MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation
02/02/2015
Jennifer Haselberger
One of the many legends that is told about the first Archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, John Ireland, is that he rose up out of his death bed in order to burn his papers, including the list of donors, donations, and other acts of procurement that facilitated the building of the Cathedral of Saint Paul. His sister, Sister Seraphine, CSJ, was entrusted with completing the job, but as any historian can tell you both brother and sister were only partially successful. Therefore, I can only imagine the thoughts of the illustrious Archbishop Ireland if he happened to be looking down from heaven last Friday when his former Archdiocese submitted its financial schedules to US Bankruptcy Court. ‘Did I teach you nothing?’, would probably have been first and foremost.
For, in providing what it described as a ‘good faith best effort’ to account for its financial assets, the Archdiocese may have fallen into the old Ireland trap of having produced more documents than it is possible to account for in the eleventh hour. Local and national newspapers and media outlets are already having a field day identifying those areas in which the Archdiocese has apparently significantly underestimated the value of its assets, as well as attempts to shield those assets by transferring them out of church control. From my perspective, however, what the schedules demonstrate is abysmally poor bookkeeping and administration. In other words, from where I stand the schedules simply don’t match the current situation of the Archdiocese.
For instance, Schedule A is the list of real property owned by the Archdiocese. It lists the Chancery complex on Summit Avenue and Kellogg Boulevard, the Cathedral, the Hazelwood property which was the retirement home of Archbishop Flynn prior to his move to the University of St Thomas, the land on which three Catholic high schools sit, and the Indian Ministry building in Minneapolis (listed as Gichitwaa Kateri although she was canonized in 2012 as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, a ceremony which Deacon Joseph Damiani attended despite accusations of child sexual abuse) .
I find it interesting that the Archdiocese chose not to list its current value interest in the high school properties in the Schedule, but only gave an estimated land market value in the notes. I also question whether such numbers truly represent a ‘good faith best effort’ to assess the value of those properties. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, in 2004 the Archdiocese executed a quit claim deed for its 49% of the property on which Hill Murray sits, and the school purchased the other 51% from the Sisters of Saint Benedict. The total value of the property at that time was estimated at $12,000,000, which makes last week’s estimated appraisals of the De LaSalle property (located on the historic Nicollet Island, and listed by the Archdiocese at $2,682,100), Totino Grace ($5,088,200), and Benilde-St Margaret ($5,900,000) seem suspiciously low.
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