I’m curious as to why there is so much interest in where Archbishop O’Malley will live. Okay, the first day they asked him if he will live in the big residence in Brighton and he said he didn’t know. But why is there article after article on the subject? Who’s so interested in it that they keep the Boston Globe writing about it? Is it someone who wants the property to be sold? A buyer? People who want the money from the sale?
The bishop’s residence itself is heavily mortgaged as part of the collateral for a line of credit of up to $38 million that the archdiocese took out from the Knights of Columbus, so its equity, if sold, is limited. But the house is located on a 60-acre property owned by the archdiocese on the Newton-Brighton line that also includes the chancery, which is the main archdiocesan office building, a library, a tribunal building, and the campus of St. John’s Seminary. The property is coveted by Boston College, which needs room for growth and has expressed a willingness to pay tens of millions of dollars for the land.
So all this talk that the Archdiocese should sell the residence to give the money to the victims and their lawyers (up to one-third of any settlement) is moot anyway. A sale of the building would net very little. And if we sell off the land, don’t we have to put the seminary somewhere? Don’t we have to put the archdiocese’s office’s somewhere. It would make very little fiscal sense to sell what we own, to rent property anyway.
