Lay Catholics Increasingly Seek Influence Over How Gifts Are Used

Lay Catholics have responded to the clergy sexual-abuse scandal by pressing for greater influence

in church decision making and by withholding their contributions to the church.

Those actions, say scholars who study Catholic giving, help to underscore a significant development in the American church: The laity is far more independent than it was just a generation or two ago.

Chief among the reasons, says Lawrence S. Cunningham, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind., is its education level. “There has never been in the history of the Catholic Church a more highly educated laity than you have in the United States of America today,” he says.

Mr. Cunningham says that some bishops have said they dealt quietly with cases of priestly abuse of children because they didn’t want to “scandalize” parishioners. He says lay people may have accepted that reasoning when his father was a young man, but he doesn’t think that Catholics today do.

“The average churchgoer in the Catholic Church is not an uneducated peasant right off the boat, generally speaking. So to have the attitude that somehow we have to protect the poor, benighted laity is to think in terms of a Catholic Church that disappeared 50 or 75 years ago,” says Mr. Cunningham.

For months now, reports of clergy misconduct have been front-page news, but it remains unclear how the sexual-abuse scandal has affected Catholic fund raising nationwide.

When the National Catholic Development Conference, a group in Hempstead, N.Y., for Catholic fund raisers, held its annual meeting in September, some dioceses and charities reported declines in fund raising, and others increases, says Sister Georgette Lehmuth, the group’s president.

Determining why declines have occurred is hard, she says. “There are so many other things that have happened this year that it’s extremely difficult for us to say that, ‘Yes, it’s because of this problem with the clergy and the scandals in the church,’” says Sister Lehmuth.

Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, an association in Washington made up of Catholic foundations, has commissioned a Gallup Organization survey of 1,000 practicing Catholics to find out what effect the sex scandal may have had on giving. The group plans to release survey results this month.

Francis J. Butler, president of the association, says that as Catholic donors have become better educated and more affluent, they have sought to exercise greater control over their gifts. Since the late 1980s, the number of Catholic foundations has grown significantly as wealthy donors have set up their own funds rather than make large gifts directly to the church or church-related charities, he says.

Mr. Butler says he expects the trend to continue. “These are people who normally have influence in their world. They’re making decisions in their companies and in their communities, having a voice,” he says. “More and more the church is going to experience that as lay people move up in society.”

‘In the Dark’

Learning about the large settlements that dioceses have paid victims of clergy sex abuse has made these more-assertive donors realize “how in the dark they are about church finances,” says Chuck Zech, who studies Catholic giving as an economics professor at Villanova University, in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Zech points to studies that have found that Catholic households tend to give roughly 1 percent of household income, compared with 2 percent for Protestants. Scholars disagree on the reasons for the difference, but Mr. Zech says one factor is that many Catholics are discouraged from giving by a lack of openness about diocesan finances.

Even before news of the sex-abuse scandal broke, Mr. Zech says, he saw signs that Catholics were pressing for more information. Pastors have told him they are worried about what will happen to giving as older parishioners are replaced by younger ones who are more demanding and ask tougher questions about money, Mr. Zech says.

“Older parishioners were raised in a church where their role was to pray, pay, and obey,” he says, “but younger parishioners aren’t going to buy that.”