Comment by ssl-3

Back when my parents made me go to church, I remember observing that a lot of the donations being made were in envelopes that the church provided.

That's pretty private, I think, in that one's fellow churchgoers can't discern much but the thickness of the envelope. It'd look the same if the donation consisted of 5 singles, or 5 hundreds.

(I have no idea if that's standard accepted practice everywhere, though I might imagine that someone would be getting pretty uptight at some level if people weren't giving enough to put another layer of gold on the roof of a Catholic church -- envelope or not.)