WASHINGTON — Catholic parents, like the rest of modern society, can be almost religious about visiting their favorite social-media sites every day. But do they regularly engage with their parish or broader church community on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest — or even interact online generally?

According to a recent survey, that answer nine times out of 10 is most likely to be “No,” showing a massive area for growth in the Church’s 21st-century evangelization of the family.

In a survey of more than 1,000 Catholic parents between 25 and 45 years old raising minor children conducted by Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), these Catholic parents are more likely than the broader adult Catholic population to have social-media profiles.

In fact, seven out of 10 Catholic parents told CARA they visited their favorite social-media site at least once a day. More than eight out of 10 Catholic parents reported watching videos on YouTube. The most popular social-media sites used by these parents were Facebook (73%), Pinterest (24%), Instagram (21%) and Twitter (20%).

But despite the high rate of activity of Catholic parents on social media, the Church has problems connecting with them through anything other than the parish bulletin and its inserts. And CARA found that only 53% of Catholic parents go at least once a month to Mass; 42% of Catholic parents get their information about the faith from the bulletin.

Close to one out of two Catholics (49%) told CARA they never used any Catholic media — print or digital — to get information about their faith in the past month.

When it comes to online content, the Church barely cracks double digits with parents: Twelve percent of Catholic parents reported using the parish website; 10% the diocesan newspaper (print and online); 9% visited Facebook accounts associated with Catholics or Catholic institutions. The percentages drop even further, as 3% of Catholic parents checked out a Catholic news site or the Vatican for information on the faith in the past month, and 2% checked out the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website, as well as diocesan websites or Catholic charities and schools.

For Catholic evangelization specialists, the numbers do not look good for a Church that has been called by Pope Francis to take on the smell of the sheep and evangelize, particularly the family.

Brandon Vogt, content director for Father Robert Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, said that the Church is facing a “challenge and opportunity” that needs to be addressed now.

“If you’re a business, it’s a no-brainer: All the people we’re trying to reach are congregating in one place,” he said. “Instead of waiting for them to come back to us, we need to go out to them.”

The urgency for the Church to increase its presence online was underscored by CARA’s finding that almost seven out of 10 Catholic parents do not have their children enrolled in traditional brick-and-mortar settings, whether it is parish-based education or Catholic schools.

“As fewer and fewer people are going to Catholic schools, or darkening the doors of our churches, we need to go out to them as missionaries, and the Internet offers us a direct channel to reach out and find them,” said Vogt.

Edward Sri, director of the Augustine Institute’s Symbolon program, said the Denver-based apostolate developed its Symbolon catechesis program, the yDisciple youth program and the Beloved marriage preparation and enrichment program on digital platforms precisely in order to get parents information on the faith “in the way that people are more and more used to getting their information.”

He explained more than 4,000 parishes have access to Symbolon’s online digital platform, where the pastor buys the subscription for the entire parish, so every family has access to the program’s videos, discussion questions and digital workbooks.

“What we’re seeing is more and more people who may not come to an event Wednesday night at the parish, but in the comfort and privacy of their home and on their own time schedule, they might start looking at these. And we’re seeing more parents use these resources,” he said.

 

Church’s Social-Media Sins?

But parishes and the broader Church in the U.S. may also need to examine their consciences about how their own actions may be preventing them from connecting with Catholic parents and families in their digital environments.

“The potential is there for all those things to reach especially parents, but any Catholic, more efficiently and more effectively,” said Matthew Warner, Catholic digital-media expert and founder of Flocknote.

“The sad part is that most parishes are doing a terrible job with all these forms of communication,” Warner, a former Register blogger, added. “It’s just that the bulletin is the form of communication that we force into people’s hands once a week.”

Warner indicated that parishes largely have to change their mentality: Digital platforms can only propose the faith; they can’t be imposed in the way that the bulletin or church announcements is delivered to a relatively captive audience.

“People will not listen to you if they don’t want to,” he tells Flocknote’s clients. Even though email and text can reach more people, he said they cannot treat those methods as if they were the bulletin. “If you send something they don’t care about too many times, you’ve just lost them: They’ve unsubscribed, they’ve blocked you, or whatever.”

“Until Church leadership changes its mindset about how these tools can help them, they’re going to keep failing at it.”

A big part of the problem, Vogt pointed out, is that many content-rich Catholic websites have self-selected out of a wider audience because they are not user-friendly, especially to people searching on mobile devices. As of 2014, more people began accessing the Internet through mobile devices than through PCs.

“That’s a problem, because you automatically lose a lot of people, regardless of how good your content is,” Vogt said. “You have to have a website or video content that people can actually view on their devices.”

Whatever the reasons, Catholic media — print or digital — is largely not on parents’ radar: 62% of Catholic parents said they had not watched, read or listened to any religious media content in the three months prior to the survey.

When CARA asked about their opinions of Catholic media, 47% of parents said they were unaware of it. Another 30% were indifferent. Just 18% said they enjoyed it.

Catholic parents reported mixed feelings of satisfaction with the current fare of television and film content on religion, Christianity or Catholicism: Just 15% of parents said they were “very much” satisfied with it. Forty-four percent said they were “somewhat” satisfied, while a combined 41% reported they were “little” or “not at all” satisfied with it.

Vogt said the large numbers of Catholics who are dissatisfied with the content should send the message that it is not enough to create Catholic media: It also has to “be high-quality, engaging and attractive to people who aren’t by nature attracted to anything that has to do with Catholicism.”

 

Potential for Evangelization

Sri thinks a revolution is taking place, in terms of teaching the faith, as more evangelists take the dynamic approach of Father Barron in developing programs — an approach Augustine Institute has imitated with Symbolon — and realize that Catholic parents and their families today are “not going to want to watch a man in a church for 40 minutes.”

“One of the things we realized is that the real competitor is Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hollywood,” he said. “That’s where people’s minds are, and we need to develop programming and catechesis that will be able to take the timeless teachings of Jesus Christ but present them in a timely way that captivate the hearts and minds of modern men and women.”

Warner added that parishes can also compete by presenting personal stories or videos of how parishioners’ lives were changed at the parish. For example, a minute-long testimonial from a Catholic parent about how the parish made a difference in her family’s Thanksgiving “or someone sharing how the RCIA program just turned his life around and helped him find meaning and purpose,” Warner said.

“If we focus on doing the things that are local, meaningful and personal, then that competes, because no one else can get that local story of someone sitting next to you in your pew. You can meet that person and have a friendship with that person.”

CARA found that more than half of Catholic parents enjoyed watching full-length shows related to news, comedy, children’s programming and dramas, while just under half (42%) watched lifestyle, history or documentaries. But less than one out of five (18%) Catholic parents reported deliberately engaging with religious content on television, and just 9% watched YouTube for religious content.

But there are ways around the barriers: Vogt said Father Barron builds low-barrier digital bridges with people who are not seeking him out for a homily or a catechetical lesson when he “just comments on a popular movie, book or cultural event, such as reviewing the latest Avengers movie.” The Word on Fire YouTube channel has more than 61,000 subscribers.

“The challenge for the next generation of evangelists and Church leaders,” Vogt said, is: “How do we become present and attractive in a digital world?”

Peter Jesserer Smith is the Register’s Washington correspondent.