What’s the rate of conversion to the Catholic Church lately?
It seems that every parish not only has a RCIA program but also actual people in it. If most parishes have even one convert every year, that’s a lot of converts over a period of time.
Does anyone know just how many people convert each year? Has this number changed since Vatican II? What influences people to convert?
WRS
I went through RCIA back in (I think) 1998, which was fairly recently. There were about 8-10 people who did it at the same time I did.
For what it’s worth, I was 14 when I did it. I was searching for a faith, and Catholicism was what I’d (more or less) grown up in. I’ve since drifted from the church.
Just want to point out that many of those people in RCIA classes are technically not converts. When my husband converted, he was the first convert our parish had had in yers- the rest of the people in the class had been baptized as infants, some had received their first Communion, and all were now preparing to be confirmed.
This article gives a figure of 160,000 RCIA initiates in 2003.
I went throught the process in 1999, myself. Prior to this I was a Methodist.
People who convert to Catholicism nowadays, are they generally traditionalists or modernists?
WRS