Mass attendance rises in the UK, though still far below pre-pandemic levels

An altar display of items associated with 17th-century English martyr St. Edmund Arrowsmith at the Church of St. Edmund and St. Oswald in Ashton-in-Makerfield, a former mining town midway between Liverpool and Manchester / Photo credit: Joseph Kellaway Burnell

CNA Staff, Feb 12, 2025 / 16:30 pm (CNA).

Though not yet near pre-pandemic levels, Mass attendance numbers are on the rise in England and Wales, according to figures from the national bishops’ conference. 

In 2023, an estimated nearly 555,000 people attended Sunday Mass in England and Wales, a roughly 50,000-person increase over 2022, a spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales told CNA via email. 

The spokesman described the figure as “not a full return to pre-COVID levels, but it is an improvement on recent years.” He also noted that the figure may be a “slight underestimation as some parishes may not have given their figures when their diocese requested them.”

Stephen Bullivant, director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary’s University in Twickenham, London, told CNA he is “tentatively hopeful that this trend for modest (re)growth will continue in subsequent years.”

He pointed to a 2024 article he wrote for the Tablet in which he noted that while Mass attendance in the U.K. has significantly decreased over the past several decades — leading to projections of a near-extinction of Catttholicism — such dire projections seem unlikely due to signs of growth in some areas of U.K. Catholic life. 

That said, Mass attendance stood at roughly 829,000 across England, Wales and Scotland on a “typical Sunday” in 2019, Bullivant wrote, meaning attendance still has a long way to climb before it reaches pre-pandemic levels, if ever. 

In addition, a late 2024 study showed that the sexual abuse crisis deeply affected Catholics in Britain, with a third of Mass-goers saying they have reduced their Mass attendance because of concerns about the child sexual abuse crisis.

In his article, however, Bullivant pointed to signs of renewed vigor and new growth in some areas in the Church in the U.K., such as anecdotal reports of increased attendance at Easter services and relatively large numbers of adult converts, thriving university chaplaincies, and vibrant diasporic and immigrant communities, suggesting that while secularization has deeply impacted the Church, it is unlikely to result in complete disappearance. 

“To put it frankly, rumours of the Church’s death – albeit four decades hence – have been very greatly exaggerated. There’s a big difference between ‘not dying out’ and ‘bursting with new life,’ however,” Bullivant wrote. “British Catholicism might be the former, but that needn’t mean it’s anything close to the latter.”

The news from the U.K. comes following recent estimates suggesting that Mass attendance numbers in the United States have recovered fully following the pandemic’s disruptions — though U.S. weekly attendance still stands at only 24%. 

The new analysis by the U.S.-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) used national surveys and Google Trends data to estimate attendance, which also revealed that attendance for important holy days like Easter and Christmas has recovered from the COVID crisis.