The Milwaukee Archdiocese has over 200 parishes, several hospitals, and many schools. It also was the center of massive sex abuse by clergy against unwilling, unwitting children.
While the actual number of abused kids will never be known, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, were known to be abused over five decades.
In 1979, Archibishop Rembert George Weakland claimed to be advised of his first case. In 2011, testified about his reign of terror in Milwaukee, from 1979 through 2002. He claimed that because his alcohol treatment programs were so good at drying out and rehabilitating besotted priests and bishops, that he applied the same program to pedophiles and sent them back into the community. He finally admitted that repeat offenders might have accidentally found their way into other archdiocese without any warning or heads up, or perhaps even out of the country by accident. To countries with no extradition treaties. By accident.
Getting the Archbishop to testify under oath was a legal feat that took years of motion practice, threatened sanctions and a full court press by the Vatican, catholic authorities, and several defense law firms representing the Archdiocese.
One amazing thing was how he answered whether he ever reported the abuse to the authorities, as required under several Wisconsin statutes. "No, there was no reason to."
FROM THE CHURCH OF INEFFABLE STUPIDITY:
Even those bits of tasty testimony were like a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
Lawrence Murphy, a priest at the St. John School for the Deaf in a Milwaukee suburb abused kids from 1950 to 1974. He is believed to have molested more than to 200 deaf boys before the mid-1970s.
Leakland's direct predecessor, Archbishop William Edward Cousins, offered Murphy a leave of absence and let him move to Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, with his mother. (who he was unlikely to sexually abuse) Cousins never warned the Bishop of Boulder Junction the reason Murphy was kicked out. He apparently abused children there, as well.
Leakland then retired, and was replace by an even more hideous creature named Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Dolan, the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops, set the tone for litigation in Milwaukee, and as a reward, was promoted to the top job in New York City, where he continues to be a vile, evil, unrepentant asshole.
One of Dolan's more brilliant moves was to take assets of $50,000,000 from the archdiocese general accounts and to transfer them to promote and take care of a small, no longer active catholic cemetery in Milwaukee. Estimates of the costs for monthly upkeep of the entire cemetery suggested that the interest alone on the $50,000,000 would pay for all upkeep for the next 4,864 years.
On January 4, 2011 the Archdiocese announced that it would file for bankruptcy. The church was facing more than 23 lawsuits, each with multiple plaintiffs., This announcement came two days before Leakland was scheduled to be deposed. Under Dolan's orders, the church repeatedly refused to release the names of the pedophile priests.
Not counting those 23 massive cases, Milwaukee had previously paid out $29,000,000 to settle 200 cases. The archdiocese said that these additional cases would incur legal fees the diocese could not afford.
Before the transfer of funds to the cemetery account, and just before the bankruptcy, the archdiocese assets of about $98.4 million.
Realistic estimates show that that there were more than 8,000 cases of abuse by more than 100 priests and bishops.
Most recently, the federal bankruptcy court approved the transfer of the $50,000,000 out of the general accounts to the protected cemetery fund.
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Today, we learned how caring, how honest and loving, and how repentant it really is about the 8000 or so living victims. (there are about a dozen who committed suicide, but no one has testified that those suicides were related to their childhood abuse by priests.)
Guess what the church is willing to pay for the remaining 23 cases, some of which have 100 plaintiffs.
$4,000,000
translated into math,
$4,000,000
divided by 8,000
______
$500 per person.
FIVE
FUCKING HUNDRED DOLLARS
PER
ABUSED
CHILD.