Exclusive Report—CRS Cornered (VIDEO)

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Dr. Carolyn Woo, President and CEO of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), made a quick getaway from ChurchMilitant.com cameras following a public presentation at a suburban Cleveland parish on Thursday night.

Woo's handlers did their best to block Church Militant from getting access to her, as they had a car warmed up and waiting outside for a quick getaway. It's understandable that Woo would want to duck questions following a string of scandals at the U.S. Bishops' poverty-fighting program, of which she is the head.

CRS has the 62-year-old Woo out on a goodwill tour trying to repair the damage to its public image. On Thursday, she was near Cleveland, Ohio at St. Clarence's parish giving a talk to roughly 170 mostly elderly, liberal Catholics, talking up the overseas work of CRS. Woo told the crowd to remember the poor and that they would be judged on how much they overlooked them. 

Woo gets paid $400,000 in annual salary. 

On top of scandalous reports about CRS supporting contraception efforts in the Third World, six weeks ago came the bombshell revelations that the Vice President of Overseas Finance, Rick Estridge, is an active homosexual in a same-sex "marriage."

The report caught CRS totally off guard and unprepared, as was evidenced by Woo's lack of response to our questions about unconfirmed reports that Estridge was paid nearly $500,000 as walking-away pay for his resignation.

The parish which hosted Woo, St. Clarence, is another typical monument to modernism, with its sickening architecture and total lack of inspiration. The blessed Sacrament isn't even in the Church. Our Lord is kept on a waist-high shelf in a tiny corner in the side chapel, right next to the glass door, complete with two giant carpet fans placed right in front.

None of this, however, can come as any surprise given the trajectory of the self-styled American Catholic Church for the past 50 years.

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