Catholics make up one of the largest religious groups in the United States — more than any Protestant denomination — and many who don’t identify with the faith still said they have a personal or family connection to it, according to a new survey.

Nearly half of Americans, 47%, said they have a relationship to the Catholic faith, with 20% identifying as Catholic, 9% identifying as a “cultural Catholic” and 9% saying they are a former Catholic, according to a June 16 Pew Research Center study.

Another 9% of respondents said they were connected to Catholicism in different ways — either having a Catholic parent or partner or having attended Mass, the survey found.

“Catholicism’s roots in the United States run deep,” researchers said.

The survey of 9,544 U.S. adults, including 1,787 Catholics, took place Feb. 3 to 9 — prior to the hospitalization of the late Pope Francis — and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.3 percentage points.

While 50% of Americans who identify as Catholic said they pray daily, 40% said they ”seldom or never attend Mass,” according to the survey.

Twenty-eight percent of Catholics said they go to Mass at least weekly, per the poll.

A plurality of Catholics, 47%, said they never go to confession, compared with 23% who said they go at least once a year, the survey found.

A small number of U.S. adults, 1.5%, are converts to Catholicism, according to the survey, which found this group sometimes observes the faith at higher rates than those born into it.

Thirty-eight percent of people who have converted to Catholicism attend Mass weekly, 10 percentage points higher than people who were born into the faith, the survey found.

What do Catholics see as essential to their religious identity?

Researchers also asked Catholics about the essentials of religious identity. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ ranked first on the list, with 69% of Catholics believing this was an important part of their faith, according to the survey.

Fifty percent of Catholics said devotion to the Virgin Mary was important and 47% said helping the poor and needy was essential to their religious identity, the survey found.

Opposing abortion, taking care of the environment and caring for immigrants also showed up on the list of essentials, at 32%, 31% and 30%, respectively, according to the survey.

Pilgrimages were the least important to Catholic identity, at 9%, according to the survey.

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