I’m thinking in terms of lowered attendance at masses or reductions in how much money is contributed?
Is there even any public access to those kinds of stats?
According to Gallup polls, weekly attendance at church by catholics has been declining for the last 55 years – from 75% in 1955, 54% in 1975, to 45% in 2009. There are all kinds of reasons suggested by people for this. It would be hard to estimate how much of a factor these continuing sex scandals are. Note that these are figures from polls of what people say. I doubt that there are any actual attendance figures. I’ve never been to a church service where they actually counted the attendees.
Most catholic churches publish an annual financial report that gives total contributions for the year, and some even compare it to previous years. These reports are generally handed out to church members at a Sunday Mass. But that is for a single church. I don’t think the cumulative totals for a diocese, or country, or the world are publicly available. Possibly some estimates are, but accuracy would be unknown.
There are estimates of the total cost of jury awards, settlements and legal fees related to this (see Wikipedia) – the total up through 2002 is about a billion dollars in the US.
I think I’m pretty typical of the “lapsed Catholic” phenomenon, and my reasons for drifting away from the Church had nothing at all to do with the child abuse scandals. I just never, from a young age, ever attended church for any reason other than to make my parents happy, and then suddenly I didn’t live with them anymore. While I had some respectful disagreements with most of my parish priests growing up, to my knowledge, none of them was a pedophile.
I suspect declining church attendance has a lot more to do with the loss of a charismatic, larger-than-life Pope and his replacement by a dogmatist with a poor grasp of public relations. Any organization whose leadership goes from Mister Wonderful to Mister Creepy Party-Liner will see a significant drop in stock price.
I, too, am lapsed, for decades now. Many reasons. The scandals/coverups have nothing to do with it, but I am not at all surprised by them. Whoever the current Pope is, is irrelevant whether he is as adorable as Mr. Rogers or like the present Pope Ratzo. But that’s just me, I’m not one of the faithful showing up on Sundays. It’s been my personal experience that churchgoing is strongest when Catholics have children to be “raised in the faith” - the family attends church and goes through all the rigamarole of the sacraments. Then - churchgoing drops off for all of them, until the children grow up and have children, and the cycle is repeated. At the same time, their parents grow older, retire, and rejoin the church for social reasons.
I was thinking more that the church can sort of shrug off news reports and such as religiously biased ‘attacks’ from outsiders, and dismiss them. Sort of ‘circle the wagons,’ hunker down, and wait it out in hopes that the attackers will get bored and move on to another story/cause.
OTOH, if your own members become outraged enough that they cry for reform, or close their pocket books, or even formally leave your church (is that even possible? or do you simply stop going but they can consider you aa still belonging to your, um, parish til you die?) then THAT could be noteworthy enough for the heirarchy to seriously consider they need to change, you now?
Because its the coverup and secrecy and ‘protect our own’ natural nature of a heirarchical elite that is the real problem, IMHO. As often said, there are no doubt pedophiles in any profession you want to name. But a pedophile accountant isn’t going to be protected and facilitated, is he?
Yeah, I agree that the scandals aren’t the main cause of declining participation. Not sure if this is universal, but Catholic schools in my area have been closing regularly over the past 10 or 15 years. Enrollment must be down 60%, and they are closing churches too.
Are you sure about that? I attend a fairly large Anglican church, and it’s part of the duties of the greeters to make an unobtrusive head-count each week, after the service is under way. Unless you do the greeting yourself (or have to come in and out at the back because of a bored PiperCub :o), you likely wouldn’t even notice.
Catholic education has gotten alot more expensive over that last 50 years. Once upon a time parochial school used to be able to count on a study supply of nuns, brothers, & priests who, haven taken vows of poverty and choses teaching as a vocation, basically taught for free; nowdays they have to rely on laypeople. Laypeople tend to have families to support and tend to want pay & benefits equal to (or better than) what they can get in the public sector.
Preaching to the choir, alphaboi867. It’s over $7k a year for my son to go to catholic high school. Your explanation makes great sense.
Found this data from Georgetown university that says catholic school enrollment has dropped dramatically since 1975 – down 40% in elementary schools, down 25% in high schools. When I was a kid (back in the 1970s) a lot of catholic kids in my neighborhood went to the parochial elementary school and then transferred to the public high school. I suspect it’s more common now for kids to do the opposite. That’s what my son did.
The same report also shows number who identify as catholics (as a percentage of the population) is down slightly, but the number who attend weekly is up slightly. The issue of closing churches must not be a widespread phenomenon.
That study doesn’t break it down by region, but I suspect that the places where church attendance is up is correlated with areas where there are large Latino populations. The US Catholic church is becoming increasingly Latino and Spanish-speaking. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
Yep, a lot of Catholic schools were originally founded to serve poor immigrants who didn’t have many other educational options. Does anyone know if Catholic schools today have a lot of poor Latino students in them? I have no idea. I’m Catholic myself, but never set foot in a parochial school.
I’d be extremely surprised if that were the case. Like every other organisation, the Church needs to know how many ‘users’ of its services it has. Parishes have to budget, schools need to plan etc. The Church here counts attendances several times a year, and then averages them to get an overall headcount of attendees. These counts usually take place on Sundays in ordinary time, to avoid the bias of the inflated attendances at specific feasts when the slacker ‘C & E’ Catholics come out of the woodwork.
As **Northern Piper **notes, you’re not likely to notice the count going on. At my parish the counters wait ten minutes or so, to allow for latecomers, and then do the headcount from the choir gallery. The parishioners are informed that there will be a count, but they don’t see any evidence of it.
The church priest staff also seems to becoming increasingly from third-world countries (Central America and the Philippines, locally), rather than home-grown local priests from the area – those seem to be quite rare nowadays.
During a recent discussion about this, one person made a cynical (but possibly true) remark that if you are a boy growing up in the slums of Guatemala, becoming a pastor at a midwestern USA church must seem like quite a good career move.
One of those being we are having much smaller families - I’ve only managed one! When I was at school, large families (those with 7, 8, 9 kids) were not uncommon.
What will be interesting is whether the trend identified by Gallup continues in a gradual way or whether it dramatically changes.
In the Presbyterian churches I’ve attended, the ushers did a count during the taking up of the offering, and weekly stats were kept. An organization like the RCC doesn’t keep track of these things? I’m surprised.
The Irish website Count Me Out says that over 9,000 people have used it to officially defect from the Church since the Ryan Report into institutional abuse was published last year. That’s a fairly significant number in a country this size. And if you assume that most people who want to defect just do so quietly, it’s pretty clear that church membership has taken a hit. Unfortunately it’s less clear that their influence on the Irish government has similarly declined but that’s a post for another thread…