It should be mentioned that Catholics pay a lot for the Catholic education of their children, rather than sending them to public schools. I have spent about $30,000 to $40,000 per year for many years just in tuition at Catholic elementary school, High School and College. Doubtless that does not show up as “charitable giving”, but it represents a material sacrifice that many Catholics make for their faith and the faith of their children. Also, stats show that religious Catholics have substantially larger families than everyone except the Mormons and Orthodox Jews -— and this is across income levels. I have many Catholic professor friends who have five to ten children. That is quite common. I myself have five. These people could be buying big houses and having expensive vacations. But they forgo that. So before we start pointing fingers, all the facts should be considered. Moreover, statistics on “Catholics” tend to lump in nominal Catholics with ones who actually practice their faith.
I reviewed decedents Estates, a location where one sees the reporting of the most substantive contributions. I would see the funding of many Yeshivas, Jewish, Eastern Orthodox or Mormon institutions or even many to secular state and private institutions/foundations but rarely did I ever see any donations to Catholic organizations. These donations at times would be in the tens or even hundreds of millions so they were meaningful. My coworkers and I viewed these documents for a 15 year period and they represented all of the Estates whose wealth exceeded 10 million. Thus, it wasn't a sample but represented the entire universe. Discussions with non catholic coworkers over these 15 years confirmed my aforementioned thoughts. It made me wonder.since many of these years predated the scandals , so said scandals could not be offered as a reason for the lack of generosity on the part of Catholics.