Priest sexual-abuse scandals have cost the US Catholic church a total of about $3bn in legal fees, settlements and other direct costs since the 1980s, but the impact of parishioners’ declining charitable contributions has been an order of magnitude larger, report Nicolas L. Bottan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of Harvard University. A parish-by-parish analysis shows that the scandals caused contributions to the church to decline by an estimated average of $2.36bn per year. From 1950-2009, allegations of abuse were lodged against 5,768 priests, or 5.3pc of all priests active in the US, the researchers say.

(Source: Social Science Research Network)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, July 28th, 2014