Poll Reveals Key Tenets of Younger Catholics

Helping the poor and believing Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist are essential to being Catholic.

What’s not essential? Celibate male priests, teachings that oppose the death penalty and support for organized labor, according to a poll of 701 post-baby boom Catholics that sought to gauge what is nonnegotiable about their faith.

The poll found the younger Catholics agreeing with older members in putting the sacraments first, but more inclined to accept married and women clergy and to lower ecclesiastical fences with Protestants.

“There’s no doubt, after looking at this data and at other data, that the younger people would be willing to reexamine things,” said sociologist Dean Hoge of Catholic University of America.

He joined Catholic University colleague William Dinges, Sister Mary Johnson of Emmanuel College in Boston and Juan Gonzalez of Cal State Hayward to commission a telephone poll as part of a larger study of young Catholics.

Princeton Survey Research Associates interviewed Catholics ages 20 to 39 last fall. The results, released to Associated Press, show that “the sacraments are very strong, and almost the central identity of what Catholics are all about,” Hoge said.

Asked what should be essential beliefs, 65% of respondents identified God’s presence in the sacraments, while 58% cited Christ’s presence in the Eucharist.

Young Catholics also expressed an openness to other Christians.

Forty-eight percent said that in their main beliefs, today’s Catholics are essentially no different from Protestants. Half said the Catholic Church is no more faithful to the will of Christ than other Christian churches.

James Davidson, a sociologist at Purdue University who has studied generational differences among Catholics, called the findings consistent with his research on Catholic identity. “There is a kind of hierarchy to truth,” he said. “Some things are more important than others.”

Aspects of Catholic faith that poll respondents cited as key were devotion to Mary and the saints, the necessity of a pope and weekly obligation to attend Mass. More than 80% of respondents called these elements essential or important to being Catholic.

Concern for the poor was also central to Catholic identity. Nearly 60% called charitable help essential to the faith.

Only 17% deemed it “essential” to believe that priests must be male, and only 27% that they cannot marry. Another 25% considered a male priesthood--and a celibate one--to be “important” but not essential.