Maggie Gallagher, a serious Catholic thinker and activist, wrote a column yesterday titled, The Catholic Weakness which carries the subtitle, "A large proportion of traditional, Mass-going Catholics don't believe basic Church doctrine. Why not?"
In the course of Gallagher's article she cites statistics from the Austin Institute’s new study, Relationships in America, from which she draws a series of comparisons, including the following:
Fewer than six in ten traditional Catholics who attend Mass regularly believe in the resurrection of the body (58 percent), compared with 75 percent of Evangelicals who attend services at least three times a month.
Catholic teaching says that weekly Sunday Mass attendance is a serious obligation and missing Mass is a mortal sin. Yet just 58 percent of traditional Catholics are at church in a given week, compared with 74 percent of Evangelicals.
When it comes to sexual-behavior measures in this study, traditional Catholics who are regular churchgoers are slightly less likely to use porn than are Evangelicals (29 percent to 21 percent) but also slightly more likely to report having premarital sex with their spouse (64 percent to 57 percent).
As far as attitudes and values, the situation is bleak. Take cohabitation: When asked whether it is a good idea for couples considering marriage to cohabit first, just 48 percent of churchgoing Catholics firmly disagree, compared with 79 percent of Evangelicals. When asked whether it is “okay” for two people to get together for casual sex, 86 percent of churchgoing Evangelicals disagree, compared with just 65 percent of traditional Catholics.
The Catholic Church is unique in teaching that a sacramental Christian marriage is literally impossible to dissolve. Yet when asked whether married couples with children should stay married, just 45 percent of traditional Catholics who attend Mass regularly definitely agree, compared with 58 percent of churchgoing Evangelicals.
These statistics bother Maggie Gallagher greatly. She writes
If the Catholic Church could learn how to do half as good a job as Evangelicals at passing on basic Christian moral and spiritual teaching to the next generation, not only would much suffering be avoided, but American culture would be transformed.
Speaking as an evangelical, I find these statistics sobering. The state of evangelical Christianity in America is nothing to boast about, but it seems Roman Catholicism is in even more desperate shape. Gallagher wrote a previous article based on the same study in which she compared Catholicism with Mormonism.