The Catholic Church Settles Again

The Catholic Church has settled yet another sexual abuse case.  This time, the church settled for an amount just shy of six hundred sixty six million dollars.  It turns out that there were more than five hundred outstanding instances of sexual abuse in the Los Angeles area that took four years of legal negotiating and wrangling in order to iron out.  The settlement is the largest to date and will gross over a million dollars for each of the victims.  But the big question for the people in the news was not how the Roman Catholic Church could condone such behavior for so many years all these years.  People wanted to know how the church could afford such a large payout.  The catholic church is a co-conspirator in hundreds of sexual abuse cases and all people want to know is where are they going to get the money to pay for the damage settlement. 

A church is an institution that is supposed to have the spiritual wellbeing of its congregation at the core of its priorities.  Many people bestow a lot of trust and privilege upon their priest and priestesses hoping to learn how to live a better life and hoping to learn how to be a better person.  The betrayal goes far beyond the typical stab of someone else in the back.  This type of duplicity can be found at the very deepest, darkest pit of human decency.  The priests who perpetrated these crimes of their flock are truly wolves in men of god’s clothing.  The church acts like Dr. Frankenstein doing anything and everything trying to protect his creation.

The news reports could not care less about the people involved in the story.  The people who decide what is news and what opinion the public should have about the news doesn’t want us, the news adoring public, to think about the impact to our community.  They who decide what is most news worthy want us to focus on the bottom line, how much money is involved. 

But this isn’t the first time community takes a back seat to finances.  The American way is to focus on the bottom line.  Screw your neighbor if you can for as much as you can.  Responsibilities to the community are nothing when they are compared to the financial bottom line.  An oil tanker can run aground and spill its rich, thick crude on the most pristine of Alaska’s coast line.  The response of the corporation that owned the tanker was to minimize the damage to the community, make a few photo shoots of actors cleaning rocks with Bounty paper towels, and protect the bottom line. 

A chemical company’s factory can explode and release a poisonous cloud of gas that kills thousands in Bhopal, India.  The company responds by minimizing the damage to the community (no Americans were killed after all), tie the plaintiffs up in court, make a few political contributions, and protect the bottom line. 

A religious institution can be instrumental in the development of an army of people with pedophilic tendencies to prey on innocent children in an environment chocked full of religious secrecy.  The church responds by moving the perpetrators to a different location so they can prey on even more sheep, cover the tracks, deny any wrong doing, tie the litigation up in the courts, and then, once all the other avenues have been exhausted, negotiate a settlement and protect the bottom line as much as possible.

The Catholic Church isn’t going to be hurting from this latest financial setback.  Six hundred sixty million dollars is like a drop in the bucket compared to the value of all its land holdings.  By some estimates the Roman Catholic Church sits on top of a four billion dollar land treasure.  The church won’t have to liquidate a single asset to pay this bill.  Two hundred fifty million will come from the archdiocese, two hundred thirty million will come from insurers, sixty million dollars will come from the religious orders whose priests committed the abuses, and the rest will come from miscellaneous sources.  No, the church won’t be hurting at all.  In fact, there’s more than enough money to handle the next outbreak of priestly indiscretions that will make their way to the light.