alt Hacker News"are Catholic" is so fuzzy though. "identify as" and "practices" are wildly different experiences, at least on the receiving end. I'm sure that percentage is mostly consisting of "identify as" rather than "practicing".
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For this purpose identify is enough - as anyone who identifies will be horrified even if they otherwise don't care about the church. Many non-Catholics (including non-Christians) are also horrified even though they otherwise don't care about what the pope says at all.
There is nothing more catholic than not practicing catholicism.
100,000 people joined the catholic church in america this week.
At this point I don't think anything other than the church retains the ability to present a coherent moral or metaphysical intellectual framework to people who care about that kind of thing.
I would be very surprised if the united states is not majority catholic in ~100 years
There's likely a large group in the middle - IDs as, but not regular practitioners of, who would absolutely not like being excommunicated despite their lack of practice.