Catholics Come Home, a lay organization faithful to church teachings, is launching the church’s first nationwide television ad campaign inviting millions of inactive and former Catholics to return to the fold.
Catholics Come Home’s TV commercials, which show personal family moments in church along with images from the broad sweep of Catholicism through history, are scheduled to appear on all major networks in all big markets Dec. 16 through Jan. 8.
While the number of U.S. Catholics has been stable at 24 percent to 25 percent of the adult population for decades because of immigration, Catholicism has experienced the greatest losses of U.S.-born members, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s landmark 2008 survey of 35,000 U.S. adults.
Almost one in three Americans was raised Catholic, yet less than one in four remained so, the survey found.
Pew researchers concluded that roughly 10 percent of American adults, or 22.5 million, are former Catholics. That would qualify lapsed Catholics as the second-largest single U.S. denomination, behind Catholics, at 54.8 million, and just ahead of the Southern Baptist Convention’s 15.1 million members, according to Pew charts.
The $3.5 million campaign’s ads are slated to run during such news programs as “60 Minutes,” “The Today Show” and “NBC Nightly News” as well as during top prime-time series such as “NCIS” and all major college football bowl games on the Dish Network.
The ads, scheduled to air more than 400 times during the three-week run, could reach an estimated 250 million viewers.
“In our 2,000-year-history, the church has never run a nationwide campaign like this,” said Catholics Come Home founder and president Tom Peterson. It has, in recent years, run regional ad campaigns and focused on several major cities.
In the U.S., Peterson said, about a third of the country’s Catholics attend Mass regularly, about a third attend occasionally, and about a third never go.
A recent poll by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University reported that 42.7 million Catholics, or two-thirds of U.S. Catholics, are not going to Mass.
People have liked being gently reminded they have another family to come home to, Peterson said. People get busy. They get out of the habit of Mass. These compassionate messages touch them, he said.
The Catholic News Service reported in 2009 that ads broadcast in the dioceses of Phoenix and Corpus Christi, Texas, resulted in 12 percent and 17.7 percent increases, respectively, in weekly Mass attendance, which continued for months.
When past campaigns aired in Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta and Boston, Peterson said, Mass attendance increased an average of 10 percent. Since 2008, the group said, the ads have helped 300,000 people return to church.
Peterson said his group is tentatively planning an in-depth six-week evangelization in the Denver market during Advent (pre-Christmas) 2012 or the 2013 Lenten season.
The national Catholic media campaign will overlap one launched in October by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. TV, billboard, bus and Internet ads aimed at improving Americans’ perceptions of Mormons are scheduled to run in Denver and the Front Range through February. The campaign has been running in a dozen U.S. cities.
The U.S. Catholic Church reports 68.5 million registered members of all ages. According to a 2011 study by Georgetown’s CARA, the total U.S. population identifying as Catholic is currently 77.7 million.
“During these turbulent times and with our economic problems, our hope rests in Jesus, and his Church leads the way,” Peterson said.
Some lapsed Catholics aren’t sure it’s that simple.
“I’ll come back when married men can be priests and nuns and all women are treated fair,” said lapsed Catholic Pat Dennish of Denver. “I’ll come back when I believe bishops don’t lie to cover up for priests’ crimes.”
In a Nov. 23 address, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley addressed some of the concerns expressed by alienated members, acknowledging that some had stopped going to church because they had been “hurt by the actions of someone in the church or because of a difficulty with church teaching.
“From my first day as archbishop of Boston and perhaps for the rest of my days, I will always be asking the forgiveness of all those who have been hurt by the actions, or inaction, of people and leaders in the church,” he said. “Please do not let those experiences and memories separate you from the love of Christ and of our Catholic family and prevent you from receiving the grace of the sacraments.”
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
