Catholics in the Dark

From the Associated Press:

A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.

Forty-five percent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn't know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.

The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion...

Atheists and agnostics scored highest, with an average of 21 correct answers [out of 32 questions], while Jews and Mormons followed with about 20 accurate responses. Protestants overall averaged 16 correct answers, while Catholics followed with a score of about 15.

In the wake of Cardinal Newman's beatification, the results of this survey are sobering, to say the least. What would this great educator and scholar say about this? Where across America have his "ideas" of a Catholic university been imbibed? We hear so much ballyhoo from the Catholic cognoscenti about the high standards and excellence of Catholic schools in America. What a complete joke! The results of this survey should (but probably won't) serve as a clarion call for bishops in this country to finally get serious about Catholic identity in schools. This is an embarrassment. And what does this survey tell us about what most pastors are preaching from the pulpit on Sundays? Surely doctrine isn't among the topics brought up.

You can read the entire survey here.