by Stephen White

But first a note from Robert Royal: Note: Be sure to tune in tonight - Thursday, June 26th at 8 PM Eastern - to EWTN for a new episode of the Prayerful Posse on 'The World Over.' TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and contributor Fr. Gerald E. Murray will join host Raymond Arroyo to discuss Leo XIV's episcopal appointments, the pope's comments on natural law, his support for priests and seminarians, and Leo's restatement of priestly celibacy. Check your local listings for the channel in your area. Shows are usually available shortly after first airing on the EWTN YouTube channel.

Now for today's column.

The Pew Research Center (I served in an advisory capacity ) has a new report out that looks at Catholic life in the United States. The primary takeaway from the report is that nearly half (47%) of American adults have a significant connection to Catholicism. One in five (20%) Americans identify as Catholic. An additional 9% of Americans say they are culturally but not religiously Catholic. An equal number (9%) say they are former Catholics. And 9% have a Catholic parent, spouse, or partner - or say they sometimes attend Catholic Mass.

In actual numbers, this means that something like 53,000,000 American adults are Catholic and an additional 71,500,000 are connected to Catholicism in one of the aforementioned ways. Now, having a "connection to Catholicism" is not the same as being Catholic. And "being Catholic" is not the same as "practicing the faith." But the reason the Pew report highlights the connections to Catholicism is simply that Catholicism has an outsized influence on the rest of American society.

We see this in lots of ways, from the overrepresentation of Catholics in Congress to the undeniable (if not always flattering) place the Catholic Church holds in the popular imagination. Catholicism matters more in America than our proportion of the population would suggest.

While Catholics may be a minority here, the U. S. Catholic population is large enough to make it the country with the fourth largest Catholic population in the world. Only Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines, have more Catholics. American Catholics are a relatively small minority, but which nonetheless forms a critical mass of sufficient size to shape American society beyond what one might expect.

Simply put, we American Catholics punch above our weight.

Which is worth keeping in mind when considering some other interesting data from the Pew study. Among the questions Pew asked were two pertaining to the Traditional Latin Mass

Unsurprisingly, the number of American Catholics adults who attend TLM on a weekly basis is not large. Only 2% of respondents say they attend TLM at least once a week.

Here's how Pew put it:

Very few Catholics report regularly attending a TLM today. Overall, 2% of Catholics say they do this at least weekly, 1% do so once or twice a month, and 2% do so a few times a year. An additional 8% say they either seldom or never attend a TLM "these days," while 87% of U.S. Catholics have not attended one at any point in the last five years.

This result surprised me, not because the number of Catholics attending TLM is so small, but because a closer look at the numbers suggests that the TLM actually plays an outsized role among America's practicing Catholics.

As a percentage of American Catholics TLM attendance is obviously small. But 2% of the Catholic adults in the United States is actually a lot of people. If 2% of America's 53,000,000 Catholics are attending TLM weekly, as Pew's data suggests, then the number of Catholics who attend TLM weekly is north of one million. I'm not convinced that's the case. (And to be fair, that's not a claim Pew makes.)

There's more. Given that only 29% of all Catholics surveyed say they attend Mass weekly, the Catholics attending TLM weekly would seem to make up a significant portion of all weekly Mass goers. Is it really the case that 5% of all American Catholic adults (including those who...