UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk|May 31, 2012|
The Media Report.com, which takes up cudgels against what it considers media attacks on the Catholic Church, today assailed the NYT’s Laurie Goodstein for a story criticizing the country’s leading hierarch for, as they see it, just doing his darnedest to remove sex offenders from the priesthood asap.
In her latest Catholic Church-obsessed piece, Goodstein takes issue with the fact that Cardinal Timothy Dolan, when he was the Archbishop of Milwaukee a while back, approved a number of $20,000 settlements to rid the Church of abusive priests in a more time-efficient and expeditious manner – without long, drawn-out canonical or civil proceedings.
The problem the story poses for Dolan is not that he did such a thing, however, but that he didn’t tell the truth about it back in the day.
The object of the exercise was to induce the sex offenders not to contest being defrocked–“laicized”–and thereby avoid a lengthy legal process in Rome. To that end, according to newly disclosed minutes of a March 2003 meeting of the Milwaukee archdiocese’s finance committee, Dolan and his councilors discussed a proposal to “offer $20,000 for laicization ($10,000 at the start and $10,000 at the completion the process).”
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