WEST PALM BEACH (FL)
Newsmax
April 3, 2019
By Cathy Burke
More than one in three Catholics question if they want to remain Catholic — a sign of their deep “frustration” with church leadership amid reports of widespread sexual abuse, according to one expert.
In a Gallup poll last month, 37% of U.S. Catholics said news of the abuse caused them to doubt their loyalty to the church — up from 22% in 2002.
In a Gallup podcast Wednesday examining the results, lawyer and Catholic activist Sister Simone Campbell said Roman Catholic leaders need to pay attention to those findings.
She said the remark she most often hears about Catholics is “‘when will they ever learn, when will they stop this?’” adding that the Pennsylvania attorney general report on decades of abuse was “shocking and horrifying.”
“Folks are really frustrated by that,” she said.
“My neighbor told me he quit going to church,” she recounted, but said more of “what I hear [from Catholics] is [they’re] shopping around more, looking for leadership they can trust.”
“When there are broader groups involved in managing the diocese… then there’s a whole different change,” she added, saying what’s important for the church leadership to do is “being willing to talk about the sin of our church.”
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