UNITED STATES
Catholic League
Bill Donohue comments on remarks made last night by Fox News host Bill O’Reilly on the Pew Research Center survey of religion:
Here is what O’Reilly said last night: “The main reason Christianity is on the decline is poor leadership and corruption within the Catholic Church. The priest scandal devastated the Catholic landscape in America.”
O’Reilly is not a scholar, and has written nothing on this subject, so he may be forgiven for his misunderstandings. But one does not have to be a social scientist to know that Catholicism is not dispositive of Christianity: In fact, Protestants outnumber Catholics by more than 2-1.
More important, the decline in the mainline Protestant denominations has been going on for a half-century. They are the ones who have been devastated, not the Catholic Church. So blaming the priest scandal for the precipitous drop in the Protestant community is simply absurd. Also, as I pointed out yesterday, the Pew survey showed that Catholicism has the highest retention rate of any religion: 90 percent of those who identify as Catholics today were raised Catholic. Looks like “poor leadership and corruption” didn’t act as a catalyst to bolt.
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