Dissenting Catholics Expect The Church Will Change

Dissenting Catholics Expect The Church Will Change September 4, 2015

Pew has a big report out on American Catholicism, and I’ve got a piece up at FiveThirtyEight about the optimism of Catholic dissenters:

Although dissenters are often tarred as “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick and choose from among the church’s teachings, without much thought for the whole, the dissenting Catholics that Pew surveyed seemed fairly confident that the changes they support will wind up being viewed as orthodox and applicable to everyone.

On every controversy that Pew included in its survey, at least half of dissenting Catholics expected that their desired change would probably or definitely come to pass by 2050. Catholics who hoped that current teachings would remain unchanged were similarly confident that the church of the future would be the one they wanted. On all issues but gay marriage, fewer than 40 percent of Catholics holding to current orthodoxy thought a change was likely.

pew chart

Read more at FiveThirtyEight…

And big praise for Pew! The crosstabs I’m using weren’t in the report itself — they ran them for me when I asked.

 

Update: The initial table I uploaded contained errors in the first column (my fault, not Pew’s).  I’ve got the right one up now.


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