The church also has extensive non-property assets including Catholic Church Insurance and its own internal banks – often known as Catholic Development Funds – which have total assets of several billion dollars, including more than $1 billion in Melbourne.

And it has other investments, including in superannuation and telecommunications. A church-owned fund manager has more than $1.4 billion under management.

Asked specifically to nominate a value for the assets of the church and its associated entities, Melbourne archdiocese communications director Shane Healy said such information was “not available”.

Results from the investigation come in the wake of the royal commission, and four years after the tabling of the Victorian parliamentary inquiry into abuse.

They raise serious new questions about the church’s decades-long bid to avoid or minimise compensation payments to abuse survivors.

The royal commission reported that payments averaged just $35,000 under the Melbourne Response, the compensation scheme established by the then archbishop George Pell in 1996, a total of $11.3 million to 324 survivors of child sexual abuse.

In 2015, the Melbourne archdiocese paid $39 million - more than three times the total compensation amount - for new premium offices, the heritage-listed Industry House in East Melbourne, near St Patrick’s Cathedral.

“These figures confirm what we have known; there is huge inequity between the Catholic Church’s wealth and their responses to survivors,” said Helen Last, chief executive of the In Good Faith Foundation, which supports abuse survivors.

“The 600 survivors registered for our foundation’s services continue to experience minimal compensation and lack of comprehensive care in relation to their church abuses. They say their needs are the lowest of church priorities.”

Healy said the church's meeting the claims of survivors whose complaints of abuse were upheld was “amongst its highest priorities”. He said that since that report the church had paid an extra $17.2 million to survivors.

The Age’s investigation also calls into question the privileges the church enjoys, including exemptions from nearly all forms of taxation and billions of dollars in government funding each year to run services - $7.9 billion for its Australian schools alone in 2015.

It involved obtaining property valuations from 36 Victorian councils, including most of the Melbourne metropolitan area, Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo, many under freedom of information.

It identified more than 1860 church-owned properties with “capital improved value” (land plus buildings) of just under $7 billion.