Lack of faith in faith schools

[Gob]

A top QC called for tougher rules to protect all faith pupils today as he stripped monks of control at a school beset by sex abuse.

Lord Carlile of Berriew detailed 21 separate abuse cases at St Benedict's School in Ealing, west London since 1970, in his independent inquiry.

He said monks must be stripped of control at the school and hoped his decision to take powers away from Ealing Abbey - the Catholic Church that neighbours St Benedict's - would 'set a template' for other schools.

Four top fee paying schools, including Ampleforth College, North Yorkshire, and Downside, near Bath, share similar structures to St Benedict's.

In his inquiry, Lord Carlile outlined a catalogue of failures by the west London abbey to intervene as allegations of abuses came to light.

‘I have come to the firm conclusion that the form of governance of St Benedict's School is wholly out dated and demonstrably unacceptable,' Lord Carlile wrote.

‘The abbot himself has accepted that it is 'opaque to outsiders'.’

The report comes a day after the High Court ruled that the Catholic Church can be held liable for the wrongdoings of its priests.

Headmaster Chris Cleugh admitted the school ‘could have, and should have, done more’ to stop the attacks and offered a ‘heartfelt apology for past failures’ as the top QC called for its independence.

St Benedict's is under Ealing Abbey's watch, which is run by Benedictine monks.

Martin Shipperlee, an abbot at the school, commissioned the independent review before the Vatican announced it had ordered a separate inquiry into historic sex offences at St Benedict's and Ealing Abbey.

The crimes of Father David Pearce, jailed for a catalogue of abuse against five boys over a period of 36 years, illustrate how ‘St Benedict's rule of love and forgiveness appears to have overshadowed responsibility for children's welfare’.

The report added: ‘In a school where there has been abuse, mostly - but not exclusively - as a result of the activities of the monastic community, any semblance of a conflict of interest, of lack of independent scrutiny, must be removed.’

Two trusts should be launched to remove ‘all power from the abbey’ while maintaining the Benedictine connection for the parents, Lord Carlile said.

Changes will be in place by the beginning of the next academic year, he added.

Mr Cleugh said the school was ‘totally’ committed to implementing the changes.

Responding to the report, he said: ‘Past abuses at the school have left a terrible legacy on those affected and have tarnished the reputation of St Benedict's.

‘On behalf of the school, I offer my heartfelt apology for past failures.’

According to campaigners, those affected by sex attacks may number in the hundreds.

Pearce, referred to as the ‘devil in a dog collar’, was jailed in October 2009.

Police are also hunting Father Laurence Soper over allegations of child abuse dating back to when he taught at St Benedict's from 1991 to 2000.

He is believed to have been living in a monastery in Rome but was due to return to London to answer bail in March.

Speaking today, Lord Carlile urged Father Soper to surrender himself to officers, saying: ‘I regret very much the difficulties he has caused.’

Lord Carlile's report, which the peer will unveil alongside the head of St Benedict's, Mr Cleugh, was commissioned by the abbey to examine how to improve child protection.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1dF8nU2LG

[Andrew D]

... the High Court ruled that the Catholic Church can be held liable for the wrongdoings of its priests.

That is long overdue. Let's hope that it becomes a universal norm.

[dgs49]

Yes, Andrew, entirely appropriate except for a few troubling factors.

To the extent that individuals did bad things, throw the book at them, according to the applicable criminal laws. This applies not only to the actual perpetrators but to their superiors who were criminally culpable for not intervening, allowing abuse to continue, facilitating further abuses, et cetera.

But as for the financial liability of "the Catholic Church," it is not the same as an analogous situation in the private sector.

A corporation has assets that can be attached, sold, liquidated, etc., and it has insurance that can be tapped up to its limits. When those are gone, the corporation is bankrupt and out of business.

But the assets of a Church are paid for by charitable donations from The Faithful, who are completely without fault. The actual perpetrators are impecunious and cannot be sued. To take money from the Church, or to force sale of its assets to pay money judgments is to punish the blameless to provide financial compensation that can have no relationship to the damage that was done.

The belief that money damages are appropriate compensation for any sort of tortious harm is a bizarre one, but one that I suppose we are stuck with, since no one has come up with a way to un-do the harm.

[loCAtek]

As well as done secularly, if not done worse;

He remembers standing up after one of the beatings and came nose-to-nose with a guard who had a smile on his face.

"I thought to myself, 'God almighty, if I could right now, I would reach into your chest cavity and I would pull out your heart and I would bite it while you looked at me,'" Colon said. "He looked at me with a face of satisfaction and contentment over the whipping that he gave me."

After the men spoke, former state Rep. Gus Barreiro, now the Department of Juvenile Justice's chief of state residential programs, unveiled a plaque outside The White House as an acknowledgment of the torture. The detention center is still open, but the White House building has been locked up since 1967.

The group planted a tree outside the building. Later, they drove to a nearby cemetery where 31 unmarked iron crosses mark the graves of unknown dead -- bodies The White House Boys believe are children beaten to death at the reform school.

"That's a sorry something for a head marker," said Bill Haynes, 65, who was an inmate at the school in the late 1950s and now works in the Alabama Department of Corrections. "This may not be the only place they ever buried them."

Straley said as far as he knows, no one was ever prosecuted for the beatings or rapes. The men, who seek out other victims and have researched the facility, say it's not clear why the abuse finally stopped. Perhaps the victims' complaints were finally heard.
Florida State Reform School

[Scooter]

A corporation has assets that can be attached, sold, liquidated, etc., and it has insurance that can be tapped up to its limits. When those are gone, the corporation is bankrupt and out of business.

But the assets of a Church are paid for by charitable donations from The Faithful, who are completely without fault. The actual perpetrators are impecunious and cannot be sued. To take money from the Church, or to force sale of its assets to pay money judgments is to punish the blameless

But the same can be said of a corporation. A corporation whose management has engaged in tortious acts, when successfully sued, must pay judgments out of the investments of shareholders who are completely without fault, and who will lose their investments even though blameless. Why should donations to a charity whose management committed tortious acts be afforded any greater protection?

I am all for ensuring that there is a clear demonstration of control by the entity being sued over those who committed the tortious acts. But once that has beeen established, I'm sorry, but the Church is a corporation like any other that needs to pay the consequences for the actions of those under its control.

[Andrew D]

Scooter is exactly right. The assets of the Roman Catholic Church should be just as subject to liability as are the assets of any other private-sector corporation, because, at least for relevant purposes, the Roman Catholic Church is nothing but a private-sector corporation.

[Lord Jim]

Well, it seems to me that there's one major difference between churches and other corporations....

Corporations do not enjoy the same specific Constitutional protections...

The Catholic Church has paid out many millions in settlements for sex abuse cases over the years, and rightly so. But if you got into a situation, (which other corporations can face) where the damages awarded reached such a level that it would result in the "bankruptcy" of the Church and force it to "go out of business" I doubt very seriously that the courts would uphold anything like that. At that point it seems to me you're running into some real Constitutional issues....

Having the civil court system (an arm of government) used as a tool to force the Catholic Church to "go out of business", looks to me like something that would represent a clear violation of the free exercise provision of the First Amendment.

The Ford Motor Company doesn't enjoy that same sort of protection.

[Andrew D]

Churches go bankrupt. Mission Road Church of God in Christ went bankrupt. Agape Assembly Baptist Church went bankrupt. Even Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral went bankrupt.

Why should the Roman Catholic Church be any different?

How does anything in the First Amendment (or any other part of the Constitution) provide that a religious corporation which cannot pay its debts is not subject to the same bankruptcy laws as any other corporation?

Of course, the Roman Catholic Church is different in the sense that it routinely lies about its assets. And it shelters many of its assets in the pseudo-state known as the Vatican.

But as to its legal culpability, how is it different? And why should it be?

[rubato]

If a church incurs debts they cannot pay they are bankrupt. There are no "constitutional issues".

If a church incurs debts because they are in fact a long-running child sex ring then they are bankrupt financially as well as morally.


yrs,
rubato

[dgs49]

There are many "major differences" between a Church and a private corporation.

A private corporation is created for the purpose of entering into commercial transactions and engaging in commercial activities in order to make money. An organized church, as a general proposition, relies entirely on donations and quasi-donations (e.g., raffle tickets, tuitions) in order to survive. It has no products; it makes no money. Because churches, as a class of institutions, are legally deemed to provide benefits to the society at large, We have elected to make them tax-exempt.

Investors in a private corporation are knowingly placing their money/investment at risk. They balance the perceived risk with the possibility and size of the potential rewards, but all of the investment is at risk. As an example, consider the former common-stockholders of the bankrupt company known as General Motors. The employees of a private corporation are in a similar situation, though "Nanny State" thinking tends to make employees forget that fact. Since the profitability and the existence of a corporation is always at risk, so are the jobs of those who work there - even though the individual employees may be competent, trustworthy, and hard-working. Indeed private corporations fire such employees with regularity.

The donors of a church are not making an investment; they are giving their money with no immediate expectation of a personal return. Their reasonable anticipation is that the money will be used to preserve the institution, and, in most cases, to do the traditional kinds of charitable works that justify the tax exemption that the church receives. In assessing money damages against The Church because of unauthorized criminal conduct of a few of its ministers, punishes the would-be beneficiaries at the missions, hospitals, food kitchens, schools (most inner-city Catholic school students are minority and non-Catholic), clinics, clothing distribution centers, and so forth.

Further, church buildings are typically "white elephants," with little commercial value. To sell them under distress further reduces their commercial value to little more than that of vacant land. People who go on about the "wealth" of the Catholic church ignore this niggling little fact. Artwork in the hands of the Church may have considerable theoretical value, but if it were to be "dumped" en masse, it would realize very little in actual cash proceeds.

And again, on the other hand, the victims of clergy sexual abuse have minimal tangible damages, and most don't actually get life-changing amounts of money at the end of the day. The real drivers of this whole campaign are the personal injury, contingent fee lawyers, who often make out like bandits while singing their sanctimonious song about simply helping the victims.

It's all pretty sordid, from every angle.

[Scooter]

A private corporation is created for the purpose of entering into commercial transactions and engaging in commercial activities in order to make money. An organized church, as a general proposition, relies entirely on donations and quasi-donations (e.g., raffle tickets, tuitions) in order to survive. It has no products; it makes no money. Because churches, as a class of institutions, are legally deemed to provide benefits to the society at large, We have elected to make them tax-exempt.

So that gives them the right to commit torts with impunity, knowing that they will never have to answer for their actions?

The donors of a church are not making an investment; they are giving their money with no immediate expectation of a personal return. Their reasonable anticipation is that the money will be used to preserve the institution, and, in most cases, to do the traditional kinds of charitable works that justify the tax exemption that the church receives.

Again, you have it completely backwards. In making an unconditional charitable donation, a donor forfeits any expectation of how the money will be spent, subject only to what a charitable corporation is legally allowed to spend money on. It is patently ridiculous to claim that donors had an expectation that the Church would be immune from paying judgments when it committed wrongdoing.

In assessing money damages against The Church because of unauthorized criminal conduct of a few of its ministers, punishes the would-be beneficiaries at the missions, hospitals, food kitchens, schools (most inner-city Catholic school students are minority and non-Catholic), clinics, clothing distribution centers, and so forth.

You see, it's distortions like these that are used to cloud the issue and make the Church appear blameless, a victim even, in this entire affair. There was not nor will there be a thin dime in damages paid in this whole nasty business that was predicated on the notion that the Church was vicariously responsible for the criminal acts of its employees. It was how they responded to discovering the sexual abuse that made them liable for damages. A priest abuses one kid, never having done so before, and the kid has no cause of action against the Church, because it cannot be made responsible for conduct of which it could not have been aware, and that was clearly out of the scope of the job. But once the Church knows about this one kid, and puts the priest in the position of being able to abuse more children, that's where the Church got into trouble, because deciding which priests should be placed where and under what conditions clearly does lay within the scope of the Church's authority. And that's why the Church must pay.

Further, church buildings are typically "white elephants," with little commercial value. To sell them under distress further reduces their commercial value to little more than that of vacant land. People who go on about the "wealth" of the Catholic church ignore this niggling little fact.

Again, completely backwards. The value of Church real estate has nothing to do with the buildings; most of them are so old that they have been fully depreciated and are carried at zero value on the books. But those worthless buildings are very often sitting on prime real estate that a developer would pay top dollar for to construct whatever type of skyscraper the areas is zoned for. The Church could easily pay a total reasonable settlement just by rationalizing its real estate portfolio, closing down churches built for 1000 people that barely see 20 souls gathering on a Sunday morning today, amalgamating parishes, and selling off the surplus real estate for the value of the land.

[dgs49]

Scooter, you have demonstrated in many other threads that you are not an idiot, yet, like rubato and Andrew, when it comes to the subject of the Roman Catholic Church, your apparent IQ drops to the mid-two digits. To wit,...

Old church buildings are not "fully depreciated." Churches pay no taxes. There is no tax return in which to take depreciation allowance, or balance sheet on which to place the depreciated value of the asset. A Church building is either paid off or money is owed on it. That's about the end of it.

I would say that you have it "backwards," but "up-side down" might be better. The perpetrators of the evil, whether they be priests or bishops or monks, or Christian Brothers, or (God help us) nuns, are all impecunious. All that can be done is to throw them out, and/or throw them in jail. But the people who pay the civil judgments are the people who donate to the church (blameless), and the ones most likely to suffer are the beneficiaries of the Church's charitable works (also blameless). Take the worst Bishop or Cardinal or the Pope: a civil judgment costs him nothing.

And Catholic church buildings are not going to be sold at a Sheriff's sale. They will be mortgaged to pay off the debt. And who pays the payments on the mortgage note?

I won't even write it.

You figure it out.

[Scooter]

Old church buildings are not "fully depreciated." Churches pay no taxes. There is no tax return in which to take depreciation allowance, or balance sheet on which to place the depreciated value of the asset.

Depreciation is not just a tax concept. It is also an accounting concept. Churches prepare financial statements just like any other corporation, and when they do, they have to follow the same accounting rules as everyone else. And no Church building that has been on the books for more than 50 years has any remaining value for financial statement purposes, except for the value of the land on which it sits.

The perpetrators of the evil, whether they be priests or bishops or monks, or Christian Brothers, or (God help us) nuns, are all impecunious. All that can be done is to throw them out, and/or throw them in jail. But the people who pay the civil judgments are the people who donate to the church (blameless), and the ones most likely to suffer are the beneficiaries of the Church's charitable works (also blameless).

The Church corporate is to blame when the behaviour of its employees, acting in the completely authorized course of their duties, put child raping priests into the position where they were free to perform more child rapes. That makes the Church corporate liable for damages. Corporations go under every day because they can't afford to pay the judgments they owe, and a lot of innocent people are hurt in the process. Nothing that you have said justifies treating a church corporation any differently.

And Catholic church buildings are not going to be sold at a Sheriff's sale. They will be mortgaged to pay off the debt. And who pays the payments on the mortgage note?

Given the drastic declines in church attendance over the past decades, easily half the church buildings in any diocese you name could be made surplus and sold by amalgamating parishes. How many church buildings are still new enough to have mortgages? A handful out in the far burbs, maybe?

The money that could be made on selling church buildings sitting almost empty in just a few major cities would be more than enough to pay for any settlements.

Just as an example, the Archdiocese of Boston paid off its entire setttlement liability with money with left over to spare by selling a single property for $100 million. Perhaps you can explain to me what innocent people are suffering, how many poor people are not being fed, how many worthy programs had to be cut, because the Archdiocese finally decided that its bishops did not need to live in a palace on 43 acres of prime real estate? Do you imagine their situation is unique?

[Andrew D]

Can dgs really be unaware that churches -- and not just the Roman Catholic Church -- make money by selling things?

That will come as quite a surprise to the customers of Old St. Mary's Gift Shop. Or the gift shop at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption:

The Gift Shop is located in the North Entrance Mezzanine level of the Cathedral. (Access from the Cathedral is by stairway near the north entrance of the Cathedral or by the elevators nearby.)

You will find the perfect gift for Baptisms, First Communions, Confirmations, and other important occasions, as well as souvenirs from the wide selection of unique and beautiful gifts in every price range:

Cathedral souvenirs and photo guide books
Hand-painted crosses from Germany and Italy
Italian statues and ceramics
Large selection of rosaries and medals
Holy cards in English and Spanish
CDs featuring organ music on the Cathedral Rufatti Organ

Or any of zillions of others.

But why go to a gift shop at all?

There's always Vatican Gift:

How about a Swarovski Crystal Rosary? $290.00

A handcarved crucifix with gold? $170.00 (16 in.)

A handcarved Virgin Mary Icon in Blue? $190.00

And on and on and on ....

[dgs49]

The Church MAKES NO PROFIT. There are no stockholders. It pays no dividends. To the extent that it sells products, the proceeds go to pay the costs of the products, to keep the organization running, and to pay for the charitable works that the Church undertakes.

Nobody gets rich from the 'profits' of the Church's operations. Priests and ministers get a stipend and they get free room and board. The only people who get rich from the Church are the lawyers who sue it.

[Gob]

Every penny he church takes in is profit as it offers nothing in return.

[dales]

Every penny [t]he church takes in is profit as it offers nothing in return.

Hey, I get a nice warm place to sleep it off on Sunday mornings.

I attend a non-demonational church, I am totally in the dark about P/L statements.

The only things we sell are workbooks for small group studies and tickets for various retreats.

As far as religious iconography is concerned, it is all "graven images" which we have no part of.

[Andrew D]

Ah, now I get it.

So.

I offer my legal services to a law firm. I don't want to get paid even a single penny. I just want the law firm to supply my meals and a private chef to prepare them, to give me several palaces to live in, and to provide me with a bevy of servants available at my whim 24/7.

I shouldn't have to pay any tax for any of that, right?

After all, I'm not making any "profit" ....

[Rick]

When we were paying a preacher he paid taxes not only on his salary but for the value of housing and bills.

Additionally that was self employment taxes which means he paid the total of his SS taxes.

No doubt he itemized.

I did have a question regarding the RC having to give up assets (serious question, not jerking around).

The analogy was that a corporation would have to.

In what situation would a corp. have to give up assets because of the actions of an employee? Other than going to civil court?

[loCAtek]

I don't know about that bevy of servants et al, for most clergy AndrewD. Most of them live quite modestly like your average bachelor, and do most of their own cooking and cleaning. (Although some churches allow marriage, and their wives do most of the domestic chores) At best, I recall a friend of mine used to do 'charity work' by helping in the local convent kitchen, and doing light housekeeping for the priests. I wouldn't call those volunteers servants.

The most devote, like monks and nuns, take what's known as a 'Vow of Poverty'.