CALIFORNIA
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler
January 14, 2014
Another American diocese filing for bankruptcy? Ho-hum. That’s become fairly routine, hasn’t it?
Yes, but look again.
Stockton’s Bishop Stephen Blaire announced that bankruptcy was the only realistic choice for the diocese, because of the sex-abuse scandal. As he put it:
Very simply, we are in this situation because of those priests in our diocese who perpetrated grave, evil acts of child sexual abuse.
Now that is new. It’s not new that the sex-abuse scandal has plunged dioceses into bankruptcy; we’ve known that all along. It’s new that a bishop is explaining the problem in such plain language.
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