Do Only a Third of U.S. Catholics Believe in the Real Presence?

In 2019, Pew Research Center released a study with the headline, “Just one-third of U.S. Catholics agree with their church that Eucharist is body, blood of Christ.” Naturally, this caused much concern among Catholic leadership, sparking discussions that ultimately led to the creation of the 10th National Eucharist Congress.

How accurate are Pew Research’s findings? Are the findings indicative of what Catholics truly believe about the Eucharist and Transubstantiation? Our initial impression was that the wording Pew used in the to reach this conclusion was not consistent with Catholic teaching. Therefore, we conducted our own research experiment to perform a simple evaluation of Pew’s language vs. alternative language, and whether that would make a difference in the outcomes.