Your Moral Arbiters

Yesterday Cardinal Timothy Dolan spent his time tap-dancing around the welcoming statements of Pope Francis toward homosexuality by engaging in the sin of extreme parsing. Of course, Dolan has been good at avoidance before.

A New York Times editorial has described as “shocking” revelations that the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, while archbishop of Milwaukee, moved $57 million off the archdiocesan books into a cemetery trust fund six years ago to prevent the money being paid to victims of clerical child sex abuse.

Well thanks to Republican appointee Judge Rudolph Randa, Dolan has another message he can provide toward abuse victims. Free touches!

A federal judge in Wisconsin handed down an opinion yesterday granting the Catholic Church — and indeed, potentially all religious institutions — such sweeping immunity from federal bankruptcy law that it is not clear that it would permit any plaintiff to successfully sue any church in any court. While the ostensible issue in this case is whether over $50 million in church funds are shielded from a bankruptcy proceeding triggered largely by a flood of clerical sex abuse claims against the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, Judge Rudolph Randa reads the church’s constitutional and legal right to religious liberty so broadly as to render religious institutions immune from much of the law.

I do believe some appeals to a higher power, or at least an appellate court is in order.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]