American Catholic sex abuse vs. national GDPs

Fact: in 2007, the Catholic Church paid out about $1,031,418,000 in settlements for lawsuits stemming from clergy pedophilia in the United States alone.

This is more than:

• The combined salaries of 39,000 American citizens earning an average salary in 2006.
• The combined federal salaries of the next 644 US presidents.
• The Gross Domestic Product of Kiribati, Sao Tome and Principe, Tonga, Dominica, Guinea-Bassau, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Comoros, Vanatu, East Timor, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Zimbabwe, Gambia, Seychelles, Liberia, Djibouti, Saint Lucia, or Burundi.
  
• The Gross Domestic Product of Burundi, Saint Lucia, Djibouti, Liberia, and Seychelles COMBINED. (This is about 11,670,000 people.)
• The combined salaries of 62,000 Catholic priests in the United States earning an average salary.
• Enough money to pay for about 34,000 years at an average American four-year private institution.
• Enough to buy 252,860,505 gallons of gas.
• Enough to pay the Vatican's operating expenses for ten years.
  

Just to keep things in perspective:

• If you are a Catholic who tithed $50 a week to your local church in 2007, you would have to keep up that donation for the next 400,000 years in order to make up for the criminal sexual deviance of Catholic clergy.
• If you are a Catholic who tithed $50 a week to your local church in 2007, your donation paid %.0000025 of the amount of money the Church was forced to pay the victims of its employees that same year.
• The average individual victim of Catholic sexual abuse who received a settlement from your church received more than 6,000 times your donation in payouts from the Catholic Church.

So, next time you are in church and the huckster behind the pulpit passes around the collection plate, ask yourself how much of your money you want flushed down the seemingly-bottomless toilet of Catholic clergy sexual deviance.