The Blessing of Catholic Converts

“Do you want to know the best way to ensure your child grows up to be a faithful, knowledgeable, and active Catholic? It’s simple: 1) Raise them as a Protestant AND 2) Only let them date Catholics and promise to pay all their wedding and honeymoon expenses if they get married in the Catholic Church. That second step is key.

“All kidding aside (...that was not a serious attempt at Catholic parenting advice!), there are hundreds of thousands of non-Catholic parents in the United States today raising children who will one day grow up to be extraordinary Catholics (...as shown below). Some will join in the coming week as the Catholic Church in the United States will welcome more than 100,000 new adult Catholics into the faith through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA).

“There aren’t a lot of data sets available to study this sub-group. One notable exception is Dean R. Hoge’s Converts, Dropouts, Returnees: A Study of Religious Change Among Catholics (1981). Hoge, a Presbyterian sociologist, noted that ‘past research on Catholic converts and dropouts is sketchy, since few studies have been done’ (p. 8). In recent years much new attention has been given to the dropouts – those who are raised in the faith but do not remain Catholic as adults . . . . In this post we focus on the converts joining the Church by compiling all of the recent research available to produce a robust and often surprising portrait.”

A recent post in the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) research blog offered an overview of recent adult converts to Catholicism. Among other findings, research shows that adult converts are more likely than all other Catholics to:

• Attend Mass at least once a month (62% of converts compared to 48% of all other Catholics),
• Go to confession at least once a year,
• Regularly contribute to parish offertory collections (59% compared to 43%),
• Be “somewhat” or “very” involved in their parish beyond Mass attendance (31% compared to 14%)
• Agree that their faith is either “the most important” or “among the most important” things in their daily life (59% compared to 40%),
• Regularly read religious or spiritual publications (29% compared to 18%) or books (10% compared to 6%), and
• Believe in the Real Presence (81% of adult converts believe in the Real Presence compared to only 55% of all other Catholics).

To access the complete post, please visit:

1964: Portrait of the American Catholic Convert: Strength in New Numbers (11 APR 14)