I think the judge is a Catholic. From the article: According to newspaper reports, she said that she had planned to do so without comment until she received a mailing from her former parish asking her to help the diocese pay for the settlement.
Did she react the way she did, because she's an anti-Catholic bigot or because she felt her church was embracing an unacceptable immorality? It wasn't that the church was asking the laity for funds to pay off those victimized by some of their employees, but that they were giving the laity a different picture of their finances than the information she'd seen as an officer of the court.
If one doesn’t live in this diocese and has not beem aware of all the aspects of this case from the very beginning, it’s not so advisable to make assumptions about it.
BTW, the author has a very accurate grasp of the highly biased and editorialized style of “reporting” all of this by the so-called “journalists” of the San Diego Union Tribune.
The Church was not “embracing an unacceptable immorality”.
No, but she is holding the Church to an impossible standard. Frankly the punishment does not fit the crime. No judge would hold a public school system to the same level of accountibility. Yet the schools are far more guilty than the Church. Almost forever school districts have handled the problem of sexual predators by sending them on there way, not by turning them over to the cops. Yet how many school districts have been required by prosecutors to turn over their personell files for those employed thirty or forty years ago.
And there is the matter of scale e: Hauling the diocese into court is like hauling the state of Rhode Island into federal court and demanding it surrender all its records, and then alllowing a jury to award huge settlements to clients who have suffered, in many cases, minimal harm. Fact is that they would get nowhere, because most personnel records are purged on a regular basis by most public schools.