The number of Catholics attending Mass in England and Wales has shot up by roughly 50,000 in 2023. Source: The Tablet.
The latest figures from the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales reveal that, while 503,308 attended Mass in 2022, 554,913 did so in 2023.
A spokesman for the Bishops Conference said: “We can’t vouch for the total accuracy of this figure, and we expect it to be a slight underestimation as some parishes may not have given their figures when their diocese requested them.”
Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St Mary’s University, Twickenham said he was “quietly hopeful” about the data.
“That’s because I would have suspected that anyone coming back to Church post-Covid would already have returned,” explained Professor Bullivant, who is also director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society.
The increase still falls short of the pre-Covid numbers. In 2019, according to the Bishops’ Conference, 701,902 people attended Sunday Mass.
Professor Bullivant estimated that “around two-thirds” of the numbers of Mass-goers pre-pandemic had returned by 2022, when 389, 960 people were registered as attending Mass in England and Wales.
“My understanding talking to parish priests is that [during Covid] we lost a lot of families,” Professor Bullivant said.
He added: “Almost every year since the 1960s the number of people dying or leaving has outweighed numbers of new people joining the Church.”
“What I suspect with the extra 50,000 is the influx of new people joining the Church is bigger for the first time than the numbers leaving.”
A similar trend has been found in Scotland. Data shows that 95,029 people attended Sunday Mass in Scotland in 2023, compared to 89,420 the previous year.
Like England, Mass attendance in Scotland has not returned to pre-Covid levels: 127,003 Scots attended Sunday Mass in 2019.
Nevertheless, 647,600 people attended Sunday Mass in Britain in 2023, compared to 592,428 in 2022.
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Big increase in Mass attendance recorded in Britain (By Bess Twiston Davies, The Tablet)
