Changing Patterns of Religious Practice and Belief among Church-attending Catholic Women in Australia

Authors

  • Tracy McEwan University of Newcastle

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.37574

Keywords:

Catholic Church, women and religion, generations, church attenders, religious identity

Abstract

In Australia, women currently outnumber men in both Catholic congregations and the Catholic workforce. However, for complex reasons, the Mass attendance rates of women are declining. In opposition to this general shift away from church participation, a small yet significant group of Catholic women are still engaging in parish life. Using quantitative analysis to examine data collected in the 2006, 2011 and 2016 National Church Life Survey (NCLS), this article will explore the private and public practices, orthodoxy, and religious salience of Catholic church-attending women in Australia. It will consider reasons for an overall reduction in these measures of religiosity in successive generations and investigate apparent anomalies that find younger Catholic church-attending women possessing measures of religious practice that contest the notion of a uniform generational decline in Catholic women's religiosity.

Author Biography

  • Tracy McEwan, University of Newcastle

    Tracy McEwan is a PhD candidate in theology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her area of research is the religious identity and participation of Generation X (Gen X) women in the Australian Catholic Church. Tracy has a Master of Theology from the University of Newcastle and a Bachelor of Applied Science (Mathematics) from the University of Technology Sydney. Tracy was the NCLS Summer Scholar in 2018 and is currently working as a tutor for BBI-TAITE.

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Published

2019-06-25

How to Cite

McEwan, T. (2019). Changing Patterns of Religious Practice and Belief among Church-attending Catholic Women in Australia. Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, 31(3), 186-215. https://doi.org/10.1558/jasr.37574