Inadequate religious education and formation of U.S. Catholics in their faith has weakened the Church when it is being “explicitly attacked”, a senior American archbishop has said.

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco said that many of the 72 million Catholics were not practising their faith because they were never properly taught it.

He said the result was a weakened and divided Church, with many nominal, and some churchgoing Catholics, such as U.S. President Joe Biden, now siding with a secular consensus often increasingly hostile to the teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church.