A growing number of American Catholics are reconsidering their loyalty to the global church as it continues on a slow path toward reforming how it handles clerical sexual abuse.

A Gallup poll published Wednesday found that 37 percent of U.S. Catholics have questioned whether they will remain part of the church this year amid recent news about sexual abuse of young people by priests. This is up from 22 percent who said the same in 2002, the last time Gallup conducted polling on this question.

That year, The Boston Globe Spotlight teams investigation into clerical abuse and the churchs cover-up in the Boston area helped expose the scandal nationwide.

Over the past year, the Roman Catholic Church has experienced a renewed reckoning, as lay Catholics questioned whether the churchs secretive, self-protective culture has really changed since 2002, and whether bishops have been held accountable for covering up the issue.

The latest allegations have toppled prominent church leaders in the U.S. , Australia and Chile . Pope Francis himself has been criticized for reacting poorly to victims concerns .

In America, Catholics were stunned to find out last year that it was apparently an open secret in some church circles that a powerful prelate, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, slept with adult seminarians. The Vatican defrocked McCarrick in February, but questions still remain about how the former cardinal was able to ascend to such a prominent position while flouting the churchs moral principles and how long Francis has known that McCarrick was a sexual predator.

Gallups survey was based on telephone interviews conducted between Jan. 21 and Feb. 28 with 581 U.S. Catholics. Between Feb. 21 and Feb. 24, about 190 top-ranking bishops, religious superiors and other Catholic officials convened in Rome at Francis behest to attend the churchs first summit on preventing sex abuse. The goal of the summit was to convince bishops from around the world that clerical sexual abuse isnt just a problem in some countries, but an issue threatening the entire church. Key global advocacy groups that have spent years representing abuse survivors were notably absent from the summits main program.

Francis ended the summit by vowing to hold predator priests accountable, end cover-ups and prioritize victims. The Vatican also announced that it planned to issue a new child protection policy for the Vatican City State that covers the Holy Sees bureaucracy five years after it told the United Nations that such a policy was in the works.

But survivors were ultimately disappointed that Francis still hasnt offered a concrete plan to hold bishops accountable for covering up abuse.