Greg Daly
The most striking thing about the 2016 census is how it points to the resilience of Irish Catholic identity, a leading Church number-cruncher has said.
According to the census, Catholics now make up 78.3% of Ireland’s population, down from 84.2% five years ago, with the number of Catholics in the country having dropped by 132,000, from almost 3.86 million to 3.73 million.
Church of Ireland membership has also fallen over the same period, as has membership of the Methodist Church, while membership of Orthodox churches and some evangelical groups has risen, largely due to immigration. The percentage of Ireland’s population claiming to have ‘no religion’ has risen from 5.9% to 9.8%.
Growing
Prof. Stephen Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, told The Irish Catholic that “the Irish ‘No religion’ population has been growing, slowly and steadily, for a while. However, the 2016 data show a significant jump.
“While overall numbers are still fairly small, this may well be a portent of things to come: the much-discussed ‘rise of the Nones’ in the USA over the past 25 years may well offer an instructive comparison,” the London-based academic said.
Despite this, he said, a willingness for Irish people to identify themselves as Catholic remains remarkably strong.
“For me, though, the most striking thing here is the relative resilience – despite everything – of Catholic identity in Ireland,” he said, continuing, “Yes, there has been decline, about 1% of the population per year, between 2011 and 2016 (more or less in line with other main Christian denominations in Ireland). But a Catholic-identifying population of 78.3% still makes Ireland very much the outlier among leading, modern Western nations.”
Prof. Bullivant cautioned, however, against interpreting the census figures in a simplistic fashion.
“A basic ‘What is your religion?’ identity question tells us nothing about practice, belief, or even how people feel about their chosen identity,” he said, continuing, “Evidence from the UK, for example, shows that a large proportion answer ‘Christian’ to such a question who would answer ‘No religion’ if asked something slightly more nuanced. But it certainly tells us something.”