A priest recently made a request for prayers on Twitter. "Pray for one of my older parishioners who has just died," he wrote. "She said she didn't believe any longer, it was the scandals." If we want to measure the impact of the abuse crisis, then perhaps we should begin here: with a single individual who was apparently robbed of her faith because of the crimes of churchmen and the cover-ups that followed.
How widespread is this loss of faith? Like many things in the Church, it is difficult to quantify. But last week a Gallup poll found that 37 per cent of US Catholics had considered leaving because of the scandals. That figure was based on interviews with 581 Catholics in January and February and has a sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points. We should, in other words, take this finding seriously: at least a third of American Catholics have considered their membership of the Church in recent months.
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