UNITED STATES
Wonkette
by DOKTOR ZOOM
Whoohoo! Free Parking!Seems like only the beginning of this month that we were all outraged and stuff about the terrible news that the Archdiocese of Milwaukee was playing hide-the-assets in an attempt to avoid paying compensation to victims of sex abuse. And now, not only has a federal judge declined to say, “No, Archbishop, that’s arch-villainous,” the judge actually went several steps further and granted the Archdiocese ridiculously broad immunity from federal bankruptcy law, basically saying that large chunks of religious institutions’ finances are exempt from scrutiny under the First Amendment. Please summarize for us, ThinkProgress:
While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.
That’s some catch.
The shell game worked like this: In 2007, while he was Archbishop of Milwaukee, Timothy Dolan (now Archbishop of New York) transferred some $57 million from the Archdiocese’s general fund into a special trust for maintaining cemeteries. Dolan wrote a letter to the Vatican explaining that this one weird trick would result in “improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.” So the question for Judge Randa was whether as part of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s bankruptcy case — brought on largely because of claims in sex abuse cases — the court could require that the hidden asserts be moved back to the general fund so they would be available to creditors, including those abuse victims.
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