Damn, I feel bad about it. I mean, I know how it is to be
broke, having lost my job a couple years ago. Sure, I get by with a few
teaching gigs, selling some (very few) books, and the occasional odd job—but
job security? Insurance? Paid vacations? 401K plans? Ah, happy days….
So I sympathize, I really do, with the Archdiocese of
Milwaukee because guess what? They’re broke, too! And not only that, but
they’ve had to pay a cartload of money in attorney fees—the Miami Herald says
the tab adds up to 12 million bucks just to declare themselves broke. Think
that’s bad? WISN.com puts
the figure at 19 million.
So they’re scrounging—just getting by, those good guys in
the Roman collars up there in cold Milwaukee. Had to take out a mortgage in
2006 on the Lake Michigan headquarters. Tried to find you a picture of it, but
all I could find was Google Map. Take
a look!
Well, they got the mortgage to pay off ten pesky victims of
sexual abuse in 2006—settlement was almost 16.7 million. And now the
headquarters is underwater—no, not the lake, but the debt
is higher than the value of the property.
So of course the then archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy A. Dolan—now
Cardinal of New York, president of the United
States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and everybody’s favorite—had to do a
smooth move, which he did. He wrote off to Rome in 2007 asking permission to
transfer almost 57 million dollars to a cemetery fund. And—as revealed last
summer…well, here’s
The New York Times:
“I
foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and
liability.” The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.
OK—let’s take the tongue out of the cheek. Five weeks? FIVE
FRIGGING WEEKS! When I, following the several cases of misconduct, have
routinely seen correspondence about abusive priests between bishops and the
Vatican that extends for DECADES! One of the worst abusers in the Catholic
church, Marcial Maciel—a
guy who actually had six children by two women, suffered from morphine
addiction, and abused at least nine boys—never got thrown out of the church at
all. Nor, by the way, did he ever apologize. So five weeks to approve a money
transfer in 2007? That’s fucking outrageous.
Well, they may have acted so swiftly because of words
that Dolan had written to Ratzinger in 2003;
were the words still ringing through the chambers of the Vatican?
“As
victims organize and become more public, the potential for true scandal is very
real,” he wrote in such a request in 2003 to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the
head of the Vatican office charged with handling abuse cases until he became
Pope Benedict XVI in 2005.
So almost
57 million bucks were transferred to a fund for cemeteries. And then what
happened? Predictably, in 2011, the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, joining
ten other dioceses around the country to have done so in the last ten years.
But that settlement for the 16.7 million-buck settlement
back in 2006? It was just for paying off the victims of two priests. The
real scope of the problem was much bigger:
At least 45 Milwaukee priests face sex abuse accusations.
One priest in particular was accused of personally molesting close to 200 deaf boys.
So all of those victims—well, some of them—got together and
filed a civil suit. And then what happened. Here’s The New York Times again:
Since
then, negotiations between the two sides in Milwaukee have broken down: the
church has argued that about 400 of the 575 cases are invalid, while lawyers
for the victims have accused the church of hiding assets.
Hiding assets
would mean that transfer to the cemetery fund: very logically, the victims of
abuse went to court, alleging that the transfer was—in legal terms—a fraudulent
conveyance. At first, they got a bankruptcy judge to agree that it was, then a
U.S. District judge—Rudolph
T. Randa—came out in July of 2013 and said
the deal was kosher, citing the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom
Restoration Act of 1993. Obviously, liberal minds were appalled: here’s
thinkprogress.com:
Randa concludes that the church has a constitutional right to shield its funds. By raising his opinion to constitutional status, Randa effectively strips Congress of its ability to correct his sweeping interpretation of the law.
(Oh, by the way,
Randa’s parents and many relatives are buried in Milwaukee Catholic cemeteries—but
that wasn’t, he felt, a cause for recusing himself…)
OK—so we’ve
gotten up to last summer. Today? Well, the archdiocese came up two days ago
with a plan to pay 4 million bucks to the 125 victims that it admits were
abused. Right—so where is this relatively trivial sum coming from? Here’s
Yahoo News:
The
archdiocese will raise $2 million in a loan from a cemetery trust fund created
under New York Cardinal and former Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
Yup, Dear Reader, the archdiocese is proposing to pay two
million dollars out of the same fund into which they had transferred 57
million dollars seven years earlier.
It is a brazen as it is depraved. And both the depravity and
the brazenness have been taken to astronomical, never-before-heard-of,
proportions.
