PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Inquirer
By David O’Reilly
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
With the current clergy sex abuse scandal likely to cost more than $11 million, and because years of deficit spending have depleted its financial reserves, Archbishop Charles J. Chaput said the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will seek donations to help pay for the World Day of Families event here in 2015.
Speaking at a Center City news conference a few blocks from where a jury is deliberating child endangerment charges against Monsignor William Lynn, Chaput said he did not know what the international, Vatican-sponsored event might cost, but that “God is giving us an opportunity to have some good news in a difficult time.”
He said he hoped the five-day gathering in Philadelphia, which Pope Benedict XVI announced Sunday, would attract between 60,000 and 80,000 families. That would be far smaller than the triennial World Day of Families that ended Sunday in Milan, which drew about 300,000 on each of its first four days. It ended with an estimated 850,000 people attending Sunday’s open-air Mass celebrated by the pope. .
On Sunday — the same day Benedict announced Philadelphia would be the 2015 host city — parishes across the archdiocese received copies of the archdiocese’s fiscal report. In an accompanying letter, Chaput noted the “extraordinary events of the past 15 months,” and paid particular attention to the devastating Philadelphia grand jury report of February, 2011, that asserted the archdiocese had three dozen priests in active minisitry who had been accused of inappropriate behavior with children.
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