The Changing Catholic Family
Parents are the primary educators of their children, as is repeatedly asserted in Vatican documents. Parents are not only the first educators in a child’s lifetime, but they are also most important at every stage of a child’s formation.
Everything in Catholic education, then, depends on the health of the family. But tragically, the American family is not well, and Catholic children are suffering the consequences.
Restoring the family and rebuilding a culture that properly nurtures children requires at least a kernel of faithful Catholic education. Our patron, St. John Henry Newman, knew the importance of forming faithful, rational, and virtuous laypeople.
For this, we have the example of Newman Guide Recommended schools, homeschool programs, colleges, and graduate programs. Their leaders exhibit the dogged determination and faithful trust in Providence that sustained the 19th-century founders of parochial schools—St. John Neumann, St. Katharine Drexel, and many other heroes of Catholic education.
Family in crisis
One recent sign of trouble in the family is the plummeting number of Catholic baptisms of children. From 2010 to 2023, child baptisms dropped 37 percent, according to the Official Catholic Directory. Since 1970, when 1.09 million children were cleansed of original sin and welcomed into the Church, the number of baptisms has dropped by half.
This is a natural consequence of the marriage decline that likewise began in the 1970s. Catholic marriages declined 74 percent from 1970 to 2023.
Consider that for a moment! Only about one-fourth as many Catholics get married in the Church today, relative to 1970. To call it a “marriage crisis” seems an understatement.
Did you know that, without immigration, the Church in the U.S. would be disappearing quickly? It may seem a consolation that the number of adult Catholics in America has increased more than 40 percent since 1970 because of new immigrants, but it only puts the family crisis in a worse light. Adjusted for the total number of Catholics in 1970, the marriage rate has actually declined 82 percent and the baptism rate 64 percent in a little more than five decades.
Another factor is the shrinking size of those Catholic families that remain intact. In the 1970s, fewer than a third of Catholic women who had ever been married had one or two children, and 21 percent had five or more (General Social Survey). But in the last decade (2010-2019), only 6 percent of ever-married Catholic women had five or more children, and fully half had just one or two. There are many factors impacting this, including higher costs of child rearing, but surely contraceptive use, abortion, divorce, and cultural biases against large families are also to blame.
The total fertility rate for U.S. Catholics in 2024 was about 2.2, according to Pew Research—just under the rate for Evangelical Protestants and far below the rate needed for the Catholic Church to grow, given massive numbers of young Catholics leaving the Church every year.
Education of children
Amid fewer marriages, fewer children, and fewer baptisms, we also see fewer Catholics educated in the Faith.
More than half of Catholics born in the 1940s attended Catholic schools, The Pillar reports. But as of 2021, only 29 percent of Catholics born in the 2010s had ever enrolled in a Catholic school.
It’s astonishing: in the 40 years leading up to 1960, Catholic school enrollment nearly tripled to more than 5 million students (NCEA). Now, 65 years later, enrollment has dropped more than two-thirds to well below the count in 1920. All that work, all those prayers and donations have been erased, and young Catholics are further separated from the Church than they were before the rise of parochial education.
Fewer than 10 percent of Millennials (born 1982-2005) attend weekly Mass, compared to more than 55 percent of the Silent Generation (born 1925-1942), according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Mass attendance declines to about 4 percent for Millennials who have never attended a Catholic school.
If there’s a lesson to learn from all this, it’s that the Church had it right all along. Yet today, few parents realize and even fewer pastors remind them that it’s their solemn duty to provide a truly Catholic education to their children.
“Parents are to entrust their children to those schools which provide a Catholic education. If they are unable to do this, they are obliged to take care that suitable Catholic education is provided for their children outside the schools” (Canon 798).
Clergy “have the duty of arranging everything so that all the faithful have a Catholic education” (Canon 794).
How, then, is it that the vast majority of Catholic children and young adults today attend secular schools and universities?
In 2024, 81 percent of Catholic families with children said they chose public schools, and another 5.4 percent had kids in secular private schools, according to the American National Election Studies. Just 18.4 percent chose private religious schools—hopefully, most of them Catholic schools. (School Choice Chart with this note: The portions add up to more than 100 percent, because some families have children in two or more types of schooling.)
On the other hand, how is it that many parents who are serious about Catholic education have difficulty finding schools and colleges that are both academically strong and faithful to their mission?
Increasingly, Catholic parents are finding their own solutions when Catholic schools don’t measure up. In 2024, 3.6 percent of Catholic families chose to homeschool—not nearly the rate of Protestants who homeschool (7.8 percent), but still a growing sector.
The Newman Guide Solution
Catholic homeschoolers and Catholic school students make up an outsized portion of students attending Newman Guide Recommended colleges. That’s good news! Amid the Church’s decline, The Newman Guide offers hope for a better future.
Even as parochial school enrollment slides, there is a revival of faithful Catholic education among many Mass-attending, traditional Catholic families. And even though many Catholic schools and colleges still strive to attract a population that has little interest in authentic Catholic formation, others are succeeding and growing by doubling down on their mission.
In 2024, The Cardinal Newman Society reported impressive rates of married alumni who met their spouses while attending Newman Guide institutions, including 30 percent at Wyoming Catholic College, 29 percent at Thomas Aquinas College, 28 percent at Christendom College, 25 percent at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College in Canada, and 25 percent at ITI Catholic University in Austria.
“Attending a Newman Guide Recommended college—with its promotion of the sacramental life, faithfulness to the Magisterium, and flowering of Catholic culture—increases grace in one’s soul but also increases one’s odds to find a holy spouse,” argued Patrick O’Hearn, author of Courtship of the Saints: How the Saints Met their Spouses.
As we celebrated last month on the Feast of the Holy Family, even Jesus Christ was born of a mother and raised by a foster father. He was educated in the home and, probably, by a nearby rabbi, sanctifying the family and formation by an education deeply rooted in the truths of God.
Newman Guide education is a return to what is natural and right. May God continue to bless it for the good of the Church, of families, and of young Catholics who deserve faithful Catholic education.