The Roman Catholic Church is among the most culturally diverse institutions in the United States at present, with a mix of white, Hispanic, Asian and African faithful, a recent study revealed.
According to the Catholic News Service (CNS), the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University was commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Cultural Diversity in the Church back in 2013 to conduct a study to determine the size and distribution of ethnic communities in America.
The research showed that less than 6 percent of the 1.3 billion Roman Catholics around the world live in the United States. The survey covered 6,332 parishes with "particular racial, ethnic, cultural and or linguistic" communities, or about 36 percent of U.S. parishes.
Of the population of Catholics in America, most are still white or non-Hispanics, numbering to over 42.5 million. Latin Americans or Hispanics are the second biggest ethic community in the U.S., with a population of more than 29.7 million.
The survey also showed that over 2.9 million American Catholics are Asian or Native Hawaiian; more than 2 million are black African-American or African or Afro-Caribbean; and 536,601 are American Indian or Alaskan Native.
The same study also provided a glimpse of the average age of Catholic faithful in the U.S. based on racial profile. White American Catholics have the highest median age at 62, while Latino Catholics are aged 39 years old on the average. Taken as a whole, American Catholics have a median age of 52.
Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio, Texas, chairman of the committee that commissioned the study, described the findings as "groundbreaking."
"The Catholic Church in the United States has always been a very diverse entity, but it is the first time that all available data was brought together to map this diversity nationwide in remarkable detail," Archbishop Garcia-Siller told CNS.
"It is also the first time that parish life was looked at from the point of view of the experience of diversity. Multicultural parishes are a growing phenomenon in the United States. This is what makes this study so fascinating and groundbreaking," he added.
