Finally, the Catholic diocese of Minneapolis/St Paul has opened their books. If you’re interested in the grisly accounting details, read the whole thing. The part that caught my attention…
The report said the archdiocese spent $8.8 million over the past decade on costs related to clergy misconduct. That does not include settlements and other payments made by the archdiocese’s insurance company, the report said.
The archdiocese spent more than $6.2 million on cases involving misconduct with minors, assisting the victim and abuser, the report said. That includes $2.3 million for legal settlements, $1.8 million for victim support such as counseling and therapy, and $566,000 in legal fees.
Note that it doesn’t cover what their insurance company paid out. I wonder if their company thinks Catholicism was a good risk?
We also learn that the church has operating expenses of over $39 million and income of over $35 million. Using the potent math skills I acquired in first grade, I think that means they’re going in the hole by about $4 million every year…but somehow the church financial officer says, the financial condition of the archdiocese is solid,
which unfortunately exceeds my mathematical ability to compute.
It looks a little less solid when you also consider the 20 child sex abuse lawsuits against the church filed just this year.
I shall eagerly await their well-deserved bankruptcy. I might be waiting a long time, though — somehow these organizations always seem to persist on the unfailing gullibility of their clientele, which is beginning to look like an infinite resource.
Let’s see: “$6.2 million on cases involving misconduct with minors, assisting the victim and abuser…” and “$2.3 million for legal settlements, $1.8 million for victim support such as counseling and therapy, and $566,000 in legal fees.”
$6.2M – ($2.3M + $1.8M +$.566M) = $1.534 for “assisting the … abuser”. Isn’t that just nice. It would have cost much less just to report them to the authorities and let them get sent to prison, where they belong.
That’s $1.534M for the abusers of course. My keyboard is omitting letters today and I didn’t catch them all. Although even a buck-fifty-three would have been too much.
creative accounting
incompetent management
uncorroborated income statements
tax free status
uncle frogy
There are cheaper ways to pay for sex. Illegal ways, even, since they seem to need that frisson. Or a nice wedding can be expensive, if spending money is what gets them off. Or a cheap wedding—if you know a priest—and a wife with a job, that might actually bring in some cash. Ooo, become a pimp!
They’re financially solid because the RCC has other money to kick in. I expect money is funneling to M/StP from dioceses where the cover-up has been more successful.
I wonder if their insurer has dropped them from coverage. I certainly hope so.
The archdiocese is putting millions into an account in anticipation of paying out damages, according to this from Minnesota Public Radio:
This year? 2014? Or do you mean in the last twelve months? And do you mean just in the US, or worldwide?
I should have included this in my previous post, which is a link to MPR’s in-depth reporting on this ongoing scandal:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/catholic-church/
A great resource for learning about the sordid history of this coverup.
Offtopic nitpick:
Any organisation as large as the Roman Catholic Church (but also governments and such) would be foolish to ever pay for commercial insurance. They should have enough in their coffers to assume any risk themselves without enriching the insurance vultures.
Unless someone has been corrupt and found a way to siphon off money though insurance of course.
I agree that the Church must die and that bankruptcy would be an excellent way to achieve that. Unfortunately it does not seem likely to happen.
Yes, this year so far there have been 20 suits filed, and many, many more are in the works.
I am cautiously optimistic that justice will finally be served. Gilbert Gustufson is the rapist priest who abused many of my friends and schoolmates, and I want him to spend his last years in a jail cell.
I am still angry 30 years later at the way we were treated for reporting him, and my friend killed himself in 1995. I think I will track down a few more of his victims and get them to file lawsuits too.
They’ll just send the boys round to see some of the wealthier parishoners:
If we could harness faith and turn it into motion, this would be a perpetual motion machine powered solely on gullibility. We could end the reliance on foreign oil!
So about a quarter of their expenses goes on clergy misconduct – and most of that involves minors.
So how much are they spending to ferry priests around to safe houses and other out-of-state parishes to protect them from being arrested for diddling the altar boys?
I wonder why La Cosa Nostra, who are likely Catholic to a man, don’t seem to be as teflon-y as the Vatican.
What got me was:
Sigh… HTML tags…
Heck I don’t need them!
“Priests who committed the abuse received another $1.5 million during this period for their living expenses, the report said.”
“The biggest share — $1.7 million — paid for the living expenses of the problem priests. Another $519,000 was used for victim support services, the audit said, and $209,000 for legal services. The archdiocese said it is required under church law to care for priests who have been removed from the ministry.”
So anyone can become a priest, commit some act of heresy like speaking out for women having leadership roles, be removed from duty by the Vatican, and get their living costs paid for for the rest of their life? Sweet deal!
Oh shit, that explains why they keep priests in ministry despite criminal and other bad activity – better to pay for them doing something than pay for them to sit in retirement AND pay someone else to cover their parish.
*peeks at source code*
Oh. Forget the “cite” part, it doesn’t even work, and it’s not where the quote is supposed to go. The quote goes between an opening <blockquote> tag and a closing </blockquote> tag:
<blockquote>this</blockquote>
automatically turns into
(…and I had to use an HTML trick to prevent that from happening in my examples).
The financial condition of the archdiocese is solid because what they have disclosed here is not all of the business of the diocese. What all the Catholic dioceses do is develop many, many allegedly independent corporations to hold all the assets of the diocese so they only have to expose one or two at a time. All of the corporations are controlled 100% by the current bishop but they pretend they’re independent and separate. Has MPR looked closely to see, for example, whether all the real estate that belongs to the diocese is included in this disclosure? Usually the diocese (that is, the bishop) owns and controls not just the diocesan property but all the property in all the parishes, too.
I wonder what would happen if their insurers grew a spine and refused to insure them.
Math nitpicking: $8.8/decade=$o.88/year.
So, the $4M after operating expenses becomes $3.1M slice of the pie to spend on “good works”. Or, do the settlements count towards their acts of charity?