Census 2022 question on religion

My household bucked the trend, going from 17% in 2016 to 50% this time. The 4 youngest "nones" fled the nest, meaning we went from 1/6 to 1/2. The wife clings on...

The Catholic church doesn't have membership lists. What it has is membership estimates, but those estimates don't involve identifying any particular person as Catholic or non-Catholic; just estimating the total number of Catholics. They do have baptismal registers, but they can't be treated as a current membership estimate, if only because the great bulk of the names recorded in baptismal registers are of people who have already died.

When I last looked at this, a few years ago, the Catholic church's estimates of its own membership in Ireland (North and South) tallied pretty closely with the available census information on self-identification (which, at that time, was from 2011). Whether the church authorities were actually using the census information to derive or correct their own estimates I cannot say, but I suspect they were. I have a post about this buried somewhere deep within the Board's archives, but my search skills are/the board search engine is not up to finding it.

It will be interesting to see if the church's next membership estimates — each diocese is supposed to produce one annually — reflect the same decline in membership as the census results will.

Just this guy's opinion really but interesting nonetheless:

Now that's genius

Census 2022 figures are just out.

• Population is now officially over 5 million (5,149,139)
• The proportion of the population who identified Roman Catholic as their religion fell from 79% in 2016 to 69% in 2022.
• Those with no religion increased from 10 per cent in 2016 to 14 per cent in 2022.
• The Church of Ireland category showed little change but remained the second largest religious category with 124,749 people (2%).

79% to 69% in only six years is a very rapid drop.

@smacl looks like you were right...

Just read back through the whole thread and even I couldn't remember why I'd posted that song.

You need to say the first line, slowly.... 😉

But yes the 'missing' 6% thing is interesting. I doubt there's been a massive increase in Jedi or something. Might be former RCs now describing themselves as just Christian but really would there be that many disillusioned RCs who are still motivated enough to describe themselves as such? Some, yes. Not 6% of the population though. "ex-Catholic"? but you're supposed to describe what you are, not what you used to be!

This.

And there's more. The fall of 180,783 Catholics is the result of (Catholics who have died since 2016) + (Catholics who have emigrated since 2016) + (People who identified as Catholic in 2016 but not in 2022) - ((Catholics born since since 2016) + (Catholics immigrating since 2016) + (people who did not identify as Catholic in 2016 but do in 2022)). The 180k figure is just the net result of all those various movements; it doesn't, in itself, tell us how big the different components of the net movement were.

And exactly the same, of course, is true of the net increase of 284,269 in the "no religion" group.

When the full results of the census are published we'll be able to get a handle of some of the individual components - a breakdown by age of the "Catholic" and "no religion" groups will tell us what proportion of each group represents children born since 2016, and will allow us to estimate with reasonable accuracy how much each group has been affected by deaths since 2016. But disentangling the "conversion" and "migration" components of the change may be less easy.

But I think the three key points are:

1. The fall in Catholic identification is steep and accelerating. The fall from 2002 to 2011 was about 2.3% of the population; from 2011 to 2016 it was 5.7%; from 2016 to 2022 it was 10%.
2. For the first time, the absolute numbers of Catholics counted has fallen, not just their percentage of the population. In all previous censuses the numbers of Catholics has risen.
3. As unfortunately's post indicates, the growth in the non-religious group is not driven solely, or perhaps even primarily, by defections from the Catholic group.

Maybe we should think of of this not in terms of how small the "Catholic" group is or will become, but of how big the non-religious group will be. As Catholicism ceases to be the monolith in Ireland that it once was, these increasingly become independent of one another.

Across Europe generally, the size of the atheist/agnostic/non-religious group varies from 4% (Romania) to 56% (Czech Republic). The EU average is 28%, and if we look at countries that are geographically, economically and culturally close to us, we see figures like 39% (UK), 40% (France), 31% (Belgium), 32% (Spain), 30% (Germany) and 14% (Italy). That's still quite a broad range, but a landing zone for Ireland somewhere in the 30-40% region looks plausible.

There tends to be huge concentration in this forum on the mismatch between identification with a religion, and systematic participation in the worship of that religion. But it's absolutely standard; in most European countries, this mismatch has persisted for generations, and there's no reason to suppose that it won't persist in Ireland too.