Statistics show a church in decline. Fewer Australians say they are Catholics, and fewer still attend Mass — and those who do are increasingly aging. Yet at the same time, some congregations are thriving, with younger, better-educated parishioners who retain close links to the church.
The statistics are telling two stories: Australian Catholicism is simultaneously shrinking in one sense while being revitalized in another, in large part due to migration, which is transforming the face of the nation —and the church.
In the major cities, where most Australians live, church congregations are increasingly made up of people from diverse cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds. Many were born overseas. They worship in different ways, in dozens of different languages.
The Australian church has become more catholic.
This is happening at the same time many older Australian-born Catholics have drifted away from regular religious practise — a secular drift that’s not confined to Catholicism. More Australians now declare no religious affiliation, while those who nominate a religion reveal a society that is more religiously diverse.
The last national census, in 2021, showed that the number of Australians who identified as Christian fell by more than one million, even though Christianity remains the most common religion. And while Catholics remain the largest single religious group, they dropped from 22.6 percent of the total population in 2016 to 20 percent five years later.
The fall in numbers was slowed by immigration from regions with high numbers of Catholics, especially Southeast Asia. Of all the migrants who came to Australia between 2016 and 2021, almost 200,000 said they were Catholics, over one-quarter of whom were born in the Philippines.
Diverse rites
Drawing on the census data, the National Centre for Pastoral Research, an agency of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, has produced a detailed social profile of the Australian Church.
Of some five million Australians who identified as Catholics in 2021, 1.4 million — 21 percent —were born overseas, and close to one in five came from a non-English speaking country (with English-speaking countries defined as New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, Canada, and South Africa).
The largest single group of these “new” Catholics was Filipinos, who now account for 4.3 percent of all Australian Catholics. Others come from India, Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and South America. Many follow diverse rites.
While most Australian Catholics are classified as “Western Catholics” and follow the Latin rite, there are growing numbers of Maronite, Melkite, Chaldean, and Syro-Malabar Catholics.
It’s not the first time there’s been a shift in the composition of Australian congregations.
For most of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the Australian church strongly reflected its original Irish roots — the first Catholics were largely Irish convicts, transported when Britain first colonized the Australian Continent in 1788. Other Irish, convict and free, supported by Irish clergy, came later.
The dominance of this Irish culture started to change after the Second World War, when Australia embarked on a large immigration program, shifting from its reliance on British and Irish migrants to bring in large numbers from Continental Europe.
According to an official church history, more than a million Catholics came to Australia from Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Hungary and elsewhere in the three decades after the war. They brought with them “different aspirations, expectations, needs and patterns of participation from those of Catholics of the Irish mould”.
The church welcomed them. In 1950, the Australian bishops issued a Pastoral Letter urging Catholics to embrace the new settlers as an opportunity to “spread the Kingdom of Christ within this Continent”.
“To the thousands of new Catholics, seeking home and shelter in our Land, the welcoming hand of their fellow-Catholics and brothers in Christ must be readily extended,” the bishops said. “Patience, kindliness, sympathy and practical help must be rendered to all unfailingly and in God’s name.”
“Will the strength of their parents’ commitment to the church fade in the children and grandchildren of these migrants, as it has with other migrant groups?”
Continuing ageing
Australia holds another census in August this year, but Dr Trudy Dantis, director of the church’s National Centre for Pastoral Research, doesn’t expect it will show a dramatic change in the Catholic share of the population.
“Over the longer term, trends suggest a continuing ageing of the Catholic population,” she says, “along with growth in the number of Catholics born in non-English-speaking countries.”
The census only records the religious affiliation of people who voluntarily declare it. It doesn’t record whether people practise their religion.
The task of calculating the number of practicing Catholics is carried out by Dr Dantis’s team, which surveyed more than 1,250 parishes across the country earlier this year, with data collection expected to be complete by early July.
Its last such survey, in 2021, confirmed the vast gulf between Australians who say they are Catholics and those who attend church. Most don’t.
The survey showed about 417,000 attended Mass — just 8.2 percent of the Catholic population. This was only partly attributed to government restrictions on public gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it followed a downward trend in previous years, with attendance figures affected by demographic changes, the age of Mass-goers — and “the presence or absence of immigrants.”
The impact of migrants is pronounced.
While Mass attendances fell by around 206,000 between 2016 and 2021, they rose in Eastern eparchies.
“Of these, the Syro-Malabar Eparchy had the largest increase: 90 percent from 4,390 in 2016 to 8,352 in 2021,” the survey found. This figure reflects the growth in migration to Australia from India. Official data recently released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics has revealed that, for the first time, people born in India are the largest group of residents who were born overseas.
In 2021, all the Eastern eparchies, apart from the Ukrainian, showed increases, with the Mass attendance rate in the Syro-Malabar eparchy rising from 52.6 percent in 2016 to 81 percent in 2021.
Mass attendance by migrants is not just confined to Eastern rite churches. The Sydney Archdiocese, with one of the highest attendance rates in 2021, also has the highest percentage of any diocese of Catholics born in non-English-speaking countries (33.5 percent).
Multicultural congregations
This growing diversity of the church is also reflected in rituals and other ways congregations’ worship. In 2021, Mass was celebrated in at least 42 different languages, up from 35 languages 20 years ago. Other than English, the most common languages were Vietnamese, Arabic, Chaldean and Italian. Malayalam, used at many Syro-Malabar Catholic Masses, was the most common Indian language.
This transformation raises an intriguing question about the future of the Australian church: Will the strength of their parents’ commitment to the church fade in the children and grandchildren of these migrants, as it has with other migrant groups?
In the meantime, church leaders have embraced the richness and diversity brought by multicultural congregations. In a message last year, recalling the welcome to migrants made in the 1950 pastoral letter, the Australian bishops spoke of the “immeasurable contribution” of migrants.
“Their presence has not only strengthened the fabric of our communities but has also deepened our understanding of what it means to be human,” they said.
Archbishop Emeritus Mark Coleridge used more informal language when he recently reflected on the impact of these more recent migrants on the church: “If you took out the Vietnamese and the Indians and the Filipinos, we wouldn’t be looking all that good.”
With thanks to Global Catholic and Tom Hyland, where this article originally appeared.
