The late John Kelly leading the procession at St Patrick’s, Dumbarton’s oldest RC church.
The number of Catholics attending Mass in England and Wales shot up by roughly 50,000 — similar trend found in Scotland
By Bill Heaney
The Good News for the Catholic Church in Scotland this Easter Weekend is that the number of people attending church services on a Sunday is on the increase.
The latest figures from the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales reveal that, while 503,308 attended Mass in 2022, 554,913 did so in 2023, Beth Twiston Davies reports in The Tablet religion magazine.
A similar trend has been found in Scotland. Data shows that 95,029 people attended Sunday Mass in Scotland in 2023, compared to 89,420 the previous year.
Like England, Mass attendance in Scotland has not returned to pre-Covid levels: 127,003 Scots attended Sunday Mass in 2019.
Nevertheless, 647,600 people attended Sunday Mass in Britain in 2023, compared to 592,428 in 2022
A spokesman for the English Bishops’ Conference said: “We can’t vouch for the total accuracy of this figure, and we expect it to be a slight underestimation as some parishes may not have given their figures when their diocese requested them.”
Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, Twickenham said he was “quietly hopeful” about the data.
“That’s because I would have suspected that anyone coming back to Church post-Covid would already have returned,” explained Bullivant, who is also director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society.
The increase still falls short of the pre-Covid numbers. In 2019, according to the English Bishops’ Conference, 701,902 people attended Sunday Mass.
A Corpus Christi procession at St Patrick’s Church in Dumbarton.
Bullivant estimated that “around two-thirds” of the numbers of Mass-goers pre-Pandemic had returned by 2022, when 389, 960 people were registered as attending Mass in England and Wales.
Bullivant told The Tablet: “My understanding talking to parish priests is that [during Covid] we lost a lot of families.”
He added: “Almost every year since the 1960s the number of people dying or leaving has outweighed numbers of new people joining the Church.”
“What I suspect with the extra 50,000 is the influx of new people joining the Church is bigger for the first time than the numbers leaving.”
Meanwhile, a new poll shows that Generation Z – those aged 18 – 24 – are half as likely to describe themselves as atheist as 45-60 year olds.
Sixty-two per cent of Gen Z youth questioned by OnePoll said they were “very” or “fairly” spiritual.
Bullivant said: “We are getting to a point where it is increasingly common to have been brought up without any religion.”
He said young people today might “have to go back to their great-grandma” to find someone “conventionally religious” in their family.
That meant Generation Z could encounter faith “as something new and exciting”.
The poll of 10,000 people also found 25 per cent of Generation X ( 45-60 year olds) describe themselves as “atheists”.
“People are far more likely to see themselves as atheists in religious worlds,” said Bullivant.
Maybe like the biology denying Scottish Government and their parliamentary colleagues across the spectrum, their antipathy, if not opposition, to religion will move into retreat.
Christianity is Scotland has been under political attack for quite a considerable time now. Religion or no religion of course is a personal choice but mainstream religion in Scotland has by public policy after public policy been undermined.
Biology denying, and denying woman’s rights has been very much a continuation of that trend.
I don’t know the Catholic Church figures but recently read the statistics for the Church of Scotland whereby after about nearly two hundred years of church attendance which sat at around 28% in 1960 Church of Scotland membership is now down to around 5% with extinction forecast at around 2036.
The increase in Mass attendance in Scotland over the last year, albeit maybe relatively modest, is however an apparent stark reversal of trend compared to the Church of Scotland.