http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1009146.ece
The finances of the Church of Rome are notoriously opaque, but at least one thing about them is clear. The ability to deploy the large contributions of the Catholic laity for charitable purposes has been seriously impaired as a result of huge payments made to the victims of sexual abuse by the clergy. The bill in the United States alone is close to $2 billion. So a scandal which has severely undermined the credibility of the Church in the US and Ireland, while causing considerable embarrassment elsewhere, has cast a spotlight on the lack of transparency and accountability in the Church’s handling of the regular donations of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.
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