MILWAUKEE (WI)
Wall Street Journal
Associated Press
MILWAUKEE — Clergy sexual abuse victims and priests in Wisconsin said Tuesday that they’ve asked Roman Catholic officials at the Vatican to move more than $50 million from a cemetery trust fund and make it available to settle bankruptcy claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee.
The letter to the Congregation for the Clergy, the church office that oversees abuse cases, essentially asks it to undo an order that authorized New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan to create the trust fund in 2007, when he was archbishop in Milwaukee.
The cemetery fund had been seen as one of the archdiocese’s few significant assets when it filed for bankruptcy in 2011, but a federal judge declared the money off-limits last summer, saying the trust was protected by the First Amendment’s freedom of religion. That decision, coupled with the archdiocese’s recent announcement of a settlement with one of its major insurers, has raised questions about how much money is available to pay the hundreds of sexual abuse victims who have filed claims in bankruptcy court.
The letter sent Friday has no bearing on U.S. court proceedings but instead is an appeal to the church to do justice according to its own teachings and legal code, said Rev. James Connell, a former vice chancellor of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee and co-founder of the Survivors and Clergy Leadership Alliance. He acknowledged the appeal was unusual and a Vatican response would be “historic.”
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