Catholics in Britain Survey, 2019

The overall aim was to conduct a wide-ranging survey of Catholic adults living in Britain, which asked about many aspects of their lives, including their socio-demographic circumstances, the nature and extent of their religious engagement (belonging, behaviour and beliefs), their views of the Catholic Church’s leadership, institutions and teachings, and their social and political attitudes. The survey was conducted online by Savanta ComRes, in October-November 2019. This is a cross-sectional dataset, based on interviews with 1,823 self-identifying Catholics adults in Britain (aged 18 and over).

In recent decades, the religious profile of British society has changed significantly, with a marked increase in 'religious nones', declining proportions identifying as Anglican or with a particular Non-Conformist tradition, an increase in non-denominational Christians, and the spread of non-Christian faiths. Within this wider context, Roman Catholics have remained broadly stable as a proportion of the adult population and represent the second largest Christian denomination in Britain, after Anglicans. However, there have been significant internal and external developments which have affected the institutional church and wider Roman Catholic community in Britain, and which could have shaped how Catholics' think about and engage with their faith and how it impacts their daily lives. Recent years have seen demographic change through significant inflows of Catholic migrants coming from Eastern Europe, the papal visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain in autumn 2010 (the first since 1982), Pope Francis's pontificate from 2013 onwards, Catholic leaders' political interventions against 'aggressive secularism' and in other policy debates, and internal crises and debates impacting on the perceived authority of the Catholic Church. The last major academic investigation of the Catholic community (and only in England and Wales) was undertaken in the late 1970s (Hornsby-Smith and Lee 1979; Hornsby-Smith 1987, 1991). It found that the 'distinctive subculture' of the Catholic community in the post-war period was evolving and dissolving in complex ways due to processes of social change and developments within the wider faith, such as the Second Vatican Council (Hornsby-Smith 1987, 1991). It also demonstrated growing internal heterogeneity in Catholics' religious beliefs, practices and social attitudes (Hornsby-Smith 1987, 1991). However, while there has been some recent scholarship on particular topics relating to Catholics and Catholicism in Britain, using both general social surveys and limited one-off denomination-specific opinion polls (Clements 2014a, 2014b; 2016; Bullivant 2016a, 2016b), there has been no systematic academic inquiry into the Roman Catholic population in Britain. In comparison, an academic-led survey series has profiled the Catholic population in the United States on five occasions between 1987 and 2011, with other large-scale surveys carried out in recent years by organisations such as the Pew Research Center. Most existing research into the waning of religious belief, practice, and affiliation in Britain has focused either on the very large, macro level or on the very small, micro level. While both are important and necessary, largely missing has been sustained sociological attention on how secularising trends have affected - and are being mediated within - individual religious communities. This project would undertake such a task for Roman Catholics in Britain, by conducting a large-scale, thematically wide-ranging and nationally representative survey. It would provide a detailed study of personal faith, social attitudes and political engagement within a significant religious minority with distinctive historical roots and in which 'tribal' feelings of belonging have been strong. The core topics would consist of personal faith, religiosity and associational involvement in parish life; attitudes towards leadership and governance within the institutional church; attitudes on social and moral issues; and political attitudes and engagement. It would be thematically wide-ranging and analytically rich, providing a detailed portrait of contemporary social, religious and attitudinal heterogeneity amongst Catholics. By undertaking this large-scale and wide-ranging survey, an important and distinctive contribution would be made to the sociology of religion in Britain in general and to the study of its Catholic population in particular.

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