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Yahoo
21-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
What to know about Catholicism in Wisconsin: population, parishes, dioceses, history.
Catholics in Wisconsin and across the world are mourning the death of Pope Francis, remembering his humility and service to the poor and marginalized. Francis died Monday of a stroke and irreversible heart failure at the Vatican, a day after he appeared at St. Peter's Square to bless Easter worshippers. He was 88. Pope Francis led an estimated 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, including more than 1 million in Wisconsin. Around 20% of adults in Wisconsin identify as Catholic, according to the Pew Research Center's Religious Landscape Survey in 2023-24, making them the largest single religious group in the state. More: Six Milwaukee Catholics share the impact Francis and his teachings had on their lives Just how large is Wisconsin's Catholic population? Here's a look at the data. There are about 1.24 million Catholics in Wisconsin, according to 2020 data from the Association of Religion Data Archives. That represents about 21% of Wisconsin's total population of 5.9 million in 2020. The Catholic Church is organized into five dioceses in Wisconsin — the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, and the Dioceses of Madison, Green Bay, La Crosse and Superior. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is led by Archbishop Archbishop Jeffrey S. Grob, who is assisted by Auxiliary Bishops James T. Schuerman and Jeffrey R. Haines. The other dioceses are led by: Bishop Donald J. Hying in Madison; David L. Ricken in Green Bay; Gerard W. Battersby in La Crosse; and James P. Powers in Superior. No. Archbishop Grob was appointed on Nov. 4, 2024, and installed Jan. 14, 2025, so he was one of the last appointments by Pope Francis. But Francis made several other significant U.S. appointments in his final months, naming Archbiship Shawn McKnight in Kansas City; Bishop Gregory Kelly in Tyler, Texas; and Archbishop Robert G. Casey in Cincinnati. Catholics live throughout the state, but have a particularly strong presence in the Milwaukee and Green Bay dioceses along eastern Wisconsin. In Milwaukee, the early church was home to German and Irish immigrants, and later to Polish, Italian and other immigrant communities, according to the archdiocesan website. The archdiocese supported these immigrants by providing Mass in their native language — a practice that continues today in some parishes with Mexican and Asian immigrants. Green Bay's early history involved missionaries working with Indigenous tribes, followed by French, Irish and Belgian ethnic churches. A recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found about 184 Catholic parishes in the 10-county Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Some are the result of mergers between two or more parishes. That compares to 261 parishes in the Archdiocese 60 years ago. In 1964, Catholics affiliated with a parish made up about 38% of the population in the archdiocese. Now, that number is 22%. In 2020, there were around 752 total Catholic congregations in Wisconsin, according to the Association of Religion Data Archives. Among the challenges facing the Catholic Church in Wisconsin include a decline in infant baptisms, marriages and active diocesan priests. Parishioners are aging at the same time fewer young people attend Mass. And because of the declining number of worshipers, many churches have unused or underused buildings to maintain. More: Milwaukee Catholic parishes are at a reckoning point. Here are several ways to understand the decline. More: This map shows the Wisconsin Catholic parishes that have closed or merged over time Wisconsin is home to several sites important to Catholics. The National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States, is in New Franken. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is believed to have appeared to a young woman in the woods there in 1859. The Basilica and National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians at Holy Hill is located on one of the highest elevations in southeastern Wisconsin, making it among the most photographed locations in the state. It is considered a sacred place of prayer and contemplation. Milwaukee has many historic churches popular with tourists, including the Basilica of St. Josaphat. The dome was modeled after St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and was only second in size to the U.S. Capitol when it was built. More: These Wisconsin sites offer spiritual destinations during Lent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Sophie Carson contributed to this story. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Catholicism by the numbers in Wisconsin: population, dioceses, parishes
Boston Globe
26-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Christianity's decline in US appears to have halted, major study shows
'We're entering a new era of the American religious landscape,' said Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who was not involved in the Pew survey. The 'nones' — those in the American population who tell researchers they have no religious affiliation — have been growing for decades. 'Now that growth has either slowed or stopped completely,' Burge said, 'and that's [a] big deal.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The findings come from the Religious Landscape Survey, a survey of more than 35,000 randomly selected adults from across the country conducted in 2023 and 2024. The last survey was published in 2014, making the new edition's release a major update in the understanding of American spiritual beliefs and practice. Advertisement The survey finds that 62 percent of adults in the United States describe themselves as Christians, including 40 percent who identify as Protestant and 19 percent who are Catholic. Overall, that represents a decline in the share of Christians since the survey was first published in 2007. As recently as the early 1990s, 9 in 10 adults in the country identified as Christian. Almost 30 percent of adults participating in the new survey are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 percent identify with a religion other than Christianity. 'If you look to the long term, it's a story of decline in American religion,' said Gregory Smith, a senior associate director of research at Pew. 'But it's a completely different story if you look at the short term, which is a story of stability over the last four or five years.' Advertisement The story of the steadying is complex, but one factor is the youngest cohort of adults in the survey. The survey's first two editions have shown each age group becoming steadily less Christian than the previous. For example, 80 percent of those born in the 1940s or earlier now identify as Christian, compared with 75 percent of those born in the 1950s and 73 percent of those born in the 1960s. People in the youngest age group in the new survey, born between 2000 and 2006, appear to defy that trend. They are still less likely than average to identify as Christian, and far less likely than the oldest Americans. But, intriguingly to researchers, they appear no less religious than survey participants in the second-youngest cohort, born in the 1990s. The youngest survey participants stood out in other ways, too. The gap in religiosity between men and women is far smaller than it is in older generations. Typically, women are more religious than men on a variety of measures. It's a pattern so consistent across time, geography, and culture that some scholars characterize it as a fact of human life. The pattern shows up in Pew's oldest cohorts, where, for example, women are 20 points more likely than men to say they pray every day. Among 18- to 24-year-olds in Pew's survey, however, the gender gap is small or nonexistent in measures of whether they pray daily, identify with a particular religion, and believe in God. 'It's not quite a reversal, but the fact that it's narrowing is significant,' said David Campbell, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame who was not involved with the survey. Advertisement Campbell speculated that the cause of the convergence might be at least partly political. As the perception of Christianity in particular has become increasingly entangled with conservative political movements, identifying as a Christian has become a matter of conservative identity. 'If you're a young white male these days and you think of yourself as conservative, then being religious is a part of that,' he said. The survey was conducted before President Trump's reelection and the subsequent 'vibe shift' detected by many religious conservatives, a rightward turn that includes celebrity conversions and a Silicon Valley backlash against progressivism. Still, people who are politically conservative and liberal are on dramatically different trajectories religiously, the Pew survey affirms. The share of self-described liberals who identify as Christian has dropped by 25 points since 2007. Just over a third of liberals now identify as Christian, and more than half say they have no religion. Among conservatives, the decline in Christian identification has been much more subtle, to 82 percent from 89 percent. Researchers caution that the data does not indicate an actual reversal in the decline of Christianity, or even that the plateau will last. Young adults are still significantly less religious than older adults, meaning they will pull down the average religiosity over time. It is unlikely that the current group of young adults will become more religious as they age. But some experts suggest that most people who were going to leave a religion have done so by now, raising the possibility that the data might offer a hint at the natural ceiling of nonreligiosity in the United States. Advertisement 'The 'nones' have run through the easy parts of the market, and now they're hitting the bedrock of committed evangelicals' and theological traditionalists in other faiths, said Burge, who was also pastor of an American Baptist church for 17 years. Going forward, 'if you're going to make advances, you have to make advances with conservatives.' Regardless of how many Americans identify with specific religions — or no religion at all — in the future, the survey depicts a fundamentally spiritual population. More than 80 percent of survey participants believe humans 'have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body,' and believe in God or a universal spirit. This article originally appeared in
