The Church in the U.S.

One wonders the impact of this sex scandal upon the Catholic population. While the numbers in the Catholic Church in America are declining, only 49% of self-declared Catholics go to confession.

This May the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis agreed to pay $210 million to 450 sex abuse victims. That archdiocese is one of 19 dioceses or religious orders that have filed for bankruptcy protection as the church has paid out more than $3 billion in settlements and monetary awards for victims,

Catholics give on an average about $10 a week to their parish, according to Mary Gautier, senior research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a Georgetown University-affiliated research center.

Most of that money stays with the church to cover overhead costs like building maintenance and priest salaries, she said. On average, about 13% of the money collected during Mass is sent on to the local diocese in the form of a yearly tax called an assessment, Gautier said. And some of the money trickles up to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), which charges assessments to pay for church staff in the U.S. — including some of the leaders who allegedly covered up abuse.

The group took in $11.3 million in assessments in 2016, according to its most recent financial statements.

After the 2002 Boston Globe investigation that revealed decades of abuse by Massachusetts clergy, church attendance among Catholics nationwide dropped — and so did their monetary donations, Gautier said. But the effect was “minor” and didn’t last.

There are now 30 million former Catholics in the U.S., and the number of people who identify as Catholic dropped from 81.6 million in 2015 to 74.3 million in 2017, according to CARA. About 27% of those who had left the church did so because of the clergy sexual abuse scandals, according to a 2010 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center.

(a lot of this is from a MarketWatch article)