Catholic church in the Czech Republic receives millions of crowns from gambling annually, daily Pravo wrote Saturday. It is just a faction of the 130 billion crowns that circulate in gambling annually in the Czech Republic, but church has officially criticised it for a long time, Pravo writes.
The Fund of the Hope of the Third Millennium foundation sends millions of crowns to the Prague Archbishop Cardinal Miloslav Vlk's foundation, religious orders and parishes within contributions to charity annually, Pravo writes.
In fact, the Fund Hope of the Third Millennium was established by the owners of the prosperous casino network Happy Day in 1999, it adds.
According to its annual reports, the Fund Hope sent over 20 million crowns to the church between 2000 and 2007, Pravo writes.
In 2007, Vlk's foundation fund received 2.5 millions crowns for the Mother Theresa community center in 2007. A year earlier, it received two million for the same purpose.
Besides, parishes in a number of villages obtain hundreds of thousands of crowns, Pravo writes.
The church has not tried to keep secret the origin of the money. The Fund Hope is published on the web page of the Prague Archbishopric, Pravo writes.
However, opposition to gambling is one of the major political slogans coined by the Christian Democrats (KDU-CSL) who stood up against it in the past week again, Pravo writes.
"We consider pathological gambling extremely dangerous to our society. The KDU-CSL is resolutely against gambling in any form as it causes crime, family disintegration and destruction of human relations in general," party leader Cyril Svoboda said on Thursday.
Svoboda said it was one of the Christian principles to struggle against smuggling and churches should carefully distinguish between their donors, Pravo writes.
"The companies paint the image of being beneficial to the public. In fact, they earn tremendous money, only giving crumbs to the humanitarian purposes, inflating all of the crumbs," Svoboda said.
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