NEW HAVEN, Conn., March 30 (UPI) -- Most U.S. adults say their plans for the day include attending church, a Knights of Columbus-Marist Poll indicates.
Nearly 6-in-10 Americans said they intend to be in church on Easter Sunday. Overall, 70 percent of Catholics said they would attend services Sunday, but among practicing Catholics the number was 92 percent.
Catholics were also nearly twice as likely to observe the season of Lent -- the 40 days of preparation for Easter that began on Ash Wednesday -- than Americans as a whole. Nearly two-thirds of Catholics and nearly 8-in-10 practicing Catholic said they intended to observe Lent by giving up something or doing something differently.
By comparison, 33 percent of U.S. adults overall said they planned to observe Lent.
"The survey shows that Easter remains an important part of the lives of most Americans," Supreme Knight Carl Anderson said in a statement.
The telephone survey of 2,000 U.S. adults was conducted March 2-5 and included 515 Catholics. The survey's margin of error for all U.S. adults was 2.2 percentage points, and for Catholics it was 4.3 percentage points.
