Posted on 05/18/2006 7:02:29 AM PDT by 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,
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
yeah. so is 2000 years of vital history.
Big demographic here.
The power of prayer.
Which is one of the reasons I posted it to Front Page
News. Apparently the Mod wasn't bright enough to grasp that.
I dont know about other places, but they had a big donation appeal last year that was a first for me. They asked for large contributions and made up some sort of story, when most of us actually thought the money was going to pay for the law suits over the pedophile priests.
Most of us still believe that. Anyway a lot of p[eople ponied up for this special appeal. Lots of money. Then along comes the Cardinals appeal. Well: there is just so may times you can go to the well. Thats whats hurting the Bishops or Cardinals appeals IMO.
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Sex scandals in public schools haven't swayed Americans from sending their children there.
Sex scandals in the UN (rape, child prostitution, sexual slavery) hasn't shaken the left's support of this outdated relic.
BTTT!
Well it IS an unreliable source...
The closer this number gets to %100 the better this country and the world will be.
**The closer this number gets to %100 the better this country and the world will be.**
Amen!
Nice to hear some positive news about the Church in the secular media once in a while!
I'd rather stay and fight for my Church.
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"The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to diocesan financial appeals, annual campaigns that are usually run by bishops."
That might be good as well - maybe they are giving to more worthy groups. Some of the bishops will waste that money, there are better options for evangelization, like:
EWTN - https://www.ewtn.com/ewtn/ssl/donation/donation_ewtn.asp
and Aid to the Church in Need -
http://www.kirche-in-not.org/index_s.html
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.
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