Archdiocese of Boston wants Catholics to “come home”

CatholicsComeHome.org urges lapsed Catholics to return to the faith

The Archdiocese of Boston is set to launch a major public relations offensive in the coming year in a bid to bring lapsed Catholics back to church. The campaign will see television adverts run in conjunction with a range of parish events in order to entice those who have left the church to return to the faith. The Archdiocese will join forces with Catholics Come Home, an independent, non-profit Catholic apostolate which will create a Lenten (March 9-April 24, 2011) television advertising initiative for Boston media markets. The commercials will direct the viewer to the CatholicsComeHome.orgwebsite to explore answers to questions of faith and to utilize the site’s ‘parish-finder’ feature to locate their local parish community.

According to Catholic News Service, a recent campaign in Phoenix, Arizona helped 92,000 inactive Catholics return to the active practice of their faith. The Diocese of Corpus Christi, Texas experienced a comparable percentage increase following a bilingual campaign in 2009. Similar campaigns have aired in ten additional dioceses such as Providence, Rhode Island, helping to increase Mass attendance by an average of nearly 12%. The next phase of the initiative will target 12 additional dioceses, including Boston, Worcester and Portland, Maine.

The archdiocese is planning a major fundraising drive to pay for the expensive television spots, the full financial outlay of which is yet to be calculated. Tom Peterson, President and founder of Catholics Come Home told the Irish Emigrant that it is hoped that a variety of sources, including Catholics interested in sharing their faith through this unique initiative, will help to fund the push. “Nationally, our Catholics Come Home partner dioceses are averaging about a 12% increase in mass attendance at the parish level.” he added. Similar results are hoped for across the Boston area. The Boston initiative will feature TV ads in English, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as additional radio ads in Haitian Creole.

In addition to the television adverts, the archdiocese plans to use a variety of additional strategies to reach people who have left the church, including doorbelling, hosting events, and publishing literature both in print and online. It will also field phone calls and online queries about the teachings of the faith.

According to the PewResearch Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses as a result of affiliation changes in recent years. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31%) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24%) describe themselves as Catholic. In the Boston archdiocese, weekly Mass attendance fell from 376,383 in 2000 to 286,951 last year, according to the church’s own count.