Sean Hannity said on his April 16 show that he broke away from the Catholic Church because of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, saying the abuse and the corruption around it drove him out of the faith. Hannity said he was raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools and went to a seminary high school before deciding he could no longer stay. “I left the Catholic Church in large part because of institutionalized corruption,” he said.
He described the problem as running “at the parish level to the bishop level, cardinals, all the way to Rome,” and said the worst misconduct “went not only unchecked, but they never fully corrected it or dealt with it.” He added that “others at the Vatican have totally lost sight of the true meaning of the bible and its teachings.”
The comments came against the backdrop of a scandal that, by the Catholic League’s account, reached its height about a half-century ago, with most of the offenses taking place between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s. Earlier surveys have put the share of clergy accused in past decades at low single-digit levels — less than 1.5 percent in a 2002 survey of the estimated sixty thousand or more men who served in the Catholic clergy, 1.8 percent in a New York Times survey of priests ordained between 1950 and 2001, and 4 percent in a John Jay College of Criminal Justice study covering 1950 to 2002.
That John Jay study, issued in 2004, said 4,393 priests had an accusation made against them during that span, and that 149 priests with more than ten allegations were responsible for 26 percent of all allegations. The same study said 149 priests accounted for more than a quarter of the claims. The Catholic League now says the current picture is very different: from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, of the 48,176 members of the clergy, exactly two had a substantiated accusation made against him, or 0.004 percent of priests with a substantiated case of sexual abuse made against them by a minor in that period.
The remaining friction is not in the history but in the comparison. The league says 81 percent of victims were male, 78 percent were postpubescent and 3.8 percent of abusers were pedophiles, while also arguing there is no institution in American society today, religious or secular, with less of a problem than the Catholic Church. Hannity’s case was personal; the numbers he pointed to were institutional. Together, they leave little doubt about his conclusion: he says the scandal did not merely wound the church, it was the reason he left it.
