Milwaukee: Judge shields archdiocese funds from creditors

[Stylteralmaldo]

MILWAUKEE – The Archdiocese of Milwaukee can shield more than $50 million from creditors in sex-abuse settlements because the money is in a cemetery fund protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, according to a federal court ruling.

Sex-abuse victims have accused the archdiocese of shifting money into the fund to avoid having to pay them, while the archdiocese has said the money was always intended for cemetery care. A judge ruled Monday that Catholic cemeteries are sacred to believers, so setting money aside to maintain them represents the free exercise of religion.

The cemetery trust was formed in 2007 by then-Archbishop Timothy Dolan, four years before the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection to deal with hundreds of sex-abuse claims. Dolan specifically wrote to the Vatican seeking permission to move $57 million into the trust.

Archdiocese spokeswoman Julie Wolf said the trust was established for the perpetual care of cemetery sites and funded by sales of cemetery plots and mausoleums.

“Because these funds were held in trust as prescribed by canon law, they were independent of the general assets and could only be used for their intended and pledged purpose – to care for the resting places of the departed as sacred places under canon law,” she said in a written statement.

See more: twincities.com/localnews/ci_23762407/milwaukee-judge-shields-archdiocese-funds-from-creditors

 

[Corki]

Good.

 

[Aelred_Minor]

I’m not passing a definite judgment on the bishops’ handling of this one way or another. However I could see it happening that when faced with the prospect of enormous settlements because of sexual abuse looming the diocese would want to first create trusts like this to ensure that things that it was always going to do and that it has a constitutional right to do, like maintain cemeteries, are still able to be done for years into the future. That is not greed, and it is not trying to get out responsibility to abuse victims. Only someone who really wanted to utterly destroy the Church, to see it stripped of even such things as cemeteries, could see it otherwise.

On the other hand if this is simply the legal trick the enemies of the Church present it as, just a way to shield massive amounts money which might later be used for anything, then there may be room for legitimate criticism.

I do think there has been a failure of understanding at least on the public relations level concerning whether it is the sexual abuse itself or the attitude of dealing with it as a scandal to be mitigated, minimized, and managed that most scandalizes the faithful.

 

[manualman]

Alternate headline:

“Cemetery customers won’t be looted and left in the lurch after all.”

A rare triumph of sanity in the world today. Had this money been seized to pay lawsuit lawyers (and some to victims), the cemeteries would have been bankrupted too and it would fall to the state to take them over and maintain them. That, in turn, would mean we the taxpayers eating the cost.

That’s what’s so infuriating about the whole abuse crisis. Weakland isn’t living in a refrigerator box, most of the abuser priests were laicized and walked away scot free, but the plaintiffs want to penalize those who bought cemetery plots, want to see grandma’s grave covered in weeds and the headstones vandalized? Want taxpayers to have to foot the bill (the usual outcome from bankrupt cemeteries)? How does THAT punish the guilty? Seizing the diocesan assets (whether cemetery or other) doesn’t punish the guilty abusers. It punishes the innocent people who would otherwise have benefitted from diocesan programs. The guilty don’t appear to be bothered, only the innocent. Real justice.

 

[Stylteralmaldo]

I have an update on this:

Milwaukee Archdiocese’s creditors want ruling halted, judge off case

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee’s creditors have filed motions asking the federal judge in the church’s bankruptcy case to set aside a key ruling and recuse himself from the case over a potential conflict of interest.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa ruled in late July that forcing the archdiocese to tap the $50 million-plus it holds in a trust for the perpetual care of cemeteries would substantially burden its free expression of religion under the First Amendment and a 1993 federal law aimed at protecting religious liberty.

Then Aug. 2, lawyers representing the archdiocese’s creditors — primarily sex abuse victims — asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Susan V. Kelley to compel the release of any records showing whether Randa and his wife, Melinda, have purchased any plots or crypts in one of the archdiocese’s cemeteries, or whether they have any interest as heirs or beneficiaries of several relatives known to be buried in them.

In motions filed Monday — one to set aside the ruling and the other asking Randa to recuse himself — the creditors said they “discovered that at least nine of Judge Randa’s relatives (including his mother, his father and his wife’s parents) are buried in cemeteries owned and operated by” the archdiocese.

“This fact alone creates the appearance of partiality,” the motion states. They add that Randa, by purchasing burial rights, entered into a contract with the archdiocese, further supporting the call for him to step down from the case.

“Judge Randa should have disqualified himself from presiding over any aspect of this adversary proceeding. Yet, he did not do so,” the motion reads. " Nor did he disclose the facts to the parties at any time during the case."

After the Aug. 2 motion, Timothy Nixon, an attorney for the cemetery trust and its sole trustee, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki, called such claims desperate and an “attack on a federal judge.”

Both sides have called the developments unusual — and possibly the first time a judge has been asked to recuse himself in the several Catholic Church bankruptcies around the country.

More:
jsonline.com/features/religion/milwaukee-archdioceses-creditors-want-ruling-halted-judge-off-case-b9975543z1-219553341.html