Cardinal Timothy Dolan Hid $57 Million From Church Sex Abuse Victims
Cardinal Timothy Dolan is under fire after news broke that he hid $57 million from the victims of the Roman Catholic Church’s pedophile priest sexual abuse victims. In 2007, then the Archbishop of Milwaukee, Dolan transferred $57 million into a cemetery trust fund after seeking permission from the Vatican. Dolan is now serving as the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), making him the nation’s top Catholic.
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So says the New York Times in a bombshell disclosure of after the release of “more than 6,000 pages of documents.” The Times reports that Dolan in the past refereed to these claims, made previously, as “malarkey†and “groundless gossip.â€
Cardinal Dolan, now the archbishop of New York, has emphatically denied seeking to shield church funds as the archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He reiterated in a statement Monday that these were “old and discredited attacks.â€
However, the files contain a 2007 letter to the Vatican in which he explains that by transferring the assets, “I foresee an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.†The Vatican approved the request in five weeks, the files show.
Those files also show that “Milwaukee harbored some of the nation’s most notorious priest pedophiles, including the Rev. Lawrence Murphy, whom a church therapist assessed as having molested as many as 200 boys during his two and a half decades teaching and leading St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wis., and Sigfried Widera, who faced 42 counts of child abuse in Wisconsin and California,” the Times reports:
Father Murphy died in 1998, and Father Widera committed suicide in Mexico in 2003.
In his letter, Archbishop Listecki said the documents showed that 22 priests were “reassigned to parish work after concerns about their behavior were known to the archdiocese,†and that 8 of those “reoffended after being reassigned.â€
Joseph Amodeo, who resigned last year from the board of NYC’s Catholic Charities, told The New Civil Rights Movement last night via electronic message that the “recent revelations regarding Dolan’s attempts to shield assets from victims of sexual abuse further demonstrate that the veil of secrecy that has plagued the Church must be lifted.”
“We can no longer allow a Church that claims moral authority to hide behind tactics that subvert the essence of justice. Morality must be lived in order for it to be true. Perhaps the time has come for the laity to organize a Fortnight for Justice for the victims of sexual abuse and all those who have been further marginalized by the Church’s hierarchy.”
Amodeo earlier this year lead a small group of silent Catholic protestors who were threatened with arrest by a New York City Police detective, unless they first washed their hands. The group was responding to Dolan’s blog post in which he told gay people who wish to participate in the Catholic faith, you must first “wash your hands!â€
The files released yesterday also show Dolan “paid $20,000 to abusive priests who agreed not to fight their dismissal from the priesthood” once they were found out to have committed sexual abuse acts, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal reports in this shocking report:
In the decades before Dolan — now cardinal of New York — arrived in 2002, church leaders, including now-retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland, routinely moved pedophile priests from one parish or school to the next, shielding them from criminal charges, the records show.
And when they did try to dismiss sex abusers from the priesthood, Dolan and Weakland were met by a Vatican bureaucracy that moved at a glacial pace, causing the process to slog on sometimes for years.
One case, involving the now-defrocked Father John O’Brien, dragged on for five years, even though O’Brien was convicted of fourth-degree sexual assault of a teenage boy and had sought his own dismissal. At one point a Vatican official wrote to Dolan saying he could not turn the case over to Pope Benedict XVI for a final decision without “an admission of guilt and a sincere expression of remorse.”
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56 million Americans without an employer-backed retirement saving plan, like a 401(k), could benefit from a proposal President Donald Trump made during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, but one expert warns he may not have the authority to do so.
Declaring that he wanted to fix a “gross disparity” in America’s retirement system, as CBS News reported, Trump said that “half of all of working Americans still do not have access to a retirement plan with matching contributions from an employer.”
Trump appears to be using a plan provided to federal government employees, the Thrift Savings Plan, as the template for the new retirement accounts.
“The current retirement system effectively excludes millions of Americans who lack access to 401(k) and similar plans, according to a recent report from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS),” CBS News noted. “The nonpartisan group found that most Americans without an employer-sponsored plan are unlikely to put any money away for retirement.”
These new plans would “ensure that all Americans can profit from a rising stock market,” Trump said.
Some financial experts lauded the idea.
“The time has come because so many people are now older and they realize the promise of the 401(k) just didn’t materialize,” retirement expert Teresa Ghilarducci, director of The New School for Social Research’s Wealth Equity Lab, told CBS News. “This goes much further than any other legislation in the last 45 years to get money into low-income workers’ retirement accounts.”
But one expert disagreed with Trump’s plan, and his authority to fund it.
“Not only does the administration lack the fiscal authority to seed 401(k)s with a $1,000 taxpayer match, nor is this a good idea,” Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, told CBS News. “Americans need a simpler system of tax-advantaged savings via universal savings accounts, not more tax-advantaged accounts (ie Trump accounts) or related handouts.”
Meanwhile, according to Semafor, Trump’s plan may end up not even being his own.
“One option: resurrecting former President Barack Obama’s MyRA program, which Trump shuttered in 2017, citing high costs. Obama announced that plan, which eventually drew 30,000 participants, during his 2014 State of the Union.”
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The billionaire head of a Berlin-based global mass media behemoth that owns influential outlets including Politico, reportedly met with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles on Wednesday.
Mathias Döpfner serves as chairman and CEO of Axel Springer SE, a publishing group that operates in dozens of countries and counts U.S. private equity firm KKR — co‑founded by Republican donor Henry Kravis — among its principal owners. According to Forbes, Kravis gave one million dollars to Donald Trump‘s 2017 inauguration committee.
In the U.S., Axel Springer also publishes Business Insider and Morning Brew.
New York Times media reporter Ben Mullin reported that Wiles met with Döpfner in, according to a source, “an introductory, get-to-know-you meeting.”
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The meeting comes just one day after President Donald Trump delivered his controversial State of the Union address and less than nine months before the midterm elections.
Döpfner sent an email to his top executives before the 2020 election, asking if they would like to join him to pray for the re-election of Donald Trump, according to reports. The email came one year before Axel Springer sealed the deal to purchase Politico.
“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner wrote in the email, The Daily Beast reported, citing an article in The Washington Post.
“No American administration in the last 50 years has done more,” Döpfner added.
“When asked about the message,” The Daily Beast reported, “Döpfner initially denied it existed, going so far as to say: ‘It has never been sent and has never been even imagined.’ When confronted with a printout of the email, he explained that he may have sent it ‘as an ironic, provocative statement in the circle of people that hate Donald Trump.’ ‘That is me,’ he added. ‘That could be.’”
In a 2022 analysis titled “The Scandalous History of America’s Newest Media Baron,” Foreign Policy reported: “The new owner of Politico, Axel Springer, has a decades-long record of bending journalistic ethics for right-wing causes.”
READ MORE: ‘Bloodshot Eyes of Crazy People’: Trump Lashes Out at Two ‘Deranged’ Dems in New Wild Rant
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President Donald Trump escalated his criticism Wednesday of two progressive congressional Democrats who shouted at him during his State of the Union address, denouncing them as “mentally deranged.” In his wild rant he said that the lawmakers had “the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people” and, suggesting deportation, added, “we should send them back from where they came.”
“When you watch Low IQ Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as they screamed uncontrollably last night at the very elegant State of the Union, such an important and beautiful event, they had the bulging, bloodshot eyes of crazy people, LUNATICS, mentally deranged and sick who, frankly, look like they should be institutionalized,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
U.S. Reps. Omar and Tlaib had denounced the fatal shootings by federal agents of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota. “You have killed Americans!” the two yelled, according to NBC News.
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“When people can behave like that, and knowing that they are Crooked and Corrupt Politicians, so bad for our Country, we should send them back from where they came — as fast as possible.”
Trump’s targeting of the left did not end there.
He suggested that the two members of Congress should join with Hollywood star Robert De Niro.
They “should actually get on a boat with Trump Deranged Robert De Niro, another sick and demented person with, I believe, an extremely Low IQ, who has absolutely no idea what he is doing or saying — some of which is seriously CRIMINAL!”
Trump did not specify which remarks he believed to be criminal.
“When I watched him break down in tears last night, much like a child would do, I realized that he may be even sicker than Crazy Rosie O’Donnell, who is right now in Ireland trying to figure out how to come back into our beautiful United States,” Trump also wrote.
“The only difference between De Niro and Rosie is that she is probably somewhat smarter than him, which isn’t saying much. The good news is that America is now Bigger, Better, Richer, and Stronger than ever before, and it’s driving them absolutely crazy!”
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