Posted by Recent surveys have looked at Catholics’ beliefs about the Eucharist in the US and UK © Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk
“Never could learn to drink that blood, and call it wine,” Bob Dylan sings on his much-maligned 1986 album Empire Burlesque. While the protean Nobel laureate has been many things in his remarkable 80 years, exponent of sound Catholic sacramental theology isn’t usually counted as one of them. And this despite the fact that several of his songs have long been favourites in the “folk Mass” repertoire – indeed, one of us actively participated in a liturgical rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” as recently as 2013.
Perhaps if certain segments of the Church in the United States, in particular, had kept their Dylan collections up-to-date, then the respected Pew Research Center might have come up with some different results to those it released in late 2019 in the responses to questions it had put to US Catholics about their beliefs about the Eucharist. Only three out of ten affirmed that, “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus”, compared to seven in ten who opted instead for their being “symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ”. Nor can the latter, larger group plead simple ignorance: two-thirds of them said they knew what the Church taught, but evidently didn’t subscribe to it themselves.
Now, as ever, there’s a fair bit of caveating to be done here. Different surveys, asking differently worded questions, to differently sampled selections of Catholics, can – and indeed have – come up with rather different proportions. A 2011 study by William D’Antonio and colleagues, for example, found the overall proportions almost reversed: 63 per cent said that they believed the bread and wine “really became” Christ’s body and blood at the consecration. Have the beliefs of American Catholics really shifted so quickly in the space of eight years? Or is something else going on – perhaps relating to respondents’ parsing of Pew’s “actually become” versus D’Antonio’s more traditional “really become”? Truth be told, we don’t really know. Such is the practice of sociology in this postlapsarian lacrimarum valle.
Either way, though, let us take it as established that – and please do forgive us this lapse into technical jargon – A Pretty Big Chunk of US Catholics, probably somewhere between one and two-thirds of them, don’t seem to be fully on board with the Church’s Dylanesque dogma when it comes to the Eucharist. The US bishops acknowledge that this is a serious problem – and one perhaps not unrelated to several other issues relating to “eucharistic coherence” (as they seem to be calling it). We suspect that the publication of Pew’s survey results raised more than a few gloomy thoughts in the minds of Britain’s Catholics: “If things are that bad in ‘religious America’, how much, much worse must they be over here?”
Well, let’s find out, shall we?
As it so happens, and thanks to the generosity of a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, we asked the polling organisation Savanta ComRes to administer a full-scale, nationally representative survey of British Catholics in late-2019. Since this was one of very few surveys ever to have been done about Catholic beliefs (take a bow Michael Hornsby-Smith and Linda Woodhead; we stand on the shoulders of giants), we seized the opportunity to ask all manner of questions of our 1,837 respondents. These ran the full gamut of demographics, moral and social attitudes, political views, and the religious “Three Bs” of believing, behaving, and belonging. We look forward to sharing several of our findings with Tablet readers over the coming months (though you all have to promise to buy our book, due out next year from Oxford University Press, in return). Here, though, let’s focus on just one question. What precisely do British Catholics believe about the Eucharist?
According to our study, 51 per cent of self-identified Catholics in Britain say that they “probably” or “definitely” believe in the “Real Presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist”: a figure that puts them in the middle of American Catholicism’s Pretty Big Chunk. For comparison, the proportions of British Catholics believing in other traditional hallmarks of Catholic doctrines were: Purgatory (46 per cent), the intercessory powers of saints (53 per cent), and religious miracles (61 per cent).
Things really start to get interesting when we divide up British Catholics into different groups. While there’s no obvious gender divide between men and women (at least on this issue), age is clearly a big factor. Very striking here – and the opposite of what Pew found in the USA – is that younger Catholics here tend to have a more robust belief in the Real Presence than older Catholics. More than six in ten 18-24-year-olds affirmed a probable or definite belief in the doctrine compared to only four in ten of the 55-64-year-olds. “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/And your old road is rapidly agin”, as the “Eucharistic fundamentalist” Dylan (to borrow a description of 18-24-year-old students coined by a 55-64-year-old colleague of ours) also sang. In fact, this age effect is evident in every decadal cohort, with each group being a bit more eucharistically orthodox than the next-older cohort. Only the 65-and-overs slightly buck this trend, though even these are still the second least orthodox age category. Boomers, eh?
Rather less surprising, though even more striking, is the divide between different levels of churchgoers. More than 80 per cent of British Catholics who say they attend Mass every week affirm a belief in the Real Presence. At the other end of the scale, around 20 per cent of those who never attend (other than for special occasions, such as baptisms, weddings and funerals) do. The very broad range of people in-between these attending extremes, fittingly, average out somewhere in the middle.
There’s a great deal more to be said about all this. (Did we mention we’re writing a book?) Things may not, as so often, be altogether all that they seem. For instance, half of British Catholics may indeed believe, with some greater or lesser degree of conviction, in the Real Presence. But then half of them say they believe in “Spiritual energy located in physical things, such as mountains, trees and crystals” (50 per cent). Spoiler alert: there’s rather more overlap between those two groups than one might necessarily expect. Even more puzzlingly, what exactly are we to make of the higher beliefs in the Real Presence among the young? Is this finally tangible proof of some rumoured new stirring of commitment among Catholic young adults? Or is it purely a statistical phantom – caused, perhaps, by a greater propensity of younger, more weakly believing Catholics to simply stop identifying as Catholic altogether, thus inflating the average of those who are left behind (a kind of reverse Rapture, one might say)? For what it’s worth, our own strong suspicion is that it’s a combination of both … but we’ll have more to say about that in future dispatches.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”, as someone – we forget who – once sang. But it can occasionally be helpful to have social scientists, with a helpful bit of grant funding, to know which way the Church goes.
Stephen Bullivant is professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Mary’s University; Ben Clements is associate professor, School of History, Politics and International Relations, at the University of Leicester.