In recent weeks, a great deal of attention has been given to the long-distance exchange between Pope Leo XIV and President Trump regarding the war in Iran. Following the news, one might think the primary concern of the pope is global geopolitics, with a particular emphasis on criticizing the US president. This, however, fundamentally misses the thinking of the Holy Father. His role is not that of a politician but of a pastor, and in the United States he is likely far more concerned with witnessing to the Gospel than with taking aim at political actors.
I obviously cannot know the pope’s precise thinking, but I suspect his greater concern is the waning of devout and engaged Catholics.
The Church in Decline
In the United States, the Holy Father’s home country, the data are sobering. The number of priests declined rapidly from its peak of 600 ordinations per year in the late 1970s to around 400 per year in 1998. Since then, it has plateaued at that level and has not seen the significant drop observed in many other parts of the world. While there is still a shortage of priests, the situation could certainly be worse.
Baptisms are another story. For three decades, from 1978 to 2008, annual figures hovered at around one million per year. However, since 2008 baptisms have nearly halved and now stand at about 590,000 per year. Other indicators show that only one in four teenagers who attended Mass at least monthly in the mid-1990s were still doing so in the late 2010s, while 56% of those who stopped attending no longer identified as Catholic. Weekly Mass attendance across the US population fell from 12% in 1980 to 5% in 2021. Since the mid-1970s, 40% of Catholic schools have closed. Only 43% of self-described Catholics go to confession more than once a year, and vocations to religious life have declined by 70%.
