BishopAccountability.org
	Speaking of Bankruptcy Pocono Record May 5, 2011 http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110505/NEWS04/105050310 There's something unseemly when Catholic religious orders file for financial protection claiming that pending sexual abuse charges have bankrupted their organization. We say, go after the parent company. Year after year, case after case, document after document, more evidence accumulates indicating that officials from the very top of the Roman Catholic hierarchy knew that priests and other church officials were abusing children. They reassigned offenders to new parishes or sent them to ineffective "treatment" centers, but they rarely took any measures to protect the children themselves. What does that say to the faithful, who have worshipped sincerely, and loyally sacrificed to provide financial support to the church? A few months ago a 1997 letter from the Vatican itself turned up that warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child abuse cases to the police. Cynical critics called it the smoking gun, demonstrating the Vatican's culture of covering up pedophilia despite officials' repeated claims that Rome never told local bishops to withhold information from police. The letter asserted the church's right to handle child abuse allegations and mete out punishments in-house. A series of churches, orders and even dioceses have sold off holdings or sought bankruptcy protection in response to growing numbers of sexual abuse complaints. Most recently the Christian Brothers Institute in New Rochelle, N.Y., announced it has filed for bankruptcy court protection. Victims' lawyers say more than 50 claims have been filed against the order. All this takes on a still more troubling aspect against the backdrop of the pending beatification of the late Pope John Paul II. Under John Paul's long watch, many robed officials attempted to protect the Roman Catholic Church's reputation, and the Vatican's vast wealth, against the public's growing knowledge of crimes against children. Statistics indicate that pedophilia is somewhat less common in the church than outside of it. That's the only ray of sunshine in this whole issue, and if anything the Vatican should have emphasized that while stepping up to the plate to make amends, both moral and financial, to the injured. Instead, high officials continued to dictate procedures — but allowed individual divisions of the church, thus their parishioners, to stand or fall on their own. This approach does little to dispel parishioners' understandable dismay that, faced with ugly charges over many years, Vatican officials circled the wagons rather than protect the children who would be the next generation of worshippers at their altar.
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