A recent report suggests that while the Church is relatively successful at keeping those born and raised Catholic, it has a poor record of making converts 

Hundreds of people in England and Wales become Catholic each year; and yet, very few of these “converts” are people raised with no religion, or who come from a non-Christian religion. This is one of the findings of a new report, “Contemporary Catholicism in England and Wales”, in which Dr Stephen Bullivant, of St Mary’s University, Twickenham, has highlighted the failures of all the Christian Churches both to hold on to the faithful and to evangelise to bring in converts.

The report found that 3.8 million English and Welsh adults identify as Catholic, although an estimated 6.2m say they were brought up Catholic. In terms of converts to Catholicism, it says that only 7.7 per cent of current Catholics were not brought up Catholics. Moreover, for every one Catholic convert, 10 Catholics no longer regard themselves as Catholic – and, of those who regard themselves as Catholic, two in every five say that they rarely or never attend Mass.

Finding converts and keeping them in the community of the faithful has been a problem from the earliest days of the Church. Jesus called on his Apostles to “go and make disciples of all the nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded …” (Matthew 28:19-20). According to the Acts of the Apostles, this is precisely what they did, beginning on Pentecost Day itself after Peter’s address to the crowds (Acts 2:37-41).