Mass attendance ticks back up nationally after pandemic falter, data suggests

CNA Staff, Feb 10, 2025 / 17:40 pm

After years of uncertainty over whether in-person Mass attendance numbers would ever rebound after plummeting during the COVID-era lockdowns, new data suggests that Mass attendance levels have quietly returned to 2019 levels nearly six years later. 

Despite the apparent uptick, however, a return to 2019 levels still means only a quarter of U.S. Catholics attend Mass weekly — despite weekly attendance being an obligatory part of Catholic life. 

The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, a premier Catholic research organization, recently used national surveys it conducted combined with Google Trends search volumes for Mass attendance-related terms to estimate weekly attendance across the United States. 

In a Feb. 5 blog post, CARA explained that prior to the pandemic in 2019, weekly Mass attendance in the U.S. averaged 24.4%. Between May 2023 and the first week of 2025, meanwhile, attendance has averaged 24%, CARA estimated, representing an overall return to pre-pandemic levels.

In addition, CARA said Mass attendance numbers for Easter and Ash Wednesday — the latter being one of the best-attended Mass days of the year, despite not being a holy day of obligation —  actually returned to pre-pandemic levels in 2023. 

Christmas attendance numbers, meanwhile, finally rebounded to pre-pandemic levels in 2024. 

“We have hypothesized that the heightened awareness and warnings about COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases during January were keeping some from returning to Mass at that time of year. We will keep tracking Mass attendance through 2025 and let you know how Ash Wednesday and Easter measure up,” the blog post reads. 

From the start of the COVID pandemic lockdowns in the U.S. beginning in March 2020 to the declared end of the pandemic in May 2023, Mass attendance averaged just 15% as many bishops dispensed their flocks from the obligation to attend in person. Some bishops lifted the dispensations as early as late 2020, while a few held out until 2022 before lifting the dispensation and inviting Catholics back to Mass in person.

As to whether Catholics would in fact return to Mass, the data collected as the pandemic wound down was not promising, in part because post-pandemic church attendance rates declined more sharply among Catholics than it did among Protestants. 

A March 2023 Pew Research Center showed that 24% of Catholics said they attend in-person religious services less often than they did before the pandemic, 38% “about as often,” and only 9% more often. 

And a survey released in January 2023 by the American Enterprise Institute concluded that ​​the percentage of Americans overall who attend religious services dipped about 8% following the COVID-19 pandemic.