The Roman Catholic Church has removed 218 priests from their positions this year because of allegations of child sexual abuse, but at least 34 known offenders remain in church jobs, according to a survey of Catholic dioceses across the United States by The Washington Post.

The survey also found that at least 850 U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since the early 1960s, and that more than 350 of them were removed from ministry in prior years.

The numbers, which are considerably higher than previously disclosed, suggest the scope of the scandal rocking the Catholic Church in America, but also underscore the continuing shortage of reliable statistics on the church’s sex abuse problem. Catholic officials have said that as a decentralized institution of autonomous dioceses, the church has no way of compiling those figures.

The Post survey was compiled by contacting each of the nation’s 178 mainstream Roman Catholic dioceses. Ninety-six dioceses responded and 82 did not, despite repeated phone calls and e-mail messages. Of those that did answer the Post’s questions, only a handful provided information on financial settlements.

Many diocesan spokesmen said they did not know whether the victims of local priests were males or females, teens or small children.

Supplementary data was then gathered from local newspapers, church newsletters and diocesan Web sites.

David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), an 11-year-old support group that claims 4,000 members, speculated that the lack of information may reflect a deliberate strategy to shield the church from liability.

“It’s ludicrous that you can’t get very, very basic data such as the number of priests who’ve been defrocked or the number of criminal or civil abuse cases filed against priests,” Clohessy said. “I think any prudent person would assume the church has more data than it’s sharing. But I also think that the church is smart enough not to have collected data which could be discoverable” by plaintiffs’ lawyers in lawsuits.

Generally, church officials were even less willing to talk about legal settlements. The Post survey found only $106 million in acknowledged payments. Plaintiffs’ lawyers maintain that the true figure is in the range of $1 billion.

The survey found 866 priests who have been accused of child sexual abuse over the past four decades, less than 1.5 percent of the estimated 60,000 or more men who have served in the clergy over that period.

The actual number accused, however, may be considerably higher. Sylvia Demarest, a plaintiff’s lawyer in Texas, said she compiled a database in the mid-1990s of about 1,200 priests who allegedly have committed sexual misconduct with minors, and she believes the current figure is higher than 1,500.

The scandal erupted in January with revelations that Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and other prelates transferred known sex offenders from parish to parish.