Declines in Donations Outweigh Direct Costs of Catholic Priest Scandals

Priest sexual-abuse scandals have cost the U.S. Catholic church a total of about $3 billion in legal fees, settlements, and other direct costs since the 1980s, but the impact of parishioners’ declining charitable contributions has been an order of magnitude larger, say Nicolas L. Bottan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of Harvard. A parish-by-parish analysis shows that the scandals caused contributions to the church to decline by an estimated average of $2.36 billion per year. From 1950–2009, allegations of abuse were lodged against 5,768 priests, or 5.3% of all priests active in the U.S., the researchers say.