The general belief of Nigerians being highly religious was given further credence recently as the Catholics in Nigeria topped the list for the highest mass attendance numbers in the world.
A recent compilation of new data by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University sheds light on the countries around the world that have the highest Mass attendance numbers.
CARA researchers used data from the World Values Survey (WVS), a major international study of religious belief that has been conducted for decades, to examine 36 countries with large Catholic populations. Of those countries, the researchers ranked them by the percentage of self-identified Catholics who say they attend Mass weekly or more, excluding weddings, funerals, and baptisms.
According to the data, Nigeria boasts the highest proportion of Catholics who attend Mass weekly or more, with 94% of Catholics in Nigeria saying they attend Mass at least weekly.
Kenya comes second with 73% of Catholics attending mass and Lebanon surprisingly many comes in third place with 69% mass attendance.
In June of 2022, gunmen believed to be Islamic extremists opened fire on Catholic worshippers attending Pentecost Mass at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in southwestern Nigeria, killing at least 50. This and other increasingly frequent attacks on Catholic churches and the latest trend of Kidnapping Catholic priests make such a level of mass attendance notably high and impressive.
Reacting to this news, newly appointed Cardinal Peter Ebere Okpaleke, who leads the diocese of Ekwulobia, sees Nigeria’s high Mass attendance as “both something to cheer and a challenge” to work to preserve “this invaluable gift from God.”
He said that there are three reasons why Nigerian Catholics are the most devoted with the highest number of mass attendance all over the world; “ The Nigerian society as a whole has “a traditional worldview” that recognizes the presence of God in life and society, according to Okpaleke. Nigerians have not lost sight of how the spiritual world imbues everyday life.
“There is a general awareness of the role of the divine in human life. It is this awareness that translates into Mass attendance for Catholics, who come to Mass to encounter Christ in the Eucharist,” the cardinal said.
He noted that high Mass attendance “cuts across income brackets” with the poor and the rich, the uneducated and the educated all drawn to the sacraments by a shared desire for God.
In other parts of the world where secularization has atrophied a culture’s sense of the divine, the Church can benefit by emphasizing how it is a “gateway” that fulfils the “inner hunger in the human being to relate to the divine,” he said.
He also shared that in Nigeria there is a strong sense of community in the churches as people see their parishes as their community which gives them a sense of belonging. The family he said also plays a huge role In Nigeria, there is a strong sense that “the family is ‘the domestic church,’” a term used by early Church Fathers and emphasized by St. John Paul II in Familiaris Consortio.
The family is still viewed as the primary place where the “faith is handed over to the next generation,” Okpaleke said.
He recommends that Catholics around the world “pay pastoral attention to the family as the domestic church because that is where everyone’s faith experience is formed.”
In 29 of the 36 countries examined, fewer than half of self-identified Catholics attend Sunday Mass. The researchers acknowledged that the use of self-reported Mass attendance numbers could inflate the figures slightly, meaning actual attendance numbers could be, in reality, slightly lower across the board.
While the number for mass attendance in other countries is not as high as that of Nigeria, More than half of all Catholics attend weekly or more in the Philippines (56%), Colombia (54%), Poland (52%), and Ecuador (50%).
The WVS data did not include the U.S., but CARA’s polling data indicated that the percentage of Catholics in the United States who attend Mass weekly or more is 17%, even though more than three-quarters of U.S. Catholics consider themselves to be a “religious person.”
Continuing down from there, the lowest levels of weekly attendance were observed in Lithuania (16%), Germany (14%), Canada (14%), Latvia (11%), Switzerland (11%), Brazil (8%), France (8%), and the Netherlands (7%).
According to CARA researchers, “One might assume that the more religious Catholics are in a country, the more likely they are to be frequent Mass attenders, Yet, there is not a strong correlation between the numbers identifying as a ‘religious’ Catholic and frequent Mass attendance.”
