Sunday Mass attendance in person at Catholic churches in the U.S. is back to pre-pandemic levels — although just under one quarter of the nation’s Catholics are in the pews on a regular weekly basis.
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University noted in a Feb. 5 post on its Nineteen Sixty-four research blog that Sunday Mass attendance in person has risen to 24% since the declared end of the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2023. That rate has held through the first week of 2025.
From the start of the pandemic lockdowns in March 2020 to May 2023, attendance had averaged 15%. Prior to the pandemic, the average attendance was 24.4%.
Mark Gray, CARA’s director of polls and editor of the blog, told OSV News that attendance figures recently released by the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, had underscored a trend he and his colleagues had identified.
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