A Roswell man's campaign to get lapsed Roman Catholics back in church got high-profile exposure during the U.S. visit of Pope Benedict XVI last week.

A TV commercial made by Catholics Come Home was shown on stadium screens before the Pope celebrated Mass in Washington's Nationals Park.

"We are hoping within a year to have the wherewithal for a launch on major U.S. [TV] networks," said Tom Peterson, the nonprofit's president.

Peterson used 30 years experience in the advertising business to start a diocese-wide program in Phoenix a decade ago calling Catholics back to church.

He and lay supporters formed a nonprofit here to expand the program.

Peterson said he is driven by a personal desire to do something to help the Catholic church. A recent national study showed the Catholic church has lost a larger percentage of childhood adherents than any major U.S. Christian church.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's Religious Landscape Survey released this month shows that nearly one-third of people raised Catholics no longer attend Catholic churches. Americans move easily from one denomination to the other or to no affiliation, it found.

Catholics Come Home's new campaign ran in Phoenix and Louisville with slick TV commercials in March.

Peterson said his group doesn't have counts of returning Catholics, but anecdotal evidence of more than 6,000 visits to its web page from Phoenix residents after the campaign indicates a positive response.

Brennan Pursell, a Catholic writer and associate professor of history at DeSales University in Pennsylvania, said Catholics in America traditionally came from traditionally Catholic countries such as Ireland or Spain. Their interaction with American consumer culture has changed them.

"What we are seeing is a transformation of the Roman Catholic Church as a church of whole nations into a church of personal choice," he said.

And Catholics have been changing to Protestant denominations or to non attendance.

"It's something the Catholic leadership must take seriously," Pursell said.

One result is calls for re evangelization by the pope and work such as that by lay organizations like Catholics Come Home, he said.

Peterson said he is talking to many dioceses across the country, such as Denver and Cincinnati, about running campaigns, and there is some international interest as well. Catholics Come Home is sponsored by private donations.

For information: Catholicscomehome.org