The Details

We first collected 1,269 Pennsylvania parishes from http://www.thecatholicdirectory.com. We crawled each parish Web site and found 249 parishes that listed their bulletins online.

The news of the grand jury report was made public on Tuesday, August 14th, 2018. We collected bulletins from the four Sundays prior and four Sundays after that event.

Example snippet of a standard parish bulletin showing the financial statement from the previous week.

From these bulletins we extracted the date of the collection, and the total amount collected from all sources except mandatory fees such as school tuition (in the event that the parish also runs a school). The snippet above is taken from St. Colman Parish in Turtle Creek, PA on August 19th, 2018. In this case, we denote the total tithing amount as $6,775+$1,591+$175=$8,541 for the collection on Sunday, August 12th (the previous week).

This was an arduous process. We repeated this task for each parish for the four weeks before and after the release of the grand jury report. In total we manually collected and analyzed just under 2,000 parish bulletins! I would like to especially thank Teresa Kottkamp (student at Trinity High School at Greenlawn, South Bend, IN) for leading this significant effort.

Of those collected, 124 parishes had complete financial information for the four weeks before and after the release of the grand jury report.

Mean average collection amounts for sample of 128 Catholic parishes in Pennsylvania during the four weeks before and after the release of the grand jury report on sexual abuse. Insignificant changes (0.2% MoE 1.78%) are found in tithing amounts.

Week over week, the financial data remained remarkably consistent. The average collection amount in the four weeks before the grand jury report was almost identical to the average collection amount received in the four weeks after.

Two main outliers are observed: August 5th and September 2nd. These are markedly higher because many weekly churchgoers tithe via an electronic debit from their bank account on the first of the month. Although there does appear to be a small difference between the first Sunday in August (before the report) and the first Sunday in September (after the report), the change is not statistically significant.

Stacked plots show the total contribution of various parishes. Data is ordered from largest collection to smallest from bottom to top.

Oftentimes details are lost in averages and statistics. So we generated a stacked plot ordered by collection amounts from largest to smallest, bottom to top. In addition, consistent colors represent a single parish across weeks in the figure above. It is easy to see how collection amounts change for each parish from week to week.

Finally we report the geographical distribution of tithing amounts. The accused clergymen were from a variety of different locations and frequently moved from parish to parish (note that priests change parishes from time to time for a variety of non-scandalous reasons). This makes it difficult to pinpoint specific parishes and locations where abuse occurred in order to perform any targeted analysis.

Postal-code map of Pennsylvania colored with shades of green or red according to the amount of increase or decrease in collection amounts respectively.

Nevertheless, we did place the parishes collected in our survey into individual postal-code regions and mapped their change in shades of green and red indicating an overall increase (green) or decrease (red) in collection amounts. This illustration indicates that our survey of parishes is geographically diverse including urban regions of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as well as rural and suburban areas. No pattern is immediately evident to us non-Pennsylvanians; the shades of red and green on this map (and our data in general) appear consistent with normal week to week collection variance.