LONDON (UNITED KINGDOM)
Catholic Herald [London, England]
October 10, 2024
The child sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church has contributed to a third of Catholics in England and Wales reducing their attendance of Mass or stopping going altogether, according to a new report by Durham University.
Over 3,000 adults who identify as Roman Catholic – and sampled as representative of the Catholic population in England and Wales – responded to the YouGov survey commissioned by the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, as part of a wider research project called “Boundary Breaking” that looked at the implications of the abuse crisis for the Catholic community.
Carried out in June and July 2022, the study aimed to gauge the attitudes and impact of child sexual abuse on so-called “ordinary” Catholics. The sample included “regular” churchgoers (classed as attending at least once a month) and “occasional” (classed as attending less than once a month), as well as those who do not go to Mass but identify as Catholics.
The survey suggests that the scandal of abuse has been a direct cause of ordinary Catholics distancing themselves from the Church, both in terms of Mass-going and financial donations. Though the study also revealed a correlation between people who are more regular Mass-goers being more willing to acknowledge the abuse crisis while not giving up on the Church.
“It makes total sense to me that those more weakly attached to the Church would be the ones most likely to leave, and to cite the abuse crisis as a reason for that,” Stephen Bullivant, Professor of Theology and the Sociology of Religion at Saint Mary’s University in London, tells the Herald.
“In point of fact, on average you’d expect more committed Catholics to be the more deeply affected by the scandals: it hits much more closely to home. For example, they are far more likely to know either victims/survivors or perpetrators, or to be part of parish communities that have been affected, or to read about things in Catholic media (in addition to secular media).
“But they also have more reasons to stay,” notes Bullivant, who is also co-author of Why Catholics Leave, What They Miss and How They Might Return.
The Catholic population in England and Wales makes up about 8 per cent of the country, or just over 3 million people.
In 2016, the British Government set up an independent statutory inquiry known as IICSA: The Independent inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. When looking at the Catholic Church, the inquiry records over 3,000 instances of child sexual abuse connected to the Church between 1970 and 2015. It also said abuse is not a “historical problem” since there have been more than 100 further allegations each year since 2016.
The Durham University study found that Catholics attending Mass regularly are more likely to consider child abuse in the Church to be a thing of the past (32 per cent) compared to those who never attend Mass (17 per cent).
Regular Mass-goers are also more likely to view the abuse problem as being as prevalent at other institutions that work with children (48 per cent) than those who never attend Mass (41 per cent).
The main findings of the study include:
- Regular Mass-goers are better informed about the Church’s handling of child sexual abuse cases.
- Regular Mass-goers hold significantly more positive attitudes regarding the Church’s response to the crisis and have changed their practice less than occasional or non-attenders.
- 32 per cent of regular Mass-goers, who have some awareness of the response from the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, feel that the bishops have not handled abuse cases well.
- Most Catholics receive their information about child sexual abuse in the Church from the mainstream media.
- Initiatives from Pope Francis to handle child sexual abuse cases are better known and viewed more favourably than handling of cases by local diocesan bishops or the Bishops of England and Wales as a whole.
- Despite low levels of awareness or participation to date, there is a widespread desire for a Day of Prayer for Victims and Survivors of Abuse, especially among younger Catholics.
“Overall, our analysis of the data shows that the Catholic community feels abuse is not a uniquely Catholic or clerical problem,” says Dr Marcus Pound from the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University, and co-author of the study.
“However, there is also a conviction that the Church needs to make changes to prevent such abuse happening in the future.”
The survey notes that more than three-quarters (79 per cent) of people surveyed think that the Church must change a great deal to prevent further cases of child sexual abuse.
The majority of people (59 per cent) were aware of, and supported, the Day of Prayer for Victims and Survivors of Abuse. The researchers say this should give the Church further encouragement in its efforts to address the abuse, through listening, practical actions and improving safeguarding procedures to create a healthier and safer church.
The survey follows The Cross of the Moment report published earlier this year as part of the same research. This four-year study listened to the voices of victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and others affected across the Catholic community.
It suggested that aspects of the culture and practices of the Catholic Church are implicated in how clerical child sexual abuse has been able to happen.
The study also concluded that the culture and practices partly explain how the response of the Church has often failed, causing further pain and harm, described by victims and survivors as “secondary abuse”.
In parallel to the impact of the abuse crisis on Mass attendance, or potentially also connected to it, is the fallout of Covid-19 and lockdowns.
As noted in a previous Herald article about the impact of the pandemic and lockdowns, the average fall in Mass attendance between 2019 and 2021 was 40 per cent. That is to say, for every ten people at Sunday Mass in October 2019, there were six there two years later.
Some parishes – about one in eight – saw falls of over 60 per cent. Most parishes though clustered around the average, having lost somewhere between a third and half of the 2019 Mass-goers.
Come the start of 2024, though, the situation hadn’t resolved itself, as noted in another, more recent Herald article:
“The sobering truth is that Mass attendance has still not returned to pre-pandemic levels even now in the UK or US – the habit of Mass-going, once lost, cannot easily be recovered, though the most active parishes have made up ground,” it notes.
Given the Durham University study’s findings about regular Mass-goers being more willing to accept the abuse crisis while maintaining a relationship with the Church, the pandemic and lockdowns may have exacerbated the dynamic of the clerical abuse scandal undermining Mass attendance.
But establishing the degree to which it did or didn’t may be too complicated and nuanced to measure for any survey, though it seems likely that lockdown-influenced/changed habits could still be exacerbating the problem, given that further information about sexual abuse in the Church continues to come to light.
“The pandemic has had a significant impact on congregations too, but I wouldn’t want to draw any too sharp distinctions between ‘people who left (or never got round to coming back) because of the pandemic’ and ‘people who left because of the abuse crisis’,” says Bullivant.
“I suspect that for anyone distancing themselves from the Church these days, the abuse crisis is likely one factor in that: and that would certainly be true of a lot of people who got out the Mass-going habit during Covid, but weren’t sufficiently motivated to resume. It probably isn’t the only factor, of course, but it’s still in the mix, so to speak.”