Assistive Listening Knowledge Base
  • Paper (survey of a national random sample of Catholic parishes)

Disabilities in Parishes Across the United States: How Parishes in the United States Accommodate and Serve People with Disabilities (CARA Special Report)

From https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/cara-2016-parish-disabilities/ · record checked 13 October 2026

  • Holland J, Gilger P, Gaunt TP (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate)
  • Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University

Independent (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a research centre affiliated with Georgetown University; commissioned and funded by Potomac Community Resources, the National Catholic Partnership on Disability, the Archdiocese of Washington's Department of Special Needs and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington)

Summary

A national survey of US Catholic pastors on how their parishes include people with disabilities, including how many offer assistive listening devices.

Key findings

  • About the Study says questionnaires went by email and post to pastors or people entrusted with parish pastoral care, followed by repeated reminders. It reports 1,760 unusable addresses, explaining the reduction from 7,002 sampled parishes to 5,242 successfully contacted.
  • Reports that 36% of parishes have assistive listening devices that parishioners can use, that larger parishes are significantly more likely than smaller ones to have them, and that parishes where people with disabilities take part in adult formation are much more likely to have them.
  • 79% of pastors know of someone in their parish with a sensory disability, and 96% of someone with an aging-related disability.
  • A further one in five pastors say additional audio or visual resources are something they would like to provide; written answers ask for financial help to buy hearing devices for people with hearing loss.
  • Asked for their parish's best accommodation, one pastor named its hearing loop, writing that some people attend Mass there because of it; another named assistive listening devices in church and in the confessional.
  • Drew a stratified random sample of 7,002 parishes; 5,242 could be reached and 789 pastors responded (15%), which the report puts at a margin of error of 3.22 percent.

Limits

A 15% response rate, and answers come from pastors rather than parishioners. The survey does not say which assistive listening technologies parishes use, whether they work or how often they are used, and it covers Catholic parishes only. The report is undated; its file was created in July 2016 and it quotes a June 2016 homily.

Read the original

cara.georgetown.edu/s/PCR-Special-Report-on-Disabilities-FINAL.pdf

Link checked . We link to the original and do not host copies.

Cited in

Cite this source

Holland J, Gilger P, Gaunt TP (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate). Disabilities in Parishes Across the United States: How Parishes in the United States Accommodate and Serve People with Disabilities (CARA Special Report). Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), Georgetown University. July 2016. https://cara.georgetown.edu/s/PCR-Special-Report-on-Disabilities-FINAL.pdf (accessed 13 October 2026).

The accessed date is when this library last checked the link; use the date you read it. To point readers to this summary instead, link to https://assistivelisteningknowledgebase.org/evidence/cara-2016-parish-disabilities/

Every finding here cites its source, and who funded each source is labelled. This site does not recommend products. Found an error or a missing study? Suggest a correction.