In the US you have 2 choices as far as mounting a legal defense
- The State can pay (free for the accused, outside of whatever taxes they pay that contributes to providing free legal defense for anyone accused of a crime.)
- The accused can pay for their own defense.
If the trial had happened here, I’d be glad the Church took responsibility for one of it’s employees and paid their legal fees... rather than shoving them off on the tax payers -all of us, and his victims- shouldering the burden. If Oz has similar laws, I’d think long and hard about whether you’d prefer for your taxes to be paying for his defense, rather than he paying for his own.
Maybe comments that perhaps millions of dollars could be spent on the survivors of Child Sexual Assault Victims/Survivors of the Catholic Church as is by spent in the defense of priests who have been moved around many different parishes over the last four decades?
Trying to dictate where someone else spends their own money (individual or organization), ...don’t spend it there! Spend it over here!... has me waving cheerfully at you as a Card Carrying Member of the Control Freak’s Club. It’s also absolutely terrible boundaries. Where the Catholic Church chooses to spend its money is it’s own business. Not yours or mine.
On the upside? The CC already spends faaaaar more than you’re suggesting, on exactly what you want them to spend it on.
In the US alone the Catholic Church already spends over 4
billion dollars a year on charity.
Hundreds of millions are spent on counseling services, victims services, sexual assault crisis teams, etc. (of course hundreds of millions are also spent on unrelated issues; medical, poverty, refugee, natural disaster, disability, education, etc.)
In In 2010, Catholic Charities USA reported expenditures of between $4.2 billion and $4.4 billion, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which publishes an annual list of the 400 biggest charities in the United States,
World wide, of course, that number is much larger.
So the good news is they’re already doing what you want them to be doing, in much larger scale.
Now... more good news... just because at present you don’t have any right to say where they should or should not spend their money (no more than our sisters or neighbors have the right to dictate our finances to us) ..that doesn’t mean you could never have the right. If you cared enough about having a say in how the church spends its money you could always compete to become a member of their board of trustees that oversees their charitable & business expenditures; or sit on the board of one of their thousand or so international charities; or via another direction entirely attempt to change the laws that govern how they’re allowed to spend their money. These are all highly competitive positions, as a great many people want to have a say in how those vast sums of money are spent; or to be a governing voice writing the laws legislating how other people spend their money (both public and private funds), but competition is healthy. So it’s always something you could work towards, if it’s something you really want.
