(I apologize for the limited length and scope of today's entry. I can assure you that I will make up for it tomorrow or Wednesday with a piece that will push your endurance to the limit.)
I think my favorite part about the massive settlement checks that Catholic diocese around the country are writing out lately (with disturbing regularity, I might add) is that no one seems to blink twice at their ability to pay. This weekend, the diocese in Los Angeles agreed to pay a staggering amount – a record $660,000,000 – to more than 500 abuse victims. If you don't think that's fair, I'd strongly encourage you to watch the documentary Deliver Us from Evil. You can see Roger Mahony squirm on camera as he attempts to explain why a priest who confessed to raping dozens of children as young as 18 months old (think about that for a second) was transferred from parish to parish to parish without a word of warning or explanation over 20 years.
That's a pretty daunting amount. And yet the diocese will pay it, just like they doled out $86,000,000 in Boston a few years back on account of Bernard Law's habit of using unsuspecting parishes in a game of "Hide the NAMBLA Member" with pedophile priests under his authority. Sure, they will do some whining about how they have to sell off property to do it, but….does it strike anyone else as a little odd that a church has that much money lying around? It reminds me a bit of the old Onion classic "Pope Asks to be Taken Off List of World's 100 Richest People."
The fact that one single diocese can come up with $660 million (although insurance is paying about 40% of that) gives the lie to the estimate that the church's overall net worth is about $5 billion globally. If individual diocese like Boston and Los Angeles have enough non-essential property to readily raise a hundred million or so (mind you, they're not selling churches – this is just their assorted real estate holdings) then, worldwide, the assets must certainly be beyond even the largest estimates.
Don't worry, though. I'm sure it won't take long for word to filter down from the Vatican that more parishes should follow this example and take refuge in Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. That will spare them from having to sacrifice any of their office parks – clearly a steep punishment for allowing priests to fuck kids for decades. What it won't stop them from doing, of course, is cajoling the faithful into coughing up more of their paychecks. If one were to resort to the rhetorical device of asking What Jesus Would Do, I'm fairly certain that the answer would not be "Hide the church's massive financial empire behind federal bankruptcy laws to avoid having to take child rape cases to trial."