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Written by admin
Sep 22, 2010
Catholics of the Milwaukee archdiocese will be amazed to find out that according to Archbishop Jerome Listecki, parishioners and donors have been paying for living and other expenses for at least nine priests who have been removed from ministry for sexually assaulting their children.
The information was part of an e-mail sent to priests and parish directors on the heels of the 19th child sex abuse civil fraud lawsuit filed involving the concealment and transfer of known sex offender clerics by archdiocesan officials.
Apparently, this use of church charitable funds to subsidize child molesters has been going on for years.
For years these nine offenders, who would have been immediately fired in any other job once their employer had determined they had raped and assaulted children, have been living with financial peace of mind with Catholic money. Why? All of these nine men have been judged guilty of child sex crimes by the archdiocese, many of them years ago.
The time it takes to remove a man permanently from the priesthood, what the church calls “laicization” (meaning to “return” to the “normal state” of being just a lay person) can take up to 10 years, a notoriously long, inefficient and secretive process.
Catholics have a right to know exactly, to the penny, how many millions of dollars have been spent of their charitable contributions to house, send to expensive and exorbitant “retreat/treatment” facilities like St. Luke’s in Maryland and elsewhere, and all other related costs to concealing, moving and reassigning sex offenders over the years or settling them quietly in communities, undetected.
Where are these nine child molesters living right now? What is their criminal abuse history? Why haven’t their files been released so Catholics can know exactly why they have been paying hundreds of thousands to make their lives comfortable and secure for so many years?
And today’s announcement, to cut off nine offender priests of approximately $10,000 a year each, might be a prudent legal move to distance the archdiocese potential for ongoing liability, but this amount really dwarfs in comparison to the believed millions of dollars spent over the years to pay for the legal fees of attorneys to fight victims and represent offenders and those who covered up for them. What are those legal costs? That money as well can only come from one source: charitable contributions from Catholics.
John Pilmaier, SNAP WI co-director
