Key findings about American Catholics
Pew Research Center asked American Catholics for their views about family structures, religious beliefs and practices and other topics. Here are 6 facts from the new survey.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Pew Research Center asked American Catholics for their views about family structures, religious beliefs and practices and other topics. Here are 6 facts from the new survey.
While roughly one-in-five U.S. adults say they were raised by two parents with different religions, just 6% say they now identify with multiple religions.
62% of U.S. Catholics think the church should allow Catholics who have been divorced and remarried without an annulment to receive Communion.
A growing share of self-identified “evangelical or born-again” Protestants (41%) says it has become more difficult to be an evangelical Christian in the U.S. in recent years; just 34% answered the question the same way in September 2014.
Americans are wary of the prospect of implanting a computer chip in their brains to improve their mental abilities or adding synthetic blood to their veins to make them stronger and faster. And this is particularly true of those who are highly religious.
A majority of U.S. adults still say religious institutions contribute either “a great deal” (19%) or “some” (38%) to solving important social problems, but the combined figure of 58% has fallen significantly in recent years.
The new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. Catholics provides an opportunity to take stock of Americans’ Catholic identity – not just people who identify primarily as Catholics, but the entire spectrum of those whose lives have crossed paths with the Catholic Church in a meaningful way.
On his first papal trip to the U. S., Pope Francis will visit three Northeastern cities that are within a few hundred miles of each other. But while New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., may be geographically close, their Catholic populations look different from one another in several ways.
The face of Catholic America is changing. Today, immigrants make up a considerable share of Catholics, and many are Hispanic. At the same time, there has been a regional shift, from the Northeast (long home to a large percentage of the Catholic faithful) and Midwest to the Western and Southern parts of the U.S.
Mexico is home to not only the largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, but one of the biggest Catholic populations, too.
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