SANTA CLARA, Calif. —A California psychologist who has counseled abusive priests and their victims estimates that there have been 3,000 predatory priests and about 24,000 victims in the United States.
The estimates by Thomas G. Plante, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University, come just before a church-appointed oversight panel is scheduled to release its own accounting of guilty priests and their victims Feb. 27.
Plante, writing in the Jan. 5 edition of the Jesuit magazine America, said the best estimates indicate that about 2 percent of Catholic priests have had a sexual encounter with a minor. During the past 50 years, there have been about 150,000 Catholic priests in the United States.
The limited research shows that each abusive priest has an average of about eight victims, resulting in the figures for priests and victims.
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