Baptised infants of non observant catholics are part of that count.
Only 25% of Catholics in Europe go to church and slightly more than that here in the states .
Catholicism is a tradition in most of the world. Infants are baptized and small children make their first communion as part of their family tradition and heritage. It has nothing to do with faith or doctrine or even with Christ. It is a part of a families or cultural identity .
People are "irish catholic", people celebrate "St Joseph's table" as cultural tradition.
When I left the church the first thing my father said was "but our family is Catholic" to him ( a divorced non observant Catholic ) that was a part of our identity as a family, it had nothing to do with Christ.
Many of those "converts" are related to the marriage to a Catholic and to please the loved one or so the family is a one faith family the unsaved spouse converts. Again this is not about Christ, it is about the family .
The truth is Catholic churches built to hold hundreds now have a handful at mass.
Many are called but few are chosen.
Actually, Catholics included in the count may not be very observant, but nowadays they must do something over the course of a year to be counted in a census.
Incidentally, Catholic church attendance in Europe is far higher than Protestant church attendance.
Some do. Mine was built in the 1840's, is in a depressed inner-city neighborhood, is now a mission run out of a neighboring parish, and offers 1 mass per week.
And that Mass is SRO, and most of the adults in the congregation are in their 30's or early 40's, with loads of kids in tow.
We have several seminarians and a new priest who will be ordained next month.
My husband and I are CONVERTS from Protestantism, and we were both in RCIA classes which numbered over 50.
The Church is alive and well. Sorry if some don't like it, but that's the way it is.
Quite frankly, I really don't care what the polls or the critics say. I have joined the One True Church, after years of wandering in the conflicting opinions of various branches of Protestantism. I am home, and am glad to be there.
I'll ask you again, how do you know that the Bible you use is the inspired Word of God?
At any rate, your post draws a relatively accurate picture of the damage Satan has done to the Church, either by:
1. Restricting the Truth (heterodox bishops)
2. Destroying souls (pedophile priests)
3. Leading people away from the Church (New Ageism, lies, spiritual sloth, cultural poisoning)
I would even go so far as to say that, in the coming centuries, this will be regarded as one of the darkest ages of the Church. Among about ten or fifteen nominal Catholics in my workplace, I'm the only one who attends Mass. The rest are (almost) hopelessly suffocating in secular mindsets.
My local parish has roughly 30 weddings a year. Out of that, only two or three of those couples will actually follow the teachings of the Church and/or attend Mass regularly. If we do the math, that's maybe 10% of new families actually having a sacramental dimension to their marriage. This is mind-boggling.
Contraception (as Paul VI keenly predicted) is an epedemic among nominal Catholics. There is simply no perspective anymore on the place of mankind vs. God. Once we became insistent on restraining the hand of God from His creative right, it became that much easier just to ignore Him altogether. Once that happens, there's no point in attending Mass or going to confession. Add to that the hyper-social pressure to accept diversity and reject religion as an intolerant system of tyranny, and it's not surprising that there are fewer and fewer people in church. Those of us who stay and fight the good fight have our work cut out, but the outcome is already known.
Which could be a good thing. Once away from the influence of the empty legalism and ritualism of Roman Catholicism, there is the opportunity to reach them with the truth of Christ, especially during times of crisis when many remember the great existential questions.