of pensioners don't attend weekly when you consider what Mass was when we were growing up. Most of us probably have parents at or above pension age, and likewise when our parents were in their 40s, everyone would have attended mass weekly, if not more often.

Now a third of those people don't and less than half of the rest don't. Imagine what the figures will look like in ten and twenty years' time. The RC has it's own "pension crisis" on it's hands, in that it won't be getting its hands on many pensions in twenty years' time.

I suspect a lot of the "drift" towards mass attendance as people get older is more to do with community and having a social life than it is to do with worship.

Peregrinus

BoJack Horseman wrote: »

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

I don't know, but I suspect not. Concrete headcounts, to be meaningful, would have to be conducted in every church, chapel and mass-centre in the country on the same day, which would be a massive effort. And it would yield less data; you'd have absolute numbers attending on that day, but you'd have no way of knowing if that was typical unless you repeated the exercise over several Sundays. And, even then, you'd have no way of knowing how many people were coming every Sunday, how many were coming frequently not not every Sunday, and how many were coming occasionally.

In other words, for a huge effort, I don't think you'd add very much to your overall picture than you already get from the European Values Survey. I suspect if you wanted to improve your understanding of the issue, you wouldn't devote your resources to more quantitative research, but to qualitative research - understanding why people make the choices they do, why there is this age-related gradient in mass attendance, etc. You'd learn more, at less cost.

And, for all I know, the bishops are commissioning this kind of research.

Peregrinus

seamus wrote: »

I suspect a lot of the "drift" towards mass attendance as people get older is more to do with community and having a social life than it is to do with worship.

Actually, high mass attendance figures in previous times may have been sustained by this. It's a common observation that society is becoming more atomised, more individualised, and that membership-based and community-based experiences are receding in signficance in people's lives, and fewer and fewer people are participating in them. So, in part, people who went regularly to mass in the past may never have done so out of intense religious feeling; rather, they did so because they valued the sense of connection and interaction that it gave them. And they feel less and less need for that.

iguana

seamus wrote: »

I suspect a lot of the "drift" towards mass attendance as people get older is more to do with community and having a social life than it is to do with worship.

I wonder. My parents are in their mid-50s and for all my life my dad was always non-religious, non-mass going while my mum went to mass every week and on all the obligation days making me and my brothers go with her. I don't think she was ever actually particularly religious but going to mass was what you did, so she did it. By the end of the 90s, once the levels of covering up of abuse that the church was continuing to be complicit with started to become obvious, she stopped attending.

But lately she's been telling me that a lot of her peers have started not only becoming increasingly involved in the church, which could be explained as socially motivated. But have been talking about angels, posting more and more religious posts on Facebook, talking about the deceased in heaven, etc. She's asked me if she thinks they could possibly really believe in it, if they think they should so are pretending that they do or if age is making them fear death and turn to god. Socially almost of these people have large, close extended families, plenty of friends, are involved in other social groups and clubs, have adult children and grandchildren who live nearby and they see several times a week, etc. So it isn't as if they are a lonely and need that Saturday evening/Sunday morning half hour of socialising after the service. But yet there does seem to be more of a turn towards not just the church but actual belief.

Hotblack Desiato

seamus wrote: »

Now a third of those people don't and less than half of the rest don't. Imagine what the figures will look like in ten and twenty years' time. The RC has it's own "pension crisis" on it's hands, in that it won't be getting its hands on many pensions in twenty years' time.

It's a toss-up whether the impending huge decline in demand for religious services will lead or lag the impending huge decline in living/serving priests.

I startedThere was a thread, last year I think, about what could/should happen with all the churches which will become surplus to requirements in future. The thread got destroyed by a particular poster with an agenda, but it's an interesting question. Already lots of CoI churches have been converted to 'civilian' use and it will also have to happen sooner or later with RC churches.

A lot of the CoI churches were 19th century or earlier though and fine buildings; a lot of the RC churches are 20th century ugly carbuncles which should probably be demolished if deconsecrated.

iguana wrote: »

My parents are in their mid-50s

Stop making me feel old

silverharp

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

A lot of the CoI churches were 19th century or earlier though and fine buildings; a lot of the RC churches are 20th century ugly carbuncles which should probably be demolished if deconsecrated.

there was a Protestant church knocked down near us in Sandymount , the luvvies were bitching about it at the time but there now nice apartments there housing 60 or 70 people. The building would have difficult to convert into something useful.

Fleawuss

BoJack Horseman wrote: »

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

Each parish would have a very good idea from the fund raising envelopes collected each week. I'm not sure if they used this information for the "letters of freedom" for marriage but the priest would have a very good idea in rural . Village Ireland. There is no chance they will release information: data protection alone would cause problems.

robindch

BoJack Horseman wrote: »

Rather than phone surveys, are there ever concrete numbers tallied by the RCC themselves?

Unlikely, as the church's entire raison-d'etre is the fictitious.

Penn

It's funny, a few months ago my grandfather died (that's not the funny part). Due to familial obligations, our whole family (cousins & even partners) went to both the Mass on the Sunday after the funeral, and 4 weeks after for the Month's mind. The difference in attendance on those two Sundays was huge. Church was 1/3 full on the first Sunday (even with the addition of myself & relatives who wouldn't normally be there, whether due to not going to Mass or going to different churches etc). 4 weeks later for the month's mind, the church was maybe 80% full.

Then I realised, the first Sunday, the usual priest wasn't there, it was a different priest as our parish priest was on holiday for a week or two. So it seems many people didn't bother going to Mass because the normal priest wouldn't be there.

I think many of them, particularly younger ones, realised that if the usual priest wasn't there, he wouldn't know they skipped Mass. So they'd get a free Sunday.

Nick Park

I think those percentages sound unrealistically high.

The fact that it's a phone survey might have made a difference. Interestingly, in the US, people are more likely to exaggerate their church attendance if being surveyed over the phone than if they are responding to a poll online: http://time.com/103789/americans-frequently-lie-about-church-attendance-study-says/

Peregrinus

Nick Park wrote: »

I think those percentages sound unrealistically high.

The fact that it's a phone survey might have made a difference. Interestingly, in the US, people are more likely to exaggerate their church attendance if being surveyed over the phone than if they are responding to a poll online: http://time.com/103789/americans-frequently-lie-about-church-attendance-study-says/

Hmmm. How do we know that the phone figures are exaggerated and the online figures are accurate, rather than the phone figures being accurate and the online figures being understated?

robindch

Peregrinus wrote: »

Hmmm. How do we know that the phone figures are exaggerated and the online figures are accurate [...]

If it's true, then I'd imagine that it's for the same reasons that people might underestimate their drink when speaking with people versus estimating it in an online poll - everybody disapproves of excessive drinking, so in a social situation like speaking with a pollster, people will underestimate their drinking.

And many people believe that church-going is positively correlated with being a good and honest person, so people are likely to exaggerate it - disproving the very marker they're trying to convey.

Peregrinus

robindch wrote: »

And many people believe that church-going is positively correlated with being a good and honest person, so people are likely to exaggerate it - disproving the very marker they're trying to convey.

Well, no. The people who claim to be churchgoers while not churchgoers are being dishonest, but they're not churchgoers!

Cabaal

Household with kids in them are less likely to attend mass than households without kids (I'd imagine this is strongly related to the age issue)

This seems an odd stat,
Family's with kids in catholic ethos schools are involved in communion etc, they are required to attend a certain amount of masses for this. Couples without kids don't have any such requirements.

Out of my network of friends which is pretty mixed, I know of only one without kids who goes to mass every week. Anyone else is births, deaths etc

Cabaal

seamus wrote: »

I suspect a lot of the "drift" towards mass attendance as people get older is more to do with community and having a social life than it is to do with worship.

I'd agree based on my own observations,
That and "some" people will hedge bets because of fear of death,

Any really really religious Catholics who go weekly and are 60+ that I know almost look forward to death....its really odd hearing this from a 66 year old when my dad is 2 decades older and doesn't have such a weird outlook

fisgon

The first thing I would say is that the figure for "less often" (than "only on special holy days"), is 23%. (the choices are "once a day", "once a week", "once a month", "only on holy days", "less often", "never".)

Less often than on holy days? If you don't even go on holy days, when do you go? That is basically never, it means you might not even go at Christmas. Add to the "never" category, you get 46% of people who either never go, or hardly ever.

Also, if this is a poll taken by one person talking to another, many people will exaggerate their frequency of church attendance, many of us have been indoctrinated into believing that going to church is a good thing, and don't really want to admit that they basically never darken the door of a chapel.

Any way you slice it, you have at least half of the population that do not attend church. I would be willing to bet that those who claim to go "at least once a month" are exaggerating too.

fisgon

Also, these monthly churchgoers I find kind of intriguing. Why go once a month? I am curious about the motivation of these folks. Weekly I can understand, they are the rules, it becomes part of your routine, it is what you do.

Only on holy days makes sense, especially as you see that it is mainly students who only do this, often brought along by the family when they are home from college. Or people going along at xmas or Easter out of a sense of tradition.

But once a month? it seems so pointless. And it is 14% of the population. Is going to church something that some people might do only if they feel like it, like going to the cinema? Curious.

therabbittest

Something to bear in mind is that a good chunk of those who do attend mass are not necessarily religious at all.

This might seem strange but hear me out.

I'm from a very religious family, and my parents are part of church choir who are a tight-nit friend group. All the children of the choir grew up together and are now in their late teens and 20s. Over the past few of those years, some of the parents have been helping out with the Church youth cafe, and a good chunk of the kids (my sister included) have fostered a group of friends that attend this youth cafe. There's a good bit of overlap between these groups and those who are part of the parish youth choir (of which I am a part).

I'm non-religious, and have stopped weekly attending mass since I stopped believing. However, I do still sing in the choir, monthly and take part in various church community events. To the outsider, the young people I know in these groups, and I myself, may seem like the next generation of good Catholics, a strong presence in the parish religious community. A good chunk of us would also be part of the statistics quoted above.

However, a quite large chunk of these young people are atheists, non religious, or just not arsed. We are where we are because of the tight-nit groups, the community, our parents, but we often make fun about the church, and question the priest among ourselves most weeks. We're a major chunk of the 16-23 years olds that attend the church, but most of us aren't even christians. I can't imagine that this is an isolated phenomenon. In fact, I know of a couple of other parish youth choirs that are just part of the parish because of friends and fun.

Once we grow out of the stage we are now, too old for youth choirs and events, a good chunk of that age group moving forward will collapse even faster than just the bare figures would indicate.

So whatever the figures are, the number of real practicing christians could well be a fair bit less

seamus

fisgon wrote: »

Only on holy days makes sense, especially as you see that it is mainly students who only do this, often brought along by the family when they are home from college. Or people going along at xmas or Easter out of a sense of tradition.

But once a month? it seems so pointless. And it is 14% of the population. Is going to church something that some people might do only if they feel like it, like going to the cinema? Curious.

Practically anyone I know who does the "Easter and Xmas" thing, does it purely as a social event. People are home from wherever. Where some people go to the pub on Xmas Eve, others go to Mass, because that's where they'll get too see the people they haven't seen all year.

I guess the once-monthly thing is probably similar. I suspect if there was a detailed analysis, you'd probably find small spikes in attendance either at the start or end of a month. And lots of people would converge in these spikes, so it becomes a social thing.

Especially when you have kids and such, the ability to text someone at 4pm to meet them at 8pm is severely limited. So many people may find that a once-monthly check in at the local church helps them keep in touch with friends that they may otherwise not see.

Penn

fisgon wrote: »

Less often than on holy days? If you don't even go on holy days, when do you go? That is basically never, it means you might not even go at Christmas. Add to the "never" category, you get 46% of people who either never go, or hardly ever.

Less often than on holy days probably encompasses those who go only for family masses, such as anniversary masses, funeral masses etc.

Peregrinus

Penn wrote: »

Less often than on holy days probably encompasses those who go only for family masses, such as anniversary masses, funeral masses etc.

Or those who go on some Holy Days - e.g. St Patricks - but not all. Or thoser who try to go on Holy Days, but don't always make it.

There are eight holy days in Ireland, including Christmas and Easter. So someone who does less often than than on holy days is not going very often at all.

Datallus

One might argue that every day is a holy day.

kylith

fisgon wrote: »

The first thing I would say is that the figure for "less often" (than "only on special holy days"), is 23%. (the choices are "once a day", "once a week", "once a month", "only on holy days", "less often", "never".)

Less often than on holy days? If you don't even go on holy days, when do you go? That is basically never, it means you might not even go at Christmas. Add to the "never" category, you get 46% of people who either never go, or hardly ever.

Also, if this is a poll taken by one person talking to another, many people will exaggerate their frequency of church attendance, many of us have been indoctrinated into believing that going to church is a good thing, and don't really want to admit that they basically never darken the door of a chapel.

Any way you slice it, you have at least half of the population that do not attend church. I would be willing to bet that those who claim to go "at least once a month" are exaggerating too.

Don't you dare say they're not Catholic though! They might never go, and not believe a word of it, but they're as Catholic as the pope and that's the end of it.

Datallus

The cathedral of the human heart is where true faith abides. Do we not all attend that church?