Alabama: Among The Most (or Least) Catholic Southern States?

"....the percentage of the adult population identifying as Catholic ranges from 44% in Rhode Island, the single most-Catholic state (by percentage), to 6% in Alabama. After Rhode Island, the most Catholic states are New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York. Other than Alabama, four Southern states -- Tennessee, Mississippi, West Virginia and Arkansas -- and Mormon-dominated Utah have single-digit Catholic populations."
                                          Gallup Report



But that's misleading. Other reports indicate there are a half-dozen Southern States with double digit Catholic populations (though none above 10%.....) 

Safe to say Alabama and the other Southern States have fewer Catholics than many of the Northern States. One contributing factor might be the anti-Catholic actions of the KKK for decades.

Klan audiences in the 1920s were routinely treated to speeches by women who claimed to be former nuns: they would often display leather bags in which, it was alleged, the newborn children of illicit liaisons between nuns and priests were carried to church furnaces to be cremated. Did people not realise, a Klan member in Sacramento asked, that “nearly all the bawdy houses, bootleg joints and other dives are owned or controlled by Romanists”?

From
 "The Klan War on Catholics"