BUFFALO (NY)
Tablet [New York NY]
December 2, 2025
By Maggie Phillips
U.S. Catholics continue to disaffiliate from the Church at record rates, thanks in part to the nationwide legacy of mass child abuse by pedophile clerics
On Nov. 17, the Feast of St. Frances Cabrini, a group of lay Catholics, former employees of the diocese of New York, and clerical abuse survivors announced initiatives to help the victims of abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church in New York state. They want survivors to have access to the Cabrini Fund, a foundation created when the New York bishops sold their diocesan health insurance plan for $3.2 billion in 2018.
“Many survivors have been locked in a legal morass for years,” said Gary Greenberg, a Child Victims Act advocate and survivor, in a press release announcing the move. “They have been denied long-term healing resources and meaningful acknowledgment of the harm they endured.”
Abuse in the Catholic Church may have faded from the headlines, but cradle Catholics are still disaffiliating from the U.S. Catholic Church at devastating rates. The University of Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal states bluntly that if weekly Mass attendance is any measure, “we are losing nine out of 10 cradle Catholics.” Similarly, the Pew Research 2023-2024 Religious Landscape Study found that the U.S. Catholic Church loses 8.4 cradle Catholics to religious switching for every single convert it brings in. This is an increase from its 2014 study showing six fallen away cradle Catholics for every new convert. Analysts and thinkers inside the Church blame different factors: bad liturgies, poor catechesis from Catholic institutions, a lack of religious transmission from parent to child. But, for those with memories that stretch back to 2018, when the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick scandal made headlines, or before that, to 2002, when the Boston Globe clergy-abuse cover-up story broke, the elephant in the room remains the abuse scandals.
The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University reported in a 2025 survey that although clerical abuse allegations have dropped off sharply since the turn of the 21st century, there are more than 16,000 credible abuse allegations in the U.S. Catholic Church, most of which occurred before 1989. These dioceses and eparchies told CARA they have paid out more than $5 billion to victims to date.
The impact has been felt across the country. An October Axios report predicted Catholic churches will be among the 15,000 U.S. churches projected to close this year, due in part to the financial fallout from the abuse scandals. Parish closures are hard to track, since congregations are often absorbed into other parishes in a process known as a merger. According to Penn State law professor Mary T. Reilly in a 2023 paper, “Since 2004, in response to mission-threatening tort liability to child sexual abuse claimants, 37 U.S. Catholic religious organizations have filed for relief in bankruptcy court.” When Maryland and New York state enacted claim-revival legislation that allowed clergy-abuse victims from past decades to file claims, dioceses in both states filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This year, the Archdiocese of Baltimore announced plans to slash nearly two-thirds of its parishes. Across New York state, parish closures and mergers are also taking place; in Buffalo, the diocese has specifically cited Chapter 11 as part of its rationale.
In 2019, 69% of U.S. Catholics said the abuse was an ongoing problem. But in an X thread last month, JD Flynn, founder of Catholic news outlet The Pillar, sounded a note of pessimism, drawing from his own experience reporting on clerical sexual abuse. “In the summer of 2018, when the Theodore McCarrick scandal emerged, there was a moment of shock across the Church, shared by nearly everyone, and with it a unified desire for transparency and justice,” Flynn wrote. “It didn’t last long.”
Many disillusioned ex-Catholics appear to have short memories for scandal. Abuse in the church is a distant fourth on the list of key factors they gave to Pew when asked why they left Catholicism, with only 8% citing it as salient. The primary reason, cited by 18%, was changed beliefs or different beliefs from the Church. Ten percent said they were never particularly committed to begin with, and 9% said they stopped believing in God and abandoned religion altogether.
Far from indicating the abuse no longer matters, these numbers may reflect a cumulative effect of scandal after scandal since 2002.
The Sisters of the Little Way is a group of vowed religious sisters and consecrated religious women. Its goal is to become a Catholic religious institute with a ministry focused on abuse survivors in the Church. The sisters recently released a podcast, “Descent into Light,” chronicling what they say are their own experiences with grooming and spiritual abuse within the Church.
Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, the group’s cofounder, notes that “stopped believing in God” is the third-highest reason cited on the Pew study of ex-Catholics. “I was raised Catholic and became an atheist at age 14 for about 12 years,” she said in an email to Tablet. “I would have given that reason in a poll. But one of the reasons I stopped believing in God was because of the bad example of Catholics and the spiritual abuse my family experienced in a Catholic charismatic community that I witnessed as a child. People have complex reasons for leaving the faith. [Cofounder] Sr. Danielle and I have seen, in speaking to people who have left, that often, some form of abuse forms part of their reasoning, whether they give it as the first reason or not.”
Flynn’s outlet, The Pillar, published a study in 2021 on the people who leave the Catholic Church. Its data suggested a generational trickle-down effect of the abuse scandals on affiliation. Those most likely to disaffiliate were older, born in the 1950s through 1970s, with even those who still identified as Catholic less likely to be weekly Mass attenders. Those Catholics are old enough to remember the media firestorms surrounding the initial Boston Globe reporting and might have personally experienced some of the events in question (or something similar). But younger respondents—most of whom did not live through the abuse scandal coverage or were too young to take in much at the time—were more likely than Baby Boomers or Gen X to identify as Catholic and to attend Mass weekly. In the study, 33% of those aged 41 and younger said they attended Mass weekly, compared to 25% of people between ages 42 and 71.
Brooklyn converts notwithstanding, there simply aren’t that many Catholic young people overall, especially cradle Catholics. According to religion data guru Ryan Burge, when given a choice between “nothing in particular” and Catholicism, the more popular preference for Americans ages 18 to 22—by a factor of almost 2 to 1—is “nothing in particular.”
Researcher Stephen Bullivant, who coauthored the Church Life Journal article, addresses the experiences of younger ex-Catholics in his 2022 book Nonverts. The young cradle Catholics with whom he spoke were aware of the abuse scandals, and they came up in interviews about their disaffiliation. However, Bullivant writes that “these observations were not being cited as having triggered their disenchantment with the Church. Rather, they’re offered as, at most, supporting evidence.” Raised by parents and grandparents who had grown lukewarm, they viewed the abuses with the “detached horror of outsiders looking in,” he writes.
The weak transmission camp, then, may have a point.
“The parents are less devout than the grandparents—so those parents have less faith to hand on, so to speak,” Bullivant and his coauthor wrote in Church Life Journal. “But then the children of those parents will tend to be less religious still, and so will have less to hand on to the fourth generation. The pattern is self-reinforcing.”
Even those who haven’t formally left the Church may find themselves ambivalent about passing down the faith. “Many of the people we speak to who have been harmed in the Church experience some kind of disaffiliation, whether it’s formal or interior,” said Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble. “Some of the people we speak to are simply unable to remain Catholic because of the trauma they have experienced. Others remain, but they often have a sense of unbelonging, and some tell us that they struggle to find other Catholics who can receive their experiences.”
In his X thread on the McCarrick scandal, Flynn recalled that, as testimonies came out from clergy, religious, lay people, and seminarians, there were calls “for repentance and mortification and conversion.” Those unified recriminations centered the victims before they shifted focus. “Soon we were dividing again into ideological camps, and dividing by caste and class, and hurling accusations based on pet theories and preconceived biases.” Flynn said both liberals and conservatives pushed him to dig up dirt on their ideological opponents within the Church in his reporting.
The much-hyped Zoomer converts and the immigrant newcomers (40% of U.S. Catholics) may be blank slates for now, but their faith will be put to the test, not if but when there is another scandal. “Some people believe that it’s possible to eliminate abuse if we just have all the right policies and protocols. But no organization is ever completely safe from any form of abuse,” said Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble.
“Real transparency and accountability require the hard work of change–changing policies and procedures, but also changing hearts,” said Sister Danielle Victoria. “It demands honest reflection on how we ended up here, not just personally, but as an institution that has been shaped by decades of patterns of silence and self-protection.” She said courageous leadership must also be accompanied by putting survivors and their hard-won wisdom first.
So far, few in the institutional Church have been willing to do this. “Sharing in someone’s suffering, especially when it involves spiritual, emotional, financial, physical, or sexual abuse in a spiritual setting, can be extremely inconvenient to the status quo and could seemingly threaten all that we hold sacred,” said Sister Danielle Victoria. “Survivors of these types of abuse in the Church share patterns of being disregarded, dismissed as unwell, gaslit, and ultimately very often scapegoated in communities that seek to protect the institution over the person.”
In New York, victims of Catholic clerical abuse “are becoming exhausted with the barriers they continue to encounter,” said Mary Pruski, spokesperson for Save Our Buffalo Churches, one of the groups petitioning the Cabrini Fund. Pruski’s organization is fighting the Diocese of Buffalo on widespread church closures and a diocesan push for parishes to contribute to payments to clerical abuse victims.
Church leaders created a lot of lost sheep when they overlooked the abuse of their flock the first time. By punting on accountability, they risk alienating those who stayed.
This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.