A More Hispanic Church
American-Catholic demographics are changing.
Right
When Pope Benedict XVI arrives in the United States today, he will greet a Catholic community that has changed in significant ways in recent decades. Although the overall share of Catholics in the United States has held steady (at approximately 25 percent) for the past thirty years, this masks a demographic shift: many Americans raised in the Catholic Church have left it. But their loss has been off-set by an influx of foreign-born Catholic immigrants. Today, young Catholics are nearly as likely to be Hispanic as white. Source: Pew Religious Landscape survey, summer 2007.