German bishops to sell publisher that marketed erotic books [CWN]

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The German bishops have decided to sell Weltbild, a major publishing house owned by 12 dioceses, amid revelations that the $2.15-billion firm had marketed some 2,500 erotic works. "We …

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Good move.

Better late than never! (they’d been warned about this for a number of years). See this link
 
Why did it take years and many outside people bringing it to light for them to do the right thing? Are they also going to drop their lawsuits against those who spoke up?
 
I supposed that’s a step in a positive direction, but I’m left wondering why they don’t just shut Weltbild down?
 
why they don’t just shut Weltbild down?

I’m with you Bearer. It seems that the bishops don’t have a problem with selling Weltbild as a going pornographic concern and want to make money on it until the very end .:mad:

I think that these bishops need to spend their next holidays at St Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland.
 
bearer said:
I supposed that’s a step in a positive direction, but I’m left wondering why they don’t just shut Weltbild down?
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I am also wondering why they didn’t just shut Weltbild down. Perhaps there was some legal impediment to doing so?
 
bearer said:
I supposed that’s a step in a positive direction, but I’m left wondering why they don’t just shut Weltbild down?
Click to expand...
Holly3278 said:
I am also wondering why they didn’t just shut Weltbild down. Perhaps there was some legal impediment to doing so?
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that Weltbild is a huge operation employing thousands of people. The “erotic” titles are a small minority of what they publish.

The equivalent would be if the American bishops owned HarperCollins.In other words, each diocese holds HarperCollins stock (and the only stockholders are the American dioceses). HarperCollins owns Zondervan and Thomas Nelson. HarperCollins also, under other imprints, publishes some pretty racy stuff as well (stuff we could pretty accurately call “erotica”)

You’ve got to think about this objectively for a minute:
  • Each bishop has a lot of responsibilities, most of them pastoral. Bishops are busy, busy people.
  • Each diocese holds property. They don’t keep their collections in a bag stuffed under a mattress. They make the money work for them. It is likely that this is not the only investment held by each German diocese.
  • Because the bishop is a religious figure and not a money figure, it is likely that each bishop has a financial (investment) adviser either on staff or on retainer. If that likely situation is the case, the bishop would place his trust in the adviser that the assets would be managed properly.
  • They owned STOCK in this company. No one bishop had complete control of this company. (The company website says that the company’s shareholders are the bishops). The day to day management of the company was in the hands of a CEO, not any one of the bishops (much less all of the bishops in synod). The job of the stockholders would be to hire and fire the company’s management, not to get into the day-to-day management.
Because of the above, I would think that it would be very believable and understandable that the bishops would not know each and every title published by this firm Weltbild. I could imagine that naivete could cause them to disregard initial concerns. They’d ask their advisers and their advisers would reassure them and they’d blow off the concerns.

But at some point in time, those concerns should have been addressed, earlier than this. In 2008, the bishop of Cologne divested his interest in this firm for moral reasons. I don’t know why the remainder of them did not follow suit.

As I said, I’m glad they finally divested. They should have done so earlier…but better late than never.

I just hope that other bishops throughout the world will look at this and learn. IMHO, each bishop should review his diocese’s investment portfolio very, very, very carefully so as not to even give the appearance of controversy that could scandalize the faithful in his particular church.
 
Wait, so why can’t they retain the publisher, but stop selling erotic books?
 
Is there not a canon against bishops owning non-church related publishing houses/bookstores?

The Church is not an investment group.
Who would even sanction such a corrupt practice?
This is like a revival of the 10th century influence of roman nobles placing popes on the thrown of there own picking.

This scandal is much worse than the Patriarch of Moscows cigarette selling.
 
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