Catholic Church Scandal Takes Toll on Attendance

The nation’s Roman Catholic Church has suffered some loss of regular attendance at Mass since the outbreak of this year’s sex scandals, according to a new survey. A second survey shows Latinos continuing to move away from the church.

A poll released this week by the Gallup Organization shows that attendance at Mass has dropped slightly this year. The number of Catholics who said they had attended services in the last week fell to 41%, compared with 46% for the same period in 2001, the poll showed.

The rate of Catholic Church attendance is now lower than that for Protestants, who have lagged behind Catholics in their worship rate in the decades since Gallup has been measuring attendance. The latest poll found 47% of Protestants said they went to church in the last week.

Gallup also found that four in 10 Catholics were less likely to donate to the church because of the clerics’ sex abuse crisis.

The survey of slightly more than 1,000 adults was conducted Dec. 9 and Dec. 10, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percentage points.

The second study, an outgrowth of last year’s American Religious Identification Survey, found the percentage of U.S. Latinos who are Catholic had dropped from 66% in 1990 to 57% in 2001.

The percentage of Latinos with “no religion” doubled from 6% to 13% over the same period while the number of Latino Protestants -- about a quarter of the overall Latino population -- has remained stable.

Ariela Keysar, the study’s lead author, said the data disprove the widespread notion that Latinos are leaving the Catholic Church for Pentecostal and other Protestant churches.

The study, coordinated by researchers at the City University of New York, surveyed 50,281 people in the continental United States.