Church records show that about 1 in every 6 Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston attend Mass during any given week, a 15 percent drop since the clergy sexual-abuse crisis came to light in early 2002.
For the first time, the archdiocese released attendance figures for most of its 357 parishes, as well as the number of key sacraments performed at each church, publishing the statistics in Friday's edition of The Pilot, the archdiocesan newspaper.
Thirty-nine parishes did not participate in the archdiocesan census of Mass attendance, which is conducted each October. Parishes are supposed to submit to the archdiocese their average Saturday and Sunday Mass attendance, based on the average head count during all October weekends.
"Generally, we've been seeing a decline for several decades, but it was accelerated across the board by the abuse crisis," said the Rev. Christopher J. Coyne, archdiocesan spokesman.
Coyne said the size of a parish and its sacramental activity, such as baptisms and marriages, will be factors in deciding whether to close a parish, but not the deciding factors. Other factors include a shortage of priests, and insufficient money.
The archdiocese has given the 80 geographic clusters of parishes until March 8 to recommend to Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley which should close. O'Malley will make the final decision.
"We decided to make them (statistics) public, because people need to have information in front of them in order to make a reasoned decision," Coyne said. "These statistics will be used in the process."
The statistics indicate that in October, average weekend attendance at Mass at the reporting parishes was 304,000. By the church's own count, there are 2 million Catholics in the archdiocese.
Voice of the Faithful, a lay group formed in the wake of the sex abuse crisis, welcomed the release of the statistics, but called for more information - such as parish financial resources, proximity to other parishes and parish outreach programs that could be harmed by church closings.
"It is positive that the archdiocese is in a mode where it understands that it has to provide meaningful data related to parishes as part of this (consolidation) process, but the data they've provided only relates to the criteria they've defined," said Steve Krueger, the organization's executive director.