This week, The Gallup Independent published a scathing editorial about the bankruptcy proceedings in the Catholic Diocese of Gallup.
From the editorial:
[Bishop James] Wall and his bankruptcy attorneys — who are billing the diocese hundreds of dollars per hour — are already dragging the process out in an unjust, inequitable and unmerciful manner by trying to sell Judge David T. Thuma and the Department of Justice’s U.S. Trustee program a bogus bill of goods. They are trying to convince federal officials that its priests aren’t really its employees, that its parishes aren’t really part of the diocese, and that its three main nonprofit organizations, the Catholic Peoples Foundation, Southwest Indian Foundation, and Catholic Charities of Gallup, don’t really raise money to benefit programs in the diocese.
It’s not the first time we have seen editorials like this.
Seems to me that if I attended a church where the leaders—who claim to carry the cross and message of Jesus Christ—repeatedly attempt to lie, cheat and swindle the court system, I’d find a new church. You know, a moral one.
But that’s just me.
It’s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy taken to its logical legal pretzel logic extreme.
And the nun/principal who told Mark Zmuda to get a divorce isn’t really RCC Inc., that the priest who abused you isn’t really RCC Inc., that nun who beat you isn’t really RCC Inc., etc. ad nauseum. If *they’re* not RCC Inc, then who the H-E-double toothpicks IS?
Hey! It’s me too, and a lot of people I know, work with, pray with. Too, too many of today’s clerics attempt to put their privileges and money ahead of their sacred obligations, while expecting, even demanding, that the courts and their own people treat them as gods. Legal fictions are not appropriate to a church which claims to proclaim the Truth.