UNCHURCHED

The Catholic Diocese of Oakland is paying out $56.3 million dollars to settle 56 cases of sexual abuse of children. The long, sordid tale of Catholic kids abused by Catholic priests has been picked over here and elsewhere, and I don’t want to dwell on it. (Like Andrew, I was raised Catholic. Unlike Andrew, I’m not practicing-and, no, I wasn’t molested when I was an altar boy. The priests I encountered as a child were, so far as I know, all good guys. Or maybe the fact that my dad was a cop and carried a gun acted as a deterrent?) Like other Catholic dioceses (dioci?), the Catholic Diocese in Oakland plans to sell church-owned land to cover the debt. Settlements in the Church sex-abuse scandal are going to reach into the hundreds of millions, if not the billions, of dollars. Like most adults my age, I’m obsessed with real estate. So with shitloads of real estate being sold off by the Church I can’t help but wonder what kind of an impact all of this property returning to private, secular ownership is going to have on property tax receipts in places like, say, Boston and Oakland and Chicago…

-posted by Dan