Let’s stop drawing out the pain. The St. Paul-Minneapolis Catholic archdiocese filed for bankruptcy today. Look at the numbers:
The filing estimates that the archdiocese — the largest in the state with more than 800,000 parishioners — has assets between $10 million and $50 million, with liabilities between $50 million and $100 million. It also estimated 200 to 300 creditors.
If Catholicism were a business, I wouldn’t recommend investing in it. I’d recommend breaking it up and selling it for scrap. But of course, that’s not what’s going to happen — they’re filing for bankruptcy as an effort to claw their way up out of the abattoir drain.
The archdiocese is the 12th U.S. diocese to seek bankruptcy protection in the face of sex abuse claims. Church leaders have said for months that bankruptcy was an option, as the archdiocese faces numerous lawsuits by victims of clergy sex abuse. The lawsuits will be put on hold while the bankruptcy case is pending.
All those lawsuits for criminal abuse of children…put on hold. Maybe it’s not such a good thing.
bullshit. there’s NO WAY the amount of claims is the cause of bankruptcy.
MUCH more likely, is that they simply don’t want to admit they don’t have enough parishoner payments to cover their overreach in expenses. and they’re using the abuse claims as cover for shady bookkeeping.
remember, actual pedophilia is rare enough, but these guys are, and have ALWAYS been organized criminals.
If the court allows them to file bankruptcy, ALL of their assets should be on the table for remuneration. someone from FFRF should be all over this to make sure that is the case, and this doesn’t end up being a Trump style “bankruptcy”, where 99% of the actual hard assets are retained, and it’s simply the creditors that get the shaft.
shut these fuckers down.
Now if the tax exemption could be removed, they would fail even faster. I’d love to see the whole cult bankrupted.
What kind of a twisted thing is it that the organization is crumbling on the end of the dicks of their own chosen “chaste” ones. How people, and in particular women, can stay associated with this organization is beyond my comprehension.
why do you think the church has been buying up medical real estate (hospitals, med clinics.. etc) as fast as they can over the last 10 years?
it’s a freaking money sink. it’s assets they KNOW most courts will not force them to forfeit.
it’s quite frustrating.
You know one thing about the Catholics: they have smart lawyers. I think it’s the intimate connection with Hell.
As the diocese is just a branch location, with the head office in the Vatican City, why can’t head office cover the claims?
dick @5
The Vatican claims that each diocese is a separate entity. The Pope is merely the Bishop of Rome, primus inter pares, and the Vatican has no financial connection with the St. Paul-Minneapolis Archdiocese. Any connection is strictly ideological. We’re supposed to ignore the fact that the archbishop is directly appointed by the Pope.
“The diocese” is a legal and corporate fiction. There will actually be numerous separate organizations that own and run the various operations of “the diocese” which are kept carefully secret from each other, from parishioners, and from the public. All of them will be under the direct control of the bishop alone.
I hope the state doe some killer disclosure work to prevent them from hiding all this from the courts.
Also it would be a very fine thing if they were forced to sell all the Catholic hospitals to private companies that would run them as health care businesses rather than as religious businesses.
It’s just step 1 of the master plan. Step 2 = sue the feminists:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-cardinal-raymond-leo-burke-blames-paedophile-priests-on-radical-feminists-9973240.html
Step 3 = profit. Of course.
I almost (but not quite) feel sorry when a parish is forced to close down because its diocese can no longer support it, due to lack of parishioners and funds. The few remaining bottoms in the pews lose what is to them a comfort in their remaining years, while the head office in Rome cuts their losses, hides pedophile priests, and plays with their vast wealth.
The Roman Catholic Church is the most immoral and corrupt institution on Earth.
Musta fallen behind on paying their taxes, huh?
@dick #5— The problem is that the diocese isn’t a branch location, it’s a franchise— they pay Rome for the right to use the Catholic brand but they’re actually a separate company.
Okay, look, whether they are hiding assets and fudging numbers or not – and of course they probably are – the right play on this is to embrace the RCC’s spin:
They raped so many kids that they cannot continue as a business if they actually had to pay what they owe.
This is what they want us to believe. They want us to believe it so that we embrace their financial negotiations and shaft the victims…again.
But if we just accept their spin, but speak it without the flowery language of the press releases, we put them in the worst possible position of all.
Churches: they hate it when you take them seriously.
You’re right, they have very smart lawyers, because they can afford the best. The RCC is a bloated parasite, owning billions of dollars worth of property in every corner of the world yet paying no taxes and crying poor at every turn. The treasure hoards of the Vatican would easily pay for all the abuse claims, but it’ll never come to that.
To the tune of “let my people go”…
gardengnome wrote:
they have far more victims than just the raped children. from the magdalene laundries to mass graves filled with children from catholic schools to the child trafficking, and everything else i’ve forgotten or don’t know about, there are a huge number of church victims world-wide.
Reminds me of a joke.
A young couple are driving along, canoodling and not paying attention to the road or that transport up ahead when suddenly they find themselves in front of St Peter. He admits that they have been good Catholics so one little lapse shouldn’t count.
“We wanted to get married but didn’t get the chance; can we get married in heaven?”
“I’m not sure, let me check”
St. Peter disappears and is gone for a thousand years or so and when he comes back he says “Yes, you can marry” So they do.
After million years of bliss and a few of not so much they go back to St. Peter and tell him it’s not working out and ask if they can get a divorce.
“Oh FFS, it took me a millennium to find a priest in heaven, how do you expect me to find a lawyer?”
I guess you’ve never sat in a pew, boadinum (#9)?. Those things are far from comfortable. But if that’s their idea of comfort I’d suggest they just put on a hair shirt and stay at home.
The Boston Globe ran the story, with this interesting quote:
‘‘We’re doing the right thing,’’ the Rev. Charles Lachowitzer, a top church official, said in advance of the filing Friday in US Bankruptcy Court. ‘‘This decision reflects the end of a process of putting victims first.’’
@18: So he’s basically saying “Those kids we screwed years ago? Lets screw them again!”
I don’t know much of anything about bankruptcy. I was aware that declaring bankruptcy involves some kind of immunity to being sued, which would be civil law, but I have a hard time believing it would extend to being charged under criminal law. Or are we talking about civil suits over the sex abuse?
Of course, bankruptcy is precisely what a company would do. Most of the major corporations in the U.S. and internationally use bankruptcy filings to prevent the destruction of their businesses. The Catholic Church is no different in that respect.
There is a problem with the numbers quoted in the article. Although I have not read the filing myself:
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Absent some impressively creative accounting, the Archdiocese has more than $50 million in assets. Consider a subset of the real estate the diocese owns: just churches and the land they occupy. This excludes a bunch of church-affiliated places (e.g. schools, hospitals, apartment complexes housing retired nuns ). At current real estate prices, the cathedral in St. Paul and the associated buildings can’t plausibly be valued as less than 5 m$ – and probably higher, since there isn’t exactly a linear scaling from the nearby 1 m$ homes and the lots they stand on that are currently for sale to a much larger property in a more-visible location. The basilica in Minneapolis is perhaps less valuable; but nearby property suggests value of perhaps 3 m$. Then the archdiocese has a bit more than 220 diocesan churches that it owns, with widely varying real estate values. Pulling four random test cases, mean value is upwards of 200 k$.
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Which gives a bit more than 50 m$, even on the extreme low end of current archdiocese physical assets (unless many of those properties are currently in large part owned by other parties). Is it customary to not list real estate among claimed assets when filing bankruptcy, or is the StarTrib perpetuating some extremely creative accounting by taking the filing’s estimate as a given?
@Bronze Dog, #20:
Since you’re curious, here you go.
The part most relevant to you is this:
Thelawdictionary.org wants me to tell you this came from: Law Dictionary: Bankruptcy Protection from a Civil Suit. Of course I already linked, but don’t fuck with the lawyers.
I’m with “dick” @ #5 on this. The archdiocese is in no way independent of the rest of the Catholic church. The Archdiocese were established with Catholic church money and while nominally independent its continues existence is entirely dependent upon the larger church. If the pope desired to liquidate the archdioceses he could certainly do it as he has direct control over the people who run it. In theory the archdiocese could exist independently as a secular entity but as a practical matter the people running it are not secular and are so disinclined to reopen the place as … say … a Put-Put golf establishment.
The other part is how the money flows. The initial setup of the archdiocese was certainly backed by Church money even if every dollar expended was donated by the parishioners. Also although I don’t know a lot about church finance I have to assume the central church gets money from somewhere. One has to assume that when there were such things any excess money collected in St. Paul does, or did, make its way to the central church for redistribution or investment. I say this because I have a pretty good idea that some archdiocese in poor areas are spending more than they collect. The difference is not made up by magic. Obviously the central church, or other archdiocese under direction of the central church, is making up the difference.
If true this means that there is money flowing both from and to the central authority or at the direction of the central authority. Which mean, to my way of thinking, that the financial independence is more notational, and a legal fiction, than real.
In my opinion plaintiffs should be able to sue the Pope down to his gold trimmed bloomers.
Oh, there’s plenty of money, it’s just been funneled to Italy (and probably illegally) to avoid seizure.
And to prop up the illegal business practices and debts of the vatican bank.
You have to give him credit for honesty. If there ever was a policy of putting victims first, this is the end of it.
Haven’t some of the other 12 stashed large sums in things like cemetery maintenance trust funds and the like, to make the assets immune from bankruptcy?
The thing that I’d like to see (though it’ll never happen…but one can dream) is for a bankruptcy court to deny a petition to enter bankruptcy on the grounds that (a) it would place the court in the position of running/controlling a religious entity (the diocese) and (b) doing so would be a violation of the Establishment Clause.
This would leave the diocese in the situation of either finding a way to settle any claims without court protection, and doing so immediately, dissolving itself completely (paying off such creditors as it can in the process), or changing into a non-religious entity that a court could Constitutionally administer.
Does anyone know if a bankruptcy filing by a church or other religious entity has ever been opposed on those grounds, either by a creditor or directly at the initiative of a judge? If so, was the opposition successful?