Why Should Churches Should Be Taxed?

Ownership of these churches in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe was transferred to the parishes. As a result, the churches are excluded from the bankruptcy estate available to clergy abuse victims. [Photographer: William LeGoullon for Bloomberg Businessweek]

Tax churches because they’re businesses, plain and simple. The product or service they provide is religion and/or spirituality.

Bloomberg Business News published the findings of their most recent financial investigation, which showed that – as expected – like any nominally competent business organization, or conglomerated international corporation, the Catholic Church in the United States has moved to protect its assets from being considered part of any potential judgments/settlements arising from individual or Class Action lawsuits initiated by individuals (plaintiffs) who as children were abused by priests, and now are adults.

From a business perspective, one could think of it as the Church opposing members who may be potential or prospective “creditors” in any liability arising from sex abuse cases.

The Federal Government needs to RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) them, because they’re clearly corrupt as evidenced by:
• Perpetrating, and perpetuating, sexual abuse, by;
• Deliberately hiding and shuffling perpetrator priests, and by;
• Deliberately shifting and hiding assets in response to lawsuits.

Catholic Church Shields $2 Billion in Assets to Limit Abuse Payouts

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-01-08/the-catholic-church-s-strategy-to-limit-payouts-to-abuse-victims

“In many cases, churches precede bankruptcy by transferring and reclassifying assets.

“The effect is to shrink the pot of money available to clergy abuse victims.

“That and Chapter 11’s [bankruptcy] universal settle­ments and protections from further claims have been an effective one-two punch for limiting payouts. A Bloomberg Businessweek review of court filings by lawyers for churches and victims in the past 15 years shows that the U.S. Catholic Church has shielded more than $2 billion in assets from abuse victims in bankruptcies using these methods.

“The survivors should have gotten that money, and they didn’t.
The Catholic Church has behaved like a business.
It hasn’t behaved like a religion that lives by the rules it espouses.”

– Terry McKiernan, President of BishopAccountability.org

“For most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in the U.S. minimized the damage wrought by pedophile priests by covering up the abuse. When the bishop of the Davenport, Iowa, diocese was told in the mid-1950s that one of his priests was sexually abusing boys at a local YMCA, he kept it secret. “It is consoling to know that no general notoriety has arisen, and I pray none may result,” he wrote to a priest, capturing the strategy of the era.

“Cover-ups worked when victims and their families could be intimidated or shamed into silence. But in the 1980s and ’90s, victims started filing civil lawsuits against the dioceses where the alleged incidents took place. Church leaders across the country kept these suits quiet by settling out of court and demanding nondisclosure agreements in return. Church leaders paid out about $750 million from the early ’80s through 2002, according to BishopAccountability.org, a nonprofit that tracks clergy sex abuse.

“The veil of secrecy on these transactions was pierced when the Boston Globe published its investigations into church sex abuse in 2002, sparking public outrage at how clergy had protected their own. From 1950 to 2002, 4,392 priests were accused of abuse, according to a study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“The pace of lawsuits escalated as public awareness grew, and besieged church leaders looked to a new option: bankruptcy. When a church district that’s been sued files for Chapter 11 and then reaches a bankruptcy settlement, a percentage of its assets are divvied up by victims. Like Fortune 500 executives—and more recently the Sacklers, the family that owns OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP—church leaders see bankruptcy as an attractive solution because it provides a controlled process for settling a large number of lawsuits while holding on to as many assets as possible.

“Another benefit is secrecy. Lawsuits and trials lead to testimony and publicity. Bankruptcy ensures a quieter mass settlement that forces an end to existing lawsuits and blocks new ones. “It provides a clean slate,” says Robert Kugler, a lawyer who represented abuse victims in the St. Paul and Minneapolis archdiocese. Dioceses have gone this route more than 20 times since 2004, when the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., declared itself insolvent.” …