Study Sees Church Rebounding From Scandal

The New York Times ^ | May 18, 2006 | LAURIE GOODSTEIN

[presidio9]

A new study has found that the scandal over sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has not caused American Catholics to leave the church, or to stop attending Mass and donating to their parishes.

The study shows that Catholic participation in church life and satisfaction with church leadership dropped noticeably at the height of the scandal in 2002, but has now largely rebounded to prescandal levels.

The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to diocesan financial appeals, annual campaigns that are usually run by bishops. While the percentage of Catholics who contributed to their local parishes remained steady, those who gave to diocesan appeals dropped to 29 percent in 2005 from 38 percent in April 2002.

"There's been an expectation that there would be more Catholics exiting the faith, and clearly the polls show that there wasn't any evidence of that," said Mark M. Gray, research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which conducted the study.

"It's a reflection of how resilient religious faith can be — that Catholics were able to disconnect their own personal faith from what was occurring among a group of clergy at a specific time in history," Dr. Gray said. "Their faith was bigger than these events. Clearly there was a lot of dissatisfaction, but people remain Catholic."

The center based the study on 10 national telephone polls of adult Catholics conducted since January 2001. Most included 1,000 or more respondents, but since the number of people polled varied each time, the margin of sampling error varied from plus or minus 2.1 percentage points to plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

The sexual abuse crisis, which first erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston in early 2002,

[Theoden]

I'm on your side!

[Rutles4Ever]

"And Simon Peter answered him: Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life."

[KEmom]

"In any event, I find it amusing that the Times always seems to send reporters with names like Laurie Goodstein to cover stories about the Catholic Church."

I was thinking the exact same thing.

I do not give to the Cardinal's Appeal because I am still pretty angry with how the pedophile scandal was handled (or mishandled) in the beginning. In my own community, we are active participants in the parish. In a fairly small town, we had about 120 2nd graders receive their First Communion a couple weeks ago, it was a pretty special sight to see (my son was one of them).

[bornacatholic]

The far-worse and far-higher number of sex crimes committed against children in the public schools has not been covered in the media.

[Antoninus]

The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to diocesan financial appeals, annual campaigns that are usually run by bishops. While the percentage of Catholics who contributed to their local parishes remained steady, those who gave to diocesan appeals dropped to 29 percent in 2005 from 38 percent in April 2002.

That's me. I object to the bishop forcing our priests to show a video during Mass in place of a sermon when the annual appeal kicks off. And I think the funds are horribly misappropriated, with not nearly enough going toward generating vocations, supporting excellent seminarians and doing evangelical work.

During the Appeal, we send our donation directly to the local seminary, to the FSSP in Nebraska, or some other cause. Sadly, until a bishop demonstrates that he can be trusted, I'm very hesitant to support him financially.

[presidio9]

(my son was one of them).

Congradulations and "welcome."

[Antoninus]

Some of the bishops will waste that money, there are better options for evangelization, like: EWTN

Exactly. EWTN has done more to bring new Catholics into the Church than all the American bishops combined.

[sageb1]

Our little church is running way behind on the Bishop's Appeal, but it's not for lack of effort. We have two Catholic churches in our small city. The Cathedral enjoys the participation of the area's wealthier folk, whereas our smaller church serves a greater percentage of the less well-off.

On a positive note, however, enrollment in the joint Catholic elementary school has risen so much that some are hoping for the return of the Catholic high school, which had to be closed over a decade ago.

[perez24]

I'm a big fan of the parish's St. Vincent dePaul Society.

[NYer]

Catholic Ping - Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list

[petkus]

The Catholic Cardinals and Bishops are guilty of using donations to hire lawyers to coverup all of their misdeeds.
These Cardinals are not dumb or ignorant, they know what they are doing when they cover up the pedophilia activity of the clergy.

---

After scandal erupted in 2002 Mahony admitted to leaving eight accused molesters in ministry as cardinal in Los Angeles. That includes Michael Baker, who admitted to Mahony in 1986 that he had molested several youths, but who Mahony kept in ministry for 14 years. Baker was charged with 34 counts of molestation, which were dismissed as a result of the Supreme Court ruling. And it includes Michael Wempe, who faces new criminal charges after 42 counts of sex crimes were dismissed last year.

Yet Mahony states that even in the 1980s he knew he must remove priests from ministry when he received credible allegations of molestation. "I knew that we wanted priests serving in our parishes who were not going to be a danger to anybody," he testified. But he also said that O’Grady’s admitted sexual urges toward a 9-year-old would not lead to his removal. Last Thursday, Mahony told a reporter from CNN that the protocol of the 1980s was to leave accused priests in ministry because, "We misunderstood pedophilia to be a moral weakness or a sin, something that could be dealt with through spiritual counseling. We now know that is inadequate." Mahony has offered similar explanations to explain Baker, Wempe and others who remained in ministry well into the 1990s.

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http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/cardinal-untruths/1101/

[Dumb_Ox]

Satan's loss.

I know some teenagers were using this as a reason to leave the church back at the height of the worst news. Perhaps they would have left anyway, and it provided a convenient rationale.