Where recent trends show Catholic Mass attendance levels in the United Kingdom and the United States have all but returned to post-pandemic levels, the Archdiocese of Toronto finds itself still with a ways to go.

The Archdiocese is witnessing approximately 18-per-cent fewer people in its parishes' pews for Mass compared to pre-pandemic years, though the faithful have slowly returned since church doors have reopened.

Statistics from the Office of Spiritual Affairs show that the recorded weekend Mass attendance in 2019 was 266,519 parishioners. As many parishes pivoted to virtual offerings following outright cancellations of Mass in 2020 when COVID shuttered the doors of churches everywhere, the number plummeted to 89,386, a decrease of more than 65 per cent.

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As restrictions eased in 2021, attendance rose to 114,550 before increasing by 47.9 per cent to 169,482 in 2022. The 200,000 mark was surpassed a year later with an average of 204,713 in 2023 before climbing again to 217,780 last year.

Maribel Mayorga, director of communications for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, said information on attendance numbers would be collected diocese by diocese and that no formal reporting structure to the CCCB for national numbers exists at the moment. Still, the pattern in Toronto is shared by dioceses across Canada.

Following the amalgamation of the former Diocese of Alexandria-Cornwall with the Archdiocese of Ottawa in 2020, attendance records remain fairly low in the nation’s capital: 2019 saw an average of 52,330 parishioners attending Mass, with the immediate decline during the beginning of the pandemic cushioned by the diocese merger. An average of 43,164 parishioners was seen in 2020 before dropping to 23,179 a year later. 

By 2023, the average number of attendees within the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall rose to 36,720. Figures for 2024 are expected later this spring and are anticipated to be slightly higher than last year. 

The Archdiocese of Vancouver shows a similar trend to that of the Archdiocese of Toronto, with statistics showing an increase in attendance over the last few years.

Surveys for Mass attendance were taken over two weekends each October: 2019 held the highest number at 82,684 before a seismic dropoff to a mere 18,078 in 2020. The estimate rose to 49,748 in 2021 before slowly returning to 72,594 in 2024, nearly 10,000 parishioners fewer than pre-pandemic days.

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Reports were less conclusive on the east coast, with the Archdiocese of Halifax-Yarmouth noting that not all parishes consistently took or submitted attendance numbers each weekend. Because of this, attendance ranged from 3,000+ to over 10,000+ on any given weekend when data was beginning to be collected in 2022.

Attendance figures are rising across the Atlantic as well, with data from the England and Wales bishops’ conference showing the number of Mass attendees increasing to nearly 555,000 in 2023, up from 503,008 in 2022.

Stephen Bullivant, professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St. Mary’s University in London, told OSV News that the increase in attendance in a post-COVID world is a genuine reflection of Catholics who are returning for a reason. He predicts that most Catholics who returned to Mass after the pandemic had already done so by 2022.

“Because we sort of cleared out the people who would be going anyway (due to COVID-19), there’s a sense in which the people who have come back are the ‘harder core’ of people,” he said. “After 60 years of secularization, after the abuse crisis, you’ve every reason not to be there — you’re there because it’s important to you.” 

Though there are no official American numbers, a report from the Arlington Catholic Herald showed that Mass attendance within Virginia’s Diocese of Arlington has risen to just south of pre-pandemic levels. A count from last October showed that nearly 28.8 per cent of an estimated 433,000 registered Catholics in the diocese attended weekend Mass, a figure 1.5-per-cent higher than the October 2023 count.

The diocese sat at an average of 132,710 attendees in 2019 before dwindling to 98,443 in 2021 and returning to an impressive 125,164 in 2024. 

“There is a lot more that needs to be done,” Fr. Richard E. Dyer, pastor of St. Thomas à Becket Church in Reston, Virginia, told the Arlington Catholic Herald, including drawing more young people to the parish through youth ministry.

According to a recent post under the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University’s Nineteen Sixty-four research blog, in-person Sunday Mass attendance could be increasing across the entirety of the United States.  

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Mark Gray, CARA’s director of polls, explained that the institute can gather approximate estimates by searching Google trends for terms associated with interest in Mass attendance. Although fluctuating with days of obligation such as Christmas and Easter, known survey attendance reference points allow CARA to see search volumes associated with actual levels of attendance over time. 

As reported by OSV News, Gray said that when online Mass attendance is factored in, the data "almost looks like a straighter distribution” during the pandemic lockdowns. Since Christmas 2024, Gray mentioned that things are “back to normal."