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By Richard Valdmanis 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. A Reuters review of U.S. Catholic financial disclosures shows the pension funding shortfall in 2014 likely approached $2 billion, with much of that coming due in the next five years as thousands of priests retire. 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. The Church’s finances are also under pressure from emptying pews and a demographic shift among Catholics to the U.S. south and suburbs that has left much of its inner-city bricks and mortar underused and bleeding money.
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