Defying predictions, Roman Catholics in the United States increased their donations to the church last year during the height of the scandal over sex abuse of minors by priests, according to data collected by researchers at Georgetown University.
The reported rise in Catholic giving is doubly remarkable because it took place during an economic downturn in which contributions to the nation's 400 largest charities fell for the first time in more than a decade.
Behind the overall increase, however, is a telling difference in the two main categories of donations to the church.
Catholics put an estimated $5.8 billion in Sunday collection baskets to support their local parishes in 2002, an increase of 4.9 percent, or twice the rate of inflation. But they cut their pledges to bishops' annual appeals for diocesan operations by 2.3 percent, to $635 million.
"The story that it tells is that people are (angry) at the bishops in general, demanding accountability from the church as a whole, but they're saying, 'My priest is OK,' " said Mary Gautier, a senior research associate at Georgetown's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
As the sex abuse scandal spread last year from Boston to dioceses nationwide, some Catholic activists predicted the church would face not only a wave of multimillion-dollar lawsuits but also a big drop in donations.
In a Gallup Poll in March 2002, 30 percent of all Catholics said they were contributing less money to the church because of the scandal. By December, 40 percent said they were reducing their donations, and Catholic fund-raisers were "worried into a frenzy," said Matthew Paratore, secretary-general of the International Catholic Stewardship Council, an association of about 1,000 diocesan development directors.
There have been indications for months that the actual impact varied from place to place.
But the nationwide picture had remained unclear until now. The Georgetown researchers, who have surveyed all 194 American dioceses on their finances annually since 2000, published their raw data for 2002 in August. It was analyzed by Joseph Claude Harris, an independent researcher in Seattle, in a report to be released Monday to coincide with a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington.
Based on diocesan reports, it appears that the number of givers did not decline. About 26 percent of Catholic households responded to their bishops' appeals for all three years, but the average gift fell by $5 in 2002, to $144 per household.
"The fact that some households gave a little less should not be surprising in a troubled economy. News about the abuse scandals likely only compounded an already negative economic picture," Harris concluded. The contrast with rising donations to parishes, however, is stark.
In an introduction to Harris' report, the Rev. Andrew Greeley, the best-selling novelist and University of Chicago sociologist, raises the question of how it is possible that many Catholics told pollsters they were cutting their donations and yet donations increased.
The answer, Greeley suggested, may lie in the fund-raising rule of thumb that 20 percent of the people usually provide 80 percent of the money.