A new study suggests that Catholic belief in the Real Presence may be higher than previous data indicated — but measuring that belief accurately remains a tricky task for researchers.
Regular Mass attendance, however, has emerged as a key factor in determining an individual’s belief in the Real Presence.
On June 3, Vinea Research, a Maryland-based market research firm that focuses on the Catholic Church in the U.S., released “Do Catholics Truly Believe in the Real Presence?” — which concluded that 69 percent of Mass-going Catholics believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Higher levels of belief correlated with more frequent Mass attendance, Vinea found.
Vinea’s seven-page report revisited a landmark 2019 survey by Pew Research that found only 31 percent of Catholics in the U.S. believed that “during Catholic Mass, the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus.” Pew reported at the time that among Catholics attending Mass at least once a week, 63 percent believed in transubstantiation — the theological term used to describe the change of the Eucharistic bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ — but another 37 percent believed “the bread and wine are symbols.”
Yet the wording of Pew’s question was problematic, as were the response options, said Vinea founder and president Hans Plate, who has extensive experience in conducting market research for pharmaceutical and health care industries.
The Pew study “actually gave (survey participants) two responses that were both partially correct,” Plate told OSV News.
Pew had posed two questions — one knowledge-based, the other belief-oriented — about the Eucharist. In the first, Pew asked respondents, “Which of the following best describes Catholic teaching about the bread and wine used for Communion?” and asked them to select if the bread and wine “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.” A percentage of the survey takers indicated they were not sure (10 percent) or had no answer (1 percent).
In the second question, Pew asked, “Regardless of the official teaching of the Catholic Church, what do you personally believe about the bread and wine used for Communion?” with participants replying that during the Mass, the bread and wine “actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ” or “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”
Plate told OSV News that “not only did (Pew) phrase the question wrong … but they actually gave (survey participants) two responses that were both partially correct. They weren’t even mutually exclusive. … I don’t think they had any bad intentions, but they just didn’t know any better.”
Instead, said Plate, the questions needed to be phrased to better align with Catholic teaching, which — as Jesuit Father Thomas Gaunt, executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, told OSV News — holds that the bread and wine are “true Presence and symbol at the same time.”
“All sacraments are symbols,” said Father Gaunt, whose organization teamed up with the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame for a 2023 national survey on Eucharistic belief among adult Catholics in the U.S.
That report — which found 64 percent of respondents expressed belief in the Real Presence, based on collective assessments of both open- and closed-ended questions for each participant, with Mass attendance proving significant in positive responses — used questions that “better expressed the Church’s teachings around Real Presence and transubstantiation,” wrote McGrath’s associate director for research Timothy O’Malley in an October 2023 commentary.
Vinea’s rewrite of the Pew questions rendered the options for both the knowledge-based and belief questions as “Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist,” “Bread and wine are symbols of Jesus, but Jesus is not truly present,” or “Not sure.”
The Vinea study split its sample of over 2,000 Catholics — defined as age 18 or older, who attended Mass “at least once,” Plate told OSV News, on a basis ranging from “seldom” to “a few times a year” to “more than once a week” — and administered Pew’s language to half, with the remaining half answering Vinea’s revised questions.
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