The Kansas City Star made a huge splash in late January with an exclusive survey of Catholic priests, purporting to show an epidemic of AIDS cutting a swath through the clergy, which presumably makes a mockery of the church's practice of priestly celibacy. Priests, of course, like all people, sometimes scandalously fail to live up to their solemn vows. But the rate at which they fail, it turns out, can't be reliably determined from the three-part series in the Kansas City Star.
To begin with, the paper's sample was not statistically valid, which it at least acknowledged in a sidebar (only 27 percent responded to its survey, which was mailed to some 3,000 priests). But more misleading was its claim that priests are dying of AIDS at a rate "four times that of the general population." This was the soundbite that made its way into everyone else's headlines and TV news reports. But as the Statistical Assessment Service points out in its February newsletter (see www.stats.org), "an appropriate comparison group for priests is surely not the general population, which includes women and children, but rather adult males," whose AIDS-related death rate is precisely the same, 4 per 10,000, that the Star projected for priests. There's a headline you don't see too often, "Priests: A Lot Like Other Men."