Published July 23, 2010

(Rainer Ebert/Flickr)

What do you call a Catholic who stops going to church for a few years? What about someone who disposes of the faith altogether?

The Catholic church calls them “lapsed Catholics,” a term that Radio Boston host Meghna Chakrabarti used Thursday when talking with representatives of the Boston Archdiocese. The church’s new ad campaign, “Catholics Come Home,” is designed to lure strays back to flock.

On wbur.org, Lynn Annen commented:

I find the term insulting. The Catholic Church might want to refer to me as a “lapsed Catholic”, but I am very happy to call myself an Episcopalian!

And Meghna responded:

I did not intend to use the term ‘lapsed’ in the same way that some officials might (i.e. to indicate any personal failing in the person that’s chosen to leave the church). I simply used it interchangably with other phrases as a form of conversational shorthand. However, you make a strong case that it might be best to stick with the clear and simple ‘former Catholic.’ However, now that I think about it, I’ve heard other Catholics take offense to using the term ‘former,’ because to them, their faith remains resolute. It’s the institution of the church that departed from them.

See why this is so interesting?

I see it as a sort of continuum. “Lapsed” suggests something temporary. For example, my AAA membership lapsed a few months ago, and their telemarketers harass me with offers to renew every other week. “Former” sounds to me a lot like someone who has given up the church.

Reporter Adam Ragusea read through some of the volume of research on the topic of Catholics and self-identification. Here’s what Adam found:

(Akbar Simonse/Flickr)

According to a Pew survey, among people who have left Catholicism, about half are now other types of Christians — and the other half are non-religious. A tiny slice has gone to other religions.

According to a survey done by Ariela Keysar and her colleagues at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., the number of Americans identifying with no religion whatsoever has almost doubled in the last 20 years — 8 percent in 1990, 15 percent in 2008.

Of those people who have gone from being religious to not being religious, 40 percent were raised Catholic in a country that’s about a quarter Catholic. So Catholics are disproportionately jumping ship on their religion AND religion in general.

According to Keysar, Adam says, when someone starts to drift away from their faith, their identification is the last thing to go:

They might gradually stop following the teachings, they might gradually stop going to services, but they continue to identify as Catholic or whatever for some time after they’ve effectively left the religion. And the surveys lump those people in as “Catholic,” because the surveys simply ask, What are you?

Now, those are the people who I think we, as journalists, could appropriately call “lapsed Catholics,” in the sense that their current state represents a deviation, rather than a transformation, as in the case of those people who, when asked, actively identify as something else.

My colleague Sonari Glinton, a Roman Catholic, says you never really leave in the church’s eyes — that is, unless you’re excommunicated or you formally renounce your faith.

What do you think? Are you a former — or lapsed — Catholic? What language should we adopt in the newsroom?