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 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.
The only significant decline is in the percentage of Catholics who contributed to their diocesan financial appeals – annual campaigns usually run by bishops.
While the percentage of Catholics who contributed to local parishes remained steady, those who gave to their 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 Gray of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which conducted the study.
The study was based on 10 national phone polls since 2001. The margin of sampling error varied from 2.1 to 4.4 percentage points.