The Boston Globe confirms what I reported yesterday. The Archdiocese is borrowing money from four sources to pay the $85 million sex abuse settlement and is securing two of the loans with mortgagaes on the seminary and the cathedral: $65 million from Citizens Bank, $10 million from Century Bank, $15 million from the Clergy Retirement Disability Trust, and $7.5 million from the Cemetery Association Perpetual Care Trust. The bank loans are indeed secured by a $25 million check from one individual.
Some new details: Another $3-4 million will be paid to a few victims who filed claims without lawyers and weren’t part of thelarger settlement; some of the money raised will pay for debt service as well as the counseling for victims that was promised and future payments in unsettled abuse cases; and some non-parish property is being sold, in addition to the half of the chancery property. “Among the properties being sold, Coyne said, are a building housing the Cardinal Cushing Resource Center in the South End; the former parish hall of St. Leonard of Port Maurice Church in the North End; 12 wooded acres on Forest Lake in Methuen that were once owned by a now-closed Lawrence parish, Saint Francis; and the Cambridge property associated with another closed parish, Our Lady of Pity.”
The Knights of Columbus cash is not being touched.
And—surprise, suprise—the Globe story quotes Fr. Bob Bullock of the Boston Priests Forum. I’m just surprised they didn’t get someone from VOTF. Were they all on vacation or is their stock so low that even the Globe doesn’t call them anymore?
The story ends with a mention from the president of Merrimack College that repeats what I’ve been saying for a long time: that ultimately it’s all Catholic who pay for settlements. We are all the Church, we are all the Body of Christ. There is no mythical “other Church” that only bishops and priests belong to that can be made to pay sex abuse settlements. We’re it and any sacrifices made by “the Church” are made by the Church, meaning all of us.
