Borrowing from St. Peter to Pay Paul
Commenter Brian Duffy raises an important point (for once) in his reply to my post (“Crisis of Faith”) about the problems facing the Catholic Church. Given that ugly crimes and cover-ups were perpetrated, is it right to punish the Church itself (and thereby its innocent supporters and beneficiaries) for the deviant activities of the clergy and the hierarchy? The litigious nature of contemporary American society leads us to believe that a nice fat lawsuit will solve everything, but is that really in the best interests of all concerned, or just opportunistic on the part of the victims and their lawyers?
If this were, say, a case of Bristol Meyers pushing pills with nasty side-effects, the remedy would be clear: sue the pants of the buggers and wring them dry. Victims made to suffer because of the cupidity of a company that puts profits before safety should be compensated, and the corporation – an economic entity – is rightly punished with economic sanctions. Stiff civil judgments are, arguably, the only effective counterweight to the profit motive in terms of enforcing corporate good behavior. Should this same thinking apply to the situation facing the Catholic Church?
On a gut level, the obscenity of the crimes makes us want to see the guilty suffer and the victims get whatever they can. The pedophile priests should go to jail, and those who participated in the conspiracy to protect them should also face criminal charges – right on up to Cardinal Law if the evidence warrants it. Civil actions can and should be taken against them individually if that’s what the victims want, although it is unlikely that any of the priests have much personal wealth to speak of. And, to the extent that the Church continues to be contumacious (to borrow its own term for “unrepentant”) in denying and covering up its institutional complicity, it should be handed over to the secular arm and treated as a criminal organization under American racketeering laws.
This brings us to the question of financial claims against the Church itself. Brian asks, rightly, does this also constitute justice in this case? If it was the clergy’s own money, or even profits derived from Church activity for the benefit of the leadership, it would be an easy call: soak the bastards down to the last button in the collection plate. But it’s not like going after Enron. Although the Catholic Church is probably the wealthiest institution in the world in terms of real assets – real estate, art, precious metals, collectable books and manuscripts, stuff like that – those are not part of the operating budget of the American diocese against whom the claims are being made. Most of that money comes from contributions of ordinary Catholics and is used, after overhead, for various social works that the Church is engaged in. And let’s give credit where it’s due – the Catholic Church is one of the most important and effective agencies of social welfare in the world, both in depressed areas of the United States and in developing countries.
When you punish the Church financially, you can’t avoid punishing both the innocent beneficiaries and the innocent contributors. Unlike the shareholders of a corporation, the contributors to the Catholic Church have no way of holding the “management” responsible, and in any case, the Church stands accused not of mismanagement of funds, but of aiding and abetting predatory pedophiles – certainly an activity that falls outside their normal scope of business. The priests, bishops and officials who participated in these activities have already done enough harm, and by punishing the Church financially, it can be argued that you are visiting their crimes on those who need the help of the Church the most.
The problem is aggravated by the complicity of the Church hierarchy in both the crimes and the cover-up. There is something deeply and institutionally rotten at the center, and public safety as well as common morality demands that the organization itself be held accountable for the harm it has done. Even those who believe that the Church is fundamentally good must agree that it has been ill-served by the actions of the leadership, and reform is necessary if it is to continue to perform both social and spiritual good works. What makes the potential bankruptcy filing by the Boston archdiocese so heinous is not the fact that it protects Church assets from claims by the victims, because it is not clear that the victims are entitled to them. But if the filing were to shield the Church from further investigation, that would be unjust and unacceptable.
9:24:04 AM 
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