Anyone curioius about what Catholics really think of the Church — and why so many of them aren’t there for Sunday mass — should check out the Rhode Island Catholic for an interesting piece on Catholics who are absent, but still “Catholic”:

It is no secret that Mass attendance has fallen across the United States and in many other parts of the world over the past several decades, many have searched for explanations for this drop.

Bob Dixon, the director of the Pastoral Projects Office of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference recently completed a study of one of the reasons for the drop in Mass attendance in Australia, a country where nearly five million people reported their religion as Catholic in the national census, but only a fraction of that number can be found in Mass on any Sunday. Dixon’s study looked into the reasons why some Australians who attended Mass for most of their adult lives suddenly stopped attending in middle age. What he found could have implications in the Diocese of Providence as a committee begins studying Rhode Islanders’ Mass attendance rates.

Last Wednesday, November 28, Dixon spoke to a group of about 35 lay people from several parishes during a presentation at St. Anthony Parish. He also spoke to diocesan priests earlier in the day during a separate lecture. Both clergy and lay people alike are concerned about the falling numbers.

Many people point to low rates of youth and young adult Church participation as the cause of declining numbers. Dixon acknowledges that is, of course, part of the issue. But another piece of the puzzle, he asserts, are Catholics who “had an established adult attendance pattern that changed.”

Dixon presented the group with a 1996 survey conducted in Australia that asked the parents of Catholic school children why they had stopped attending Mass. In Australia, Dixon pointed out, Catholic education is heavily subsidized by the government and does not demand the same financial sacrifice that it does in the U.S., so many parents send their children to Catholic schools even if they don’t attend Mass. These almost 4,500 parents cited numerous reasons for their non-attendance, but the reason selected by more than half of participants is surprising to say the least. Fifty-four percent of respondents reported that they “no longer feel being a committed Catholic requires going to Mass every week.”

This attitude, Dixon commented, is representative of a shift in attitudes from several decades ago when Mass attendance was not considered optional. Thirty years ago, he said, there were two groups of Catholics – committed and lapsed, or those who regularly attended Mass and those who didn’t. Today, Dixon said, this survey and others reveal the emergences of a third group of Catholics who don’t attend Mass but still consider themselves committed to their faith.

In 2004 Dixon and several other Australian researchers set out to find out who made up this third group. They approached every diocese in Australia and asked the bishops for help finding members of this third group of adult Catholics who had recently stopped attending Mass.

He and the other members of the research team finally wound up with 41 Australian Catholics who agreed to participate in interviews about their religious life and their recent absence from Church. From those interviews his research shows that there are a multitude of reasons why people leave the Church, but there were certainly overlaps and parallels in the 41 personal stories he collected.

Read on to find out what those overlaps and parallels are. Pretty compelling stuff.