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As Pope visit nears, U.S. Catholic Church faces financial strain
Reuters ^ | October 20, 2015 | Richard Valdmanis

Posted on 10/20/2015 2:16:47 PM PDT by sparklite2

BOSTON (Reuters) – When Pope Francis makes his first visit to the United States this month he will face a national Catholic Church whose finances are staggering under a shrinking membership and huge payouts to sex-abuse victims, threatening to undermine its social influence.

With the Church still absorbing the roughly $3 billion cost of a clergy sex abuse scandal, another financial crisis is looming — a potentially crippling shortfall in funding the pensions of its ageing priests.

The U.S. Catholic Church has lost millions of its members over the past 14 years following the child abuse scandal that tarnished its reputation and forced it to sell assets to pay billions of dollars in settlements.

(Excerpt) Read more at oann.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: epa; globalwarminghoax; popefrancis; romancatholicism

1 posted on 10/20/2015 2:16:47 PM PDT by sparklite2
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To: sparklite2

I’m no fan of this Pope. And the pedophile priest scandals have been truly unconscionable.

But it’s impossible to deny that the Left is deliberately pursuing a strategy of trying to bankrupt the Church as a way to end advocacy for traditional values.


2 posted on 10/20/2015 2:21:20 PM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: sparklite2

(This version corrects Sept. 8 story in paragraphs 28 and 29 to make plain Robert Bouche is CFO of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, not Philadelphia, and that his archdiocese requires parishes to contribute to priests’ retirements)


This should have been at the beginning of the aticle,not the end.

Crappy journalism.

.


3 posted on 10/20/2015 2:21:41 PM PDT by Mears
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To: sparklite2; All

Wait a minute, wasn’t the pope just here?


4 posted on 10/20/2015 2:22:06 PM PDT by notdownwidems (Washington DC has become the enemy of free people everywhere)
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To: sparklite2

The Catholic bishops stood by APPLAUDING as the inner-city Catholic neighborhoods were systematically destroyed by the federal government, under the direction of the Quaker/Unitarian alliance. The bishops fell for the lie that resistance to the destruction of ethnic Catholic neighborhoods was “racist.”


5 posted on 10/20/2015 2:23:39 PM PDT by Arthur McGowan (Beau Biden's funeral, attended by Bp. Malooly, Card. McCarrick, and Papal Nuncio, Abp. Vigano.)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

There is no significant pedophile priest scandal.

The actual “pedophiles” numbered, at most, half-a-dozen.

The scandal was a homosexual-priests-abusing-teenage-boys scandal.


6 posted on 10/20/2015 2:25:34 PM PDT by Arthur McGowan (Beau Biden's funeral, attended by Bp. Malooly, Card. McCarrick, and Papal Nuncio, Abp. Vigano.)
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To: sparklite2
The link doesn't go to Reuters. Goes to oann.com, but doesn't open. Are you sure this isn't old? Francis was just here
7 posted on 10/20/2015 2:25:55 PM PDT by fatnotlazy
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To: notdownwidems

Yes, this time but Bill Nye the Science Guy will be holding mass in the pope’s place.

Focus groups confirmed people can’t tell the difference.


8 posted on 10/20/2015 2:28:42 PM PDT by Eddie01 (Soul Finger by the Barkays)
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To: Arthur McGowan
There is no significant pedophile priest scandal. The actual “pedophiles” numbered, at most, half-a-dozen. The scandal was a homosexual-priests-abusing-teenage-boys scandal.

Oh. Well, I suppose that makes it OK then.


9 posted on 10/20/2015 2:29:15 PM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: Arthur McGowan

Bears repeating. I’m not sure of the percentage outside the Catholic Church, but the overwhelming majority of child sexual abuse in the world at large also involves the homo crowd as perps— no more than 3% of the population.


10 posted on 10/20/2015 2:30:07 PM PDT by Vigilanteman (ObaMao: Fake America, Fake Messiah, Fake Black man. How many fakes can you fit into one Zer0?)
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To: fatnotlazy

The link works ok for me.
The article is dated today, but scrolling way, way down,
I now see it is updated from a September article.
Sorry about that.


11 posted on 10/20/2015 2:30:11 PM PDT by sparklite2 (All will become clear when it is too late to matter.)
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To: sparklite2
Ok thanks. :)
12 posted on 10/20/2015 2:31:51 PM PDT by fatnotlazy
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To: sparklite2

Mylanta???!!

He was just here three weeks and gave a lovely marxist speech.


13 posted on 10/20/2015 2:33:12 PM PDT by Vendome (Don't take life so seriously-you won't live through it anyway-Enjoy Yourself ala Louis Prima)
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To: sparklite2

“following the child abuse scandal”

There was no child abuse scandal except in the lies printed by the media. What the media dishonestly called pedophilia and child abuse was homosexual priests accused of having sex with boys in their late teens.

Many of those accusations were false. The homosexual priests are a small minority of total priests but work together to promote and protect each other. They are a problem.


14 posted on 10/20/2015 2:36:11 PM PDT by detective
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To: Vendome
The Catholic Church is the world's largest Corporation and landlord

Cry me a river.

We just had the Socialist Pope here and I don't think he put money in the Church's coffers unless the DNC cut him a check for pushing their agenda

15 posted on 10/20/2015 2:37:13 PM PDT by scooby321
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To: Buckeye McFrog; Arthur McGowan
Dear Buckeye my friend, nobody --- least of all Arthur McGowan --- is saying homosexual priests sodomizing underage teens is "OK." The point here is that the problem IS male homosexuality. It is not the clerical 0.0001% (my guesstimate) who are pedophiles, it's the much bigger percent who are practicing homosexuals.

It is not at all unusual for homosexuals to be attracted by the "young stuff." The most common form of homosexual practice, historically, across cultures, by far, has been, specifically, pederasty. As far as I know, it still is.

That is the problem.

16 posted on 10/20/2015 2:52:02 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o ("In Christ we form one body, and each member belongs to all the others." Romans 12:5)
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To: notdownwidems
Wait a minute, wasn’t the pope just here?

Probably just a lookalike hired by the Pope so that He wouldn't have to actually meet Obammy and pretend to like him. Oil and water just don't mix doncha know.

17 posted on 10/20/2015 2:59:47 PM PDT by epow (Man will ultimately be governed by God or by tyrants. Benjamin Franklin)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

I didn’t say anything was OK.

I was saying that the scandal has been given the WRONG NAME.

The homosexual movement (including homosexual priests and bishops) WANTED the scandal to be called the “pedophile priest” scandal, to deflect attention away from the fact that the guilty priests were almost all homosexual men preying on teenage boys.


18 posted on 10/20/2015 3:00:48 PM PDT by Arthur McGowan (Beau Biden's funeral, attended by Bp. Malooly, Card. McCarrick, and Papal Nuncio, Abp. Vigano.)
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To: sparklite2

“The U.S. Catholic Church has lost millions of its members over the past 14 years following the child abuse scandal that tarnished its reputation and forced it to sell assets to pay billions of dollars in settlements.”

While the homosexual molestation of young men was an absolute disgrace and crime, I don’t know that anyone left the Church in the past 14 years because of it. The Church had been waning for decades before (in the US and the West), and people I know who “left the Church” did so because of laziness, being denied a Church wedding on their second, third, and fourth times around, or a pastor’s refusal to baptize “their child” (adopted) while they were openly living together in a homosexual relationship.

For true believers, the scandal (I prefer the term “crimes”) actually served to flush the toilet on some real POSes and their enablers...


19 posted on 10/20/2015 3:04:09 PM PDT by kearnyirish2 (Affirmative action is economic warfare against white males (and therefore white families).)
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To: Buckeye McFrog
There is no significant pedophile priest scandal. The actual “pedophiles” numbered, at most, half-a-dozen. The scandal was a homosexual-priests-abusing-teenage-boys scandal. Oh. Well, I suppose that makes it OK then.

Doesn't make it O.K., just makes it an entirely different situation. Child abuse is one thing, a gay man seeking willing young men to participate is another.

20 posted on 10/20/2015 3:51:38 PM PDT by terycarl (COMMON SENSE PREVAILS OVERALL!!)
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