Handing on the Faith

In Church Life Journal, Michael Rota and Stephen Bullivant have a useful analysis of why cradle Catholics continue to flee the Church in extraordinary numbers and what might stanch the exodus (“Religious Transmission: A Solution to the Church’s Biggest Problem”). They note that a big part of the problem is that even those who still identify as Catholic show up at weekly Mass only 11 percent of the time, which makes handing on the faith to the next generation almost impossible. “We are losing nine out of ten cradle Catholics,” they write, a rate of defection even higher than that of other troubled religious groups. Most of those leaving the Church end up identifying with the ever-growing number of religious “Nones.” Why this steady dwindling of the faithful? “Catholic parents are, for the most part, failing—failing to effectively hand on a life of faith to their children,” they argue.