From as long ago as he can remember, Josey Baker's mom took him to Mass each Sunday at Immaculate Conception Catholic Parish in Columbia, Ill.From kindergarten through fifth grade, he went to Mass with his classmates every day at Immaculate Conception's school. From first grade through his senior year at Gibault Catholic High School in Waterloo, Ill., Baker took religious education classes alongside math and English.
But as he grew into adulthood, the church became less important to his faith. "A lot of people say, 'You're not Catholic because you don't abide by the pope's every rule,' " said Baker, who is now 27.
"But I don't feel like just because I don't go to church I'm going to hell. I can have my own relationship with God without going to church every week."
Baker said "the majority" of his friends from grade school and high school feel the same way.
That sentiment — and recent statistics suggesting a gradual bleeding of church membership — has leaders of the church concerned for its future.
How to herd stray Catholics back to the flock is at the top of the agenda as U.S. bishops gathered for their annual spring meeting Thursday in Orlando, Fla.
The bishops heard from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, whose pollsters released a major survey of the country's religious landscape in February.
They heard from Catholic researchers at Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, who have challenged some of the Pew results, especially those regarding Catholic retention rates.
Pew's survey found that more than a quarter of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised, either for another religion or no religion at all. Catholicism, according to the study, has lost the most members.
While nearly one in three Americans were raised in the Catholic church, today fewer than one in four describe themselves as Catholic. According to the Pew survey, about 10 percent of Americans are former Catholics.
The Georgetown researchers pointed out that among Christian denominations and other faith groups, the Pew survey showed that Catholics had the third best retention rate, after Jews and Mormons, in the country.
The survey also found that an influx of Catholic immigrants, mostly Hispanic, has kept the church membership numbers nationwide relatively flat in recent years.
In the St. Louis archdiocese, church leaders are reaching out to lapsed Catholics.
St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke established the archdiocese's office of the new evangelization last July. Its director, Hector Molina, said he has spent the last year talking to parishes about how to evangelize — something he said doesn't come easily to many Catholics.
"Unfortunately, for many Catholics (evangelism) has a negative association," he said. "Over the last couple of decades, there've been televangelists, some aggressive proselytizing from fundamentalist Christian groups, and the tactics of non-Christian groups like Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons who try to convince Catholics to abandon our faith to join them."
Tom Peterson, a former Phoenix advertising executive, is the president and founder of Catholics Come Home. Peterson test-marketed the nonprofit this spring, and the success of its Web site and slick television ads caught the attention of bishops around the country.
Peterson said officials at about 30 dioceses, including St. Louis, have contacted him about the ads in the last two months.
Molina said the archdiocese is "very interested" in running the Catholics Come Home ads here, and said that if they do air, they would likely be coupled with a grassroots "ground campaign" at all the archdiocese's parishes to get lapsed Catholics to try church again.
Michele Dillon, author of "In the Course of a Lifetime: Tracing Religious Belief, Practice, and Change," said Christians who leave church for political or lifestyle reasons often return later in life.
Those who leave in their late teens and early twenties sometimes return after starting families in order to introduce their children to their faith. Some leave again in middle age when they have other Sunday activities — travel, golf — to entertain them, but return again later in life when church becomes a social outlet.
Others leave because they disagree with an aspect of church teaching, Dillon said, but some return "because they don't believe that's enough to break their ties."
The local effort to bring lapsed Catholics back to church has been going on quietly for years. Monsignor Francis Blood, director of the archdiocese's Propagation of the Faith office, said many pastors take advantage of Easter and Christmas crowds to try to get holiday attendees to return to regular attendance.
Monsignor Patrick Hambrough, pastor of St. Mark Catholic Church in south St. Louis, does just that. St. Mark's "Catholics Returning Home" program invites lapsed Catholics, during the Easter and Christmas seasons, to try the church again. For many, "they just need to be prodded a little, or invited, or encouraged," he said.
"And once they get there it's like coming home again. There's something about it they miss."
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