People fleeing the pews means fewer dollars to spend on administration and property maintenance. And lay people are fleeing Catholic pews in droves.

An issue you don't mention here that's critical, according to both Pew Research and PRRI, is that part of the exodus of Catholics from the pews has to do with the Church's stands against gay people like me and against trans people.

Despite some half-hearted gestures from Pope Francis to the contrary, the Catholic Church is intensely homophobic. The Catechism insists that I, a cradle Catholic and loving gay man, commit "acts of grave depravity" and that I am "intrinsically disordered."

American see language like that and feel quite rightly repulsed. They recognize that horrifying hate speech of that order has no place in their lives.

Good data indicates that most lay Catholics aren't down with that message either, and increasingly, they're leaving in disgust over it.

Where I live in Michigan, we see a phenomenon that is common across the United States: priests who run parishes and bishops who run dioceses are intensely homophobic, even denying us all sacraments including burial with our families in Catholic cemeteries. They conduct witch hunts against Church employees, including in one instance firing a lesbian organist who had been working as a music director for her church for 30 years. She lost a pension because of that. Now, at the beginning of what should have been a comfortable retirement, she's struggling. Because Catholic priests and bishops tend to be disgusting pieces of shit. So, more loving lay people leave, and churches trend toward reduction to nests of hateful vipers.

Nuns and priests already have to be fairly hateful vipers just to become nuns and priests. You can't take your vows without affirming that gay people are depraved and disordered. So you end up with disgusting bigots in Catholic leadership and service.

Nothing brought this home to me more than an incident that happened a few years ago with a friend of mine who was a Catholic nun. I was shocked to see her publicly write one day that people should accept the Catholic catechism's (nasty and hateful) descriptions of queer people with "prayerful discernment and waiting."

I I was beyond shocked, because it never occurred to me that she was a homophobic bigot. I contacted her immediately and asked her if she agreed with Catholic teachings that gay people are depraved and disordered.

At first, she refused to answer. Then, she began to equivocate. Eventually, I realized she DOES accept those doctrines. I realized that she's hateful and bigoted against people like me even while she acts like she's friendly.

I can't tell you how filled with disgust I became.

But that's common across the Catholic world in the United States. Priests and nuns hold on to absolutely sickening beliefs, and Catholic lay people aren't down for it.

So they're leaving. And what remains is cancerous rot. And a lot less money.