The purpose of this report is very simple: it aims to provide a set of reliable, up-to-date statistics on the overall state of Catholicism in England and Wales.
Each of the four chapters covers a key area:
• The place of Catholicism within the religious make-up of England and Wales as a whole.
• The demographic profile (age, sex, race/ethnicity) of the Catholic subpopulation.
• Levels of retention, disaffiliation, and conversion.
• Levels of church attendance.
While the natural focus of each chapter is on Catholics, where useful and appropriate, comparisons will sometimes be drawn to the general population, 'Christians in general', and/or selected other denominations. This is most obviously the case in chapter one, which presents data on English and Welsh religion as a whole.
The original analyses in this report are all based upon publicly available data collected as part of the highly respected British Social Attitudes survey (BSA), administered by NatCen Social Research. Most of the charts and tables presented here are based on the BSA's most recently released waves (2012-14 inclusive), although earlier years are sometimes used for the purposes of historical comparison
