UNITED STATES
Daily Kos
Kaili Joy Gray
This story is just gonna break your heart:
Cardinal [Timothy M.] Dolan criticized a legislative proposal that would, for a year, drop the statute of limitations for filing civil claims for sexual offenses, allowing for lawsuits by people who say they were abused long ago. The cardinal said he was concerned that a flood of lawsuits over abuse by priests could drain the church of money it is using for charitable purposes.
“I think we bishops have been very contrite in admitting that the church did not handle this well at all in the past,” he said. “But we bristle sometimes in that the church doesn’t get the credit, now being in the vanguard of reform. It does bother us that the church continues to be a whipping boy.”
Aw. Poor bishops. They are just so sick and tired of being blamed for that whole covering-up-the-widespread-rape-and-molestation-of-children thing. Don’t you secular ingrates understand that they can’t do really important stuff—like spend $26.7 million a year lobbying politicians to pass Church-approved laws against gays and vaginas—if they have to keep paying settlements to all those molested kids?
And once you take into account all the money the Church has to spend trying to shut down Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) because, according to William Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, the bishops believe “they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough” because they “don’t need altar boys,” why, that hardly leaves any money at all to care for the homeless pull funding from services for the homeless because its director supports marriage equality.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.