{"id":6836,"date":"2006-07-10T10:32:46","date_gmt":"2006-07-10T10:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/trying-to-clean-up.html"},"modified":"2006-07-10T10:32:46","modified_gmt":"2006-07-10T10:32:46","slug":"trying-to-clean-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/trying-to-clean-up.html","title":{"rendered":"Trying to clean up"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Seattle Times piece on the financial disaster of the Spokane Diocese<\/a><\/p>\n

Milwaukee prepares:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is going ahead with plans to sell the Cousins Center in St. Francis and has launched a major communications effort, partly to prepare its 700,000 Catholics for what might be "staggering financial consequences" as 10 lawsuits filed against it by victims of clergy sexual abuse move toward trials in California.<\/p>\n

Katherine Freberg, an attorney representing eight of the victims, said Thursday that the archdiocese has expressed interest in seeking settlements while also indicating "there’s a possibility they will file for bankruptcy."<\/p>\n

"When we hear that from a defendant, we are very suspicious that a mediation would not be very fruitful," added Freberg, who noted that average settlements of clergy sexual abuse lawsuits in California "certainly are over $1 million."<\/p>\n

Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, who has acknowledged in the past that bankruptcy could be a last-resort option, did not rule it out in his Herald of Hope column and in his quotes in a news story devoted to sexual abuse issues in Thursday’s Catholic Herald. <\/p>\n

"The issue of going into bankruptcy would be extremely painful and would only come after extensive consultation with the advisory groups of the archdiocese, and as a last resort," Jerry Topczewski, Dolan’s chief of staff, said Thursday in an interview. "The financial and operating tension that you live under is to do everything you can do to help the victim-survivors while continuing to fund the ministries and mission and of the church here in southeastern Wisconsin.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Seattle Times piece on the financial disaster of the Spokane Diocese Milwaukee prepares: The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is going ahead with plans to sell the Cousins Center in St. Francis and has launched a major communications effort, partly to prepare its 700,000 Catholics for what might be "staggering financial consequences" as 10 lawsuits filed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nTrying to clean up - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/07\/trying-to-clean-up.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trying to clean up - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6836\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}