Statistician Ryan Burge said that the Archdiocese of Detroit has posted workbooks that offer “unprecedented access into what is happening at the parish level across hundreds of churches in Michigan.”
In this article, Burge, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and a former Baptist pastor, offers a “30,000 foot view of the Archdiocese of Detroit based on the metrics provided in these workbooks.”
Burge writes:
In 2011, the average weekend Mass attendance in the Archdiocese was about 231,000 people. That dropped below 200,000 by 2015, it declined to 163,000 by 2019. The most recent data that these workbooks provide is from 2024, when Mass attendance was just under 140,000. According to their own reports, the Catholic Church in Detroit is recording an attendance decline of 4% per year …
If Mass attendance had simply kept pace with population growth since 2011, roughly 236,000 Catholics would show up to a Detroit-area parish this weekend. The actual number is 139,000—about 40% lower. The archdiocese is currently filling about 29% of its available pew space on a given weekend. If current trends hold, that number could slip below 20% within a few years. That’s a church with an empty building problem.