In Milwaukee Post, Cardinal Authorized Paying Abusers

mongrelmutt:

shortbreadsh:

lilacturtl:

invisibleforeigner:

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York authorized payments of as much as $20,000 to sexually abusive priests as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood when he was the archbishop of Milwaukee.

Why hello, straw that broke the camel’s back.

I just can’t. I want to go to bed and cry for a year. This is horrible. What is MORE horrible, is that nothing surprises me anymore.

tbh, I’m not mad about this. I’m imagining like if I had a sister with an abusive boyfriend. I know that the legal system will take a long time for anything to get resolved (if it ever does, there might be no evidence) and in the mean time I just want him away from my sister and I have some money laying around. So I say, “here’s 20k if you never come near my sister again.”

Honestly, it doesn’t even seem like that much money to get an abusive man out of the priesthood. I couldn’t care less if he buys a convertible with that money, I just want him out of a position of power that has access to children.

What Natalie said.

Remember, this diocese went bankrupt. They didn’t actually have $20,000 lying around to pay off priests. And that’s what this is, a plain-as-day bribe.

And frankly I don’t care what the priestly protections are, to give them life-long insurance or a pension or any of the things mentioned in the article. If the only (quick) mechanism to actually get abusive priests out of the priesthood is to pay them off, that says something much worse about the Catholic Church.

invisibleforeigner