The truth about how much the Catholic church has spent on child abuse lawsuits is finally coming out.
Pedophilia in the Catholic church has been a huge issue for them, and the allegations don’t seem to be slowing down.
Pope Francis has done his best PR-wise for the church, as he has tried to play-down and sweep under the carpet as many as the scandals as he can, but he can only do so much.
The mounting number of allegations which have turned into lawsuits has seen the Catholic church have to pay out vast sums of money, but where are they getting it from?
The Catholic church is highly secretive about the amount of cash they have, but the estimates suggest that they are one of the richest organizations in the world – their fine art collection alone is worth billions of dollars.
Devout Catholics are putting their hands in their pockets every week to donate to their local church, but how much of this money is going to pay for lawyers to protect their pedophile priests?
BishopAccountability are a non-profit group that specialize in logging and reporting allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church.
They have concluded in a report that the church has paid out almost $4 billion in sexual abuse lawsuits since the 1980s.
BishopAccountability state that their mission is to “document the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church,”
Their website also documents the unparalleled level of payouts involving more than 8,600 cases of assault survivors abused by a member of the clergy dating as far back as the early 1950s.
Back in the 1990’s a monk spoke to the New Yorker about the same issue, saying:
“You wouldn’t believe the amounts of money the church is spending to settle these priestly sexual-abuse cases.”
Judging by this time scale it appears that these cover-ups and lawsuits have been going on far longer than the media have realized.
On his visit to Dublin, Ireland, Pope Francis met with individual victims who experienced sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. He says that he shared the outrage many feel about these “repugnant crimes.”
In a speech to government officials at Dublin Castle he said:
“The failure of ecclesial authorities — bishops, religious superiors, priests and others — to adequately address these repugnant crimes has rightly given rise to outrage, and remains a source of pain and shame for the Catholic community. I myself share these sentiments.”
