Cardinal Dolan’s cemetery deal smacked down

MILWAUKEE (WI)
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics

Mark Silk | Mar 13, 2015

Back in 2007, when he was still Archbishop of Milwaukee, Cardinal Timothy Dolan asked the Vatican for permission to transfer a $55-million fund for the maintenance of its cemeteries into a special trust. Dolan’s request came just a few weeks before the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed victims of sex abuse to sue the archdiocese. Seventeen days after the ruling, the Vatican approved the request.

When this move came to light two years ago, Dolan, now ensconced as Archbishop of New York, was roundly criticized for seeking to deny the victims their due. Denouncing what he termed “old and discredited attacks,” he dismissed the idea “that establishing a perpetual care fund from money belonging to cemeteries and designated for that purpose – as required by state law and mandated by the archdiocesan finance council – was an attempt to shield it from the bankruptcy proceedings.”

Given that the Archdiocese of Milwaukee declared bankruptcy four years after the trust was created, this was not, strictly speaking, a fib. Strictly speaking, the point of creating the trust was, as Dolan put it in his letter to the Vatican, to provide “an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”

After the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, the bankruptcy judge disallowed Dolan’s move, making the funds subject to the claims of creditors. The archdiocese then went to federal court, where U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa quickly ruled that the archdiocese had a religious right to shield the funds in a way that a secular entity in bankruptcy would not, inasmuch as care of the dead was a central part of the church’s religious practice.

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