UNITED STATES
La Prensa
Washington, Nov 3 (EFE).- The Catholic Church has paid out close to $4 billion in the United States from being sued for the sexual abuse of minors by priests since the 1950s, a higher figure than had been previously estimated.
The report published in the National Catholic Reporter, or NCR, a newspaper for the Catholic community in the United States, raises by some $1 billion the amount of settlements for such cases previously reported in the media.
The document reached the conclusion that the exact accumulated settlements amounted to $3,994,797,060.10, as the result of a three-month review of more than 7,800 articles from the NCR’s own database and that of LexisNexis Academic, as well as from analyzing information from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Figures offered by the NCR are ostensibly higher than the official statistics, due to the fact that there are no uniform reporting standards for Catholic dioceses to disclose their financial records.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.