We have a couple lawyers in house here. I know we have several more lawyers as readers. This doesn’t make this blog bad. 🙂 Today, I open the floor to their expertise.
Going forward we know with certainty that there will be additional children abused. While paying for past abuse has been very expensive, paying for future abuse is very likely to be expensive as well. The existing legal structures have proved impotent as well. Parish assets have been considered diocesean assets in judgement in clear violation of canon law, which admittedly lacks standing in these cases. The civil structures for avoiding this have seemed deficient as well. Going forward, what legal organization will prevent the bankruptcy of dioceses?
To get things started, I offer an excerpt from the red mass homily of Bishop Paprocki of Chicago:
Years ago such charitable purposes were protected by the common law notion of charitable immunity. This concept recognized that charitable institutions receive donations to be held in trust and to be used for charitable purposes. The safeguards of charitable immunity began to erode in the middle of the twentieth century with the increasing sophistication of medical technology and the rise of medical malpractice claims against hospitals, most of which were not-for-profit institutions. Courts rightly determined that it would be contrary to justice and equity to use charitable immunity to protect the assets of multi-million dollar medical centers and deny damage awards to victims of medical malpractice.
However, in eliminating charitable immunity completely, the services provided by other types of charitable institutions, like Catholic Charities and other diocesan agencies, are also threatened with elimination. In claims and lawsuits involving dioceses, plaintiff’s attempts to include parish properties and parish funds in the total assets of the diocese have left not only bishops and diocesan officials wondering about the status of parish assets, but parishioners themselves have begun to question the security of their donations being used for their intended charitable and religious purposes. The Code of Canon Law recognizes and protects this by declaring that parish assets are distinct from diocesan assets, and diocesan bishops are constrained by canon law from indiscriminately seizing parish assets for diocesan purposes. It is not yet certain that civil law will do the same, thus parishioners are rightly concerned about the ultimate destination of their donations. So how did we get to this point and what do we do about it?
As a side note, please feel free to link to legal articles of interest in the combox.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In