Chutzpah on parade.
The Catholic Diocese of San Diego is asking parishioners and priests to make contributions to help pay for the recent $198.1 million sexual abuse settlement.A memo issued this week by Bishop Robert Brom asked priests to contribute one month's salary, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
"We cannot ask of others what we are unwilling to do ourselves," Brom wrote in the memo to about 280 priests, whose monthly salary can be as much as $1,535.
The donation requests will help "cover the expense involved in compassionate outreach to our brothers and sisters who suffered sexual abuse within the family of the church," the memo said.
The idea came from current priests who saw it as a gesture toward the 144 people who allege they were abused by clergy members and church workers when they were minors.
"It's a way of kind of righting some of the injustices done to them and also start the healing process," said the Rev. Ned Brockhaus of St. John of the Cross in Lemon Grove.
Judy Bethel, a Catholic and San Diego resident, said that if Brom hadn't sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the diocese in February, he could have settled the suits for less money.
"I think he's asking us to bear the cost of his mistakes," Bethel said. "I, for one, am not willing to do this."
The average payout will be $1.38 million per victim, according to the terms of the agreement announced last month. The San Diego diocese will pay about $107 million of the total; the rest will come from insurance and the Diocese of San Bernardino, which was once part of the San Diego diocese.
(Source)
Sorry faithful, devout, gullible; we used all your tithe money to re-gilt the statues and build bigger chapels (all to the glory of god, naturally), as well as to pay for the relocation of all those pedi...err, priests.
We know we've told you that the love of money is the root of all evil, but come on. If you don't fork over, err, donate a month's worth of your hard-earned income to mother church, we're going to have to sell off two of our most ostentatious properties in San Diego. You don't want your church to have to suffer just because a few, well, a few dozen priests didn't take their vows seriously, do you? You don't want mother church to lose her precious properties simply because she made a silly little error in protecting criminal behavior?
We promise to do much better in the future. We're only going to accept straight boys in seminary from now on, and make them promise (cross their sacred-hearts) never to molest little girls. And if we catch any of them breaking their vows, we'll definitely give some thought to turning them in to the authorities...the civil authorities, that is. Because when it comes to religion, we're still THE authorities.
(Does the Catholic church retain any credibility after this? Have its leaders no shame? Do they really think treating their members like stock holders after a swindle is exposed is going to win them more converts? They've obviously become so wealthy, so corrupt and so above-it-all they've totally lost touch with reality.)
