It's Sunday

Timothy Dolan, who was archbishop of Milwaukee at the time, is now archbishop of New York, head of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and a cardinal.

Notes from a meeting he attended in Wisconsin in 2003 show a "proposal" to offer $20,000 to "currently unassignable priests."

Former Catholic priest Patrick Wall, who now helps abuse victims sue the Catholic Church, said that term meant only one thing in his experience.

"Unassignable priests are those clerics whom the bishop cannot place in a parish because he has a serious moral impediment," he said. "In my 20 years' experience, the only impediment the term 'unassignables' referred to was a credible accusation of childhood sexual abuse."

[...]

On Thursday, the archdiocese confirmed that it had offered payoffs to abusive priests as "the most expedient and cost-effective way to have offenders laicized or removed from the priesthood."

  CNN

They should have been turned over to criminal authorities, but in the alternative, I would have thought the most expedient and cost-effective way to remove them would be to apply a boot to their asses. Priests can't be fired? 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the leading spokescritter for the Clan of The Red Beanie in its upcoming campaign to protect its delicate consciences against the onslaught of the unauthorized use of ladyparts, was previously posted to Milwaukee, where the archdiocese there is currently going through bankruptcy proceedings due to the amount of money it has had to pay out as a result of the Roman Catholic hierarchy's failed career as an international conspiracy to obstruct justice. The interesting thing about bankruptcy proceedings is that all kinds of documents get to be made public.

It seems that the Milwaukee archdiocese made a series of under-the-prie-dieu payments to criminal priests in order to get them to leave the church quietly. It also seems that Dolan presided over this program of hush money.

[...]

The first known payment in Milwaukee was to Franklyn Becker, a former priest with many victims. Cardinal Dolan said in response to a reporter's question at the time that the payment was "an act of charity," so that Mr. Becker could pay for health insurance. According to church documents, Mr. Becker was accused of abusing at least 10 minors, and given a diagnosis of pedophilia in 1983. The church paid more than $16 million to settle lawsuits involving him and one other priest.

Not long ago, Dolan was waxing wroth in the Wall Street Journal about how the president is making Catholics pay for aids to sexy sexytime that may not all be "open to the transmission of new life."

[...]

Yes, far better to take 20,000 of those dollar bills tossed into the basket of a Sunday morning and, without any substantive input from those Catholics whose consciences might object to this use of their donations, hand them over to a child-buggering monster just so the institutional Church can be rid of him.

We're going to hear more than we need to hear from this Dolan character between now and the election. Any story about him that does not contain the phrase "...who once supervised a program to use the money collected from parishioners to pay accused child molesters to leave the priesthood..." is unworthy of being read.

  Charlie Pierce