In July, a group called the Real Presence Coalition undertook a national survey of lay Catholics in the United States to try to understand why there has been such a loss of faith in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist – a Pew Forum study found a decade ago that 70 per cent of Catholics do not believe in this fundamental dogma.
It was the single largest survey of lay Catholics ever conducted in the US, and involved 16,000 participants reasonably representative of American Catholics in terms of age, sex and diocese, though inevitably weighted towards those congregations that included members of the Coalition.
