Governor Jerry Brown

Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom

Attorney General Kamala Harris

Insurance Commissioner Mike Villines

Superior Court Judge Richard Ulmer

District 2 Mark Farrell

District 4 Carmen Chu

District 6 Theresa Sparks

District 8 Scott Wiener/Rebecca Prosan (2nd Choice)

District 10 Steve Moss/Laynette Sweet (2nd Choice)

San Francisco Ballot Measures

AA Vehicle Registration Fee    NO

We’re for this when the City starts licensing  bicycles  for a registratio fee & subjects them to the same rules of the road-and speeding  tickets- that motorists in cars are.

A Earthquake Safety Retrofit Loan Program General Obligation Bond ($46,150,00)     YES

We went along with SPUR’s recommendation on this but we  take their word that it won’t become another city bureaucratic boondoggle.

B City Retirement and Health Plans     YES

You don’t fix a leak in the roof by shooting the workers who built the house.

C Mayoral Appearances at Board Meetings     NO

D Non-Citizen Voting in School Board Elections     NO

E Election Day Voter Registration     NO

An early warning about potential voter fraud in the 2011 mayoral election.  SF is the only county in the state requesting this and the Secretary of State’s office is not equipped to proccess the voter certification.

F Health Service Board Elections     YES

G Transit Operator Wages (Fix Muni Now)     YES

H Local Elected Official on Political Party Com     YES

I Saturday Voting    OK

J Hotel Tax Clarification and Temporary Increase     NO

K Hotel Tax Clarification and Definitions    NO

L Sitting or Lying on Sidewalks    YES

M Community Policing and Foot Patrols (Board of Supervisors’ Confusing response to Prop. N)    NO

A bogus proposition intended to confuse the voters.

N Real Property Transfer Tax     NO

State Ballot Measures

Proposition 19     NO

A good deal for Oakland, but disasterous for the fragile economy of Mendocino County.

Proposition 20     NO

This is a sucker deal that puts California at a disadvantage to Texas & New York.

Proposition 21     YES

Proposition 22     NO

Proposition 23     NO

Proposition 24     NO

Proposition 25     NO

Proposition 26    YES

Janet Reilly’s Woman Voters Problem

By Warren Hinckle

Focus on: District 2: Farrell v. Reilly

I met Janet Reilly in Tom Donoghue’s Marina Lounge, on Chestnut Street. This is one of the oldest and therefore the greatest of San Francisco neighborhood joints, places like Gino and Carlo in North Beach and The Philosopher’s Club in West Portal, bars that are the neighborhood living room where locals gather to read the paper and watch sports on TV and talk about life in the village. She is a spectacularly good-looking candidate, strong professional presence yet feminine and friendly; the leader of the pack in a stage presentation of “Little Women.”  She came with a handler in tow. He sat to her left. They were both nursing something to drink. There was no money on the bar.

I thought it would interesting, like one of those 60 Minutes interviews, to talk to a powerful professional woman about how they keep their life apart from their love partners. Janet said that didn’t happen with her, her campaign was really professional.  Clint was not involved in it. Not? What about joint meetings pushing for endorsements and money and Clint always on the phone, saying give to Janet or else, that sort of stuff.  I mean it’s the talk of the money guys downtown. Clint beating them up on her behalf

I don’t do that, never had a joint meeting with Clint about my campaign, we are excellent professionals, she said.  Never a meeting?? What about the one with Annmarie Conroy and her Husband Bart Lally?– two friends of mine. “Oh, that did happen.” she said, almost as an afterthought, “I wanted her endorsement and she gave it to me.” Well, that was not the way my friend Annmarie told it. She said that she wouldn’t endorse Janet unless she renounced the rascal Peskin and she wasn’t willing to commit. A couple of days later, as the heat of Reilly-Peskin, Reilly-Daly came on, it became known that the Reilly family is one of the biggest contributors to public power (a no-no in D.6.)  Janet sent out a press release saying she wouldn’t back her friend Peskin for interim Mayor, god forbid, if she wins and Gavin wins for Lieutenant Governor. Conroy is taking the credit for that late blooming backstab to Reilly’s friend Peskin.

I asked her how difficult it was, being a strong professional politician and accomplished woman in her own right, to be married to a speckled egg of a husband like Clint Reilly, the political power broker and used-to-be political campaign manager who is famously known in Democratic Party higher political circles for publicly firing his then- client Dianne Feinstein–who was at that time running for Governor of California–for not having, I believe his phrase was, ‘fire in her belly’ when she took a few days off the campaign trail for a gynecological procedure. Clint has done other controversial things within the state Democratic Party such as making gazillions publishing state-wide and local phony  “Democratic Party” slate cards and sometimes, to make a buck, sticking one of his candidates –who happened to be one of the Republicans in elective office in San Francisco, then San Francisco Supervisor Annmarie Conroy — without her knowledge on one of his money-making ersatz Democratic Slate Cards. Conroy lost a close when her Democratic opponents yelled “hypocrisy” for appearing on an “official” Democratic “party” piece of mail.

Then there was left unsaid Clint’s horrific campaign for Kathleen Brown for Governor which she might have won if he hadn’t screwed it up – by say spending all her money early on on highly commissionable state-wide TV ads- and then famously not returning Kathleen’s calls during the final week of the campaign.  She sued him and the result was a sealed settlement in which she apparently got some money back but all was lost with the election.

That’s two San Francisco women in politics–Republican Conroy and Democrat Brown–that Clint managed and who lost. The stable, family voter, Marina/Pacific Heights savvy Democrat families with long political memories remember that Clint as campaign manager had a bad relationship and bad result with at least two strong women, basically taking their money and screwing them over. People talk about that, other women who had gone down under bad circumstances, in the perspective that Clint his now running his wife for elective office. San Franciscans think she will find it difficult to free herself of her husband’s past… and present.

Janet’s political handler brought Dianne Feinstein and her husband’s business deal into the conversation–“This is unfair questioning, no one has asked things like that about Feinstein,” he said.  Say what??? I mentioned a few Los Angeles Times front-page articles about the Shanghai airport deal and the Orange County paper coverage about that land swap.

Janet said she was at the bus stops every day talking to voters and no one had asked her about this stuff. But they are talking about it in the parishes, I said. San Franciscans have memories like elephants.  She said nothing like that had ever been brought up about Dianne Feinstein and her husband, that she had no knowledge of anything of the kind.

I said that many voters I had talked to in the district in which she is running for Supervisor, the Marina, said almost in a sort of mantra, that they like her but they were concerned about Clint hanging over her shoulder and whispering into her ear, politically. They genuinely liked her-and she is a most likeable person, even if she is a politician-but had questions about the overbearing Clint– and the money that he, and her, had given to people like Daly and Peskin and issues like public power, which, finally, is not a winning issue in the Marina.

She and her handler left the bar. There remained no money on the plank, I asked Gary Ferrari if any money had exchanged hands.

“No,” he said, “They stuck you.”

Ed Moose, a barkeeper of legend and boss of the Washington Square Bar and Grill in it’s golden days, died today apparently of complications from apparently fucked-up procedures at the hospital where he was being treated for an apparently also fucked-up routine operation.

As San Francisco days go, this was a classic of gloom. Today before even the predatory funeral people could to get their paws on  the  Moose carcass, a sign went up saying that the Washbag had been closed. At the moment, there is no evidence that there was any coordination.

Among other glories, Moose established the annual penny pitch at  Washbag at which a thousand traditional inebriates tossed their tips and made a bundle for good causes. Moose was predeceased in the Washbag by his business partner San Dietch, a classic saloonkeeper and a very good man despite North Beach sniping about him. They were both from St. Louis and learned Frisco something.

I recall a dark night of mischief back at the start of the Washbag which was then the down- home Rose Postola’s we went out for mischief and stole a cable car sign from the Muni barn and installed it in  the Washbag front room before ithe joint expanded with tables and silverware to take over the gold fish store next store.

Moose’s original partners in the Washbag were Donato and Frank Rossi of the Rossi family of Gino and Carlo and without them Moose always said he would have never got the place off the ground.

He is survived by his wife Mary Etta, one of the great woman of all times and a cook to beat the best. Theirs was a wonderful marriage, the product of  an enchanting love affair, which would be the envy of the most romantic.

– Warren Hinckle

Peskin Should Do The Right Thing —

In Fairness, Allow No Endorsement Vote in Districts 6 and 8 Supervisorial Races

By Warren Hinckle

2000 was a very good year for democracy, as former DCCC member Jeff Sheehy recalls it. That year new political talent was in abundance in the San Francisco Democratic Party (including a wedding singer named  Hall and a couple of guys names Daly and Peskin) and the party central committee decided to make no endorsements in the races for district supervisor on the grounds of fundamental fairness.

“There were so many qualified candidates for the voters to choose among

that we agreed to make no endorsements for Supervisor and leave it to the voters because the official party endorsement would give one candidate an

unfair advantage over other Democrats,” said Sheehy.

And what an advantage it is — in mailing, money and imprimatur. In a study of 20 years that party made endorsements in supervisorial races, only 2 candidates managed to beat the Most Lucky Fellow with the endorsement. “Especially with the instant run-off system, the party endorsement gives a huge advantage if only one person is endorsed,” Sheehy said.

2010 is very much like 2000 in terms of talented and resourceful candidates.

The hotly- contested races in Districts 6 and 8 are so hotly contested precisely because in each there are at least three strong, qualified candidates who have demonstrated the ability to raise serious campaign money.

(District 10 has had a later-blooming field than the 6 and  8 battlegrounds but there are several highly qualified candidates and if the fairness principle is applied the panel would either ranked-choice list the candidates or include them in the No Endorsement category.)

For a Democratic party panel made up of  politicians and their appointees to trade favors to anoint one of them – when they have the historical option of  not endorsing any and leaving it to the votes to pick the most qualified Democrat – raises the unsettling question of what type of democracy there is in the Democratic Party on chair Aaron Peskin’s watch.

DCCC members I spoke to thought there appears to be a developing consensus that given the strength of the field it would be fairest to take the year 2000 No Endorsement route in 2010 – but that would be unlikely if Peskin and his handmaidens on the committee play machine hardball and push through their pick of the litter.

Background to tonight’s vote: In 2008, Supervisor Chris Daly e-mailed longtime DCCC member Arlo Hale Smith Jr. that he must vote for Aaron Peskin for chair and not Scott Weiner (now the leading contender in the District 8 race for termed-out Bevan Dufy’s Supervisor seat) because the independent-minded Weiner as chair “would make it less likely that our candidates would win the endorsement of the Party.” Daly threatened Smith, the son of  former San Francisco DA Arlo Smith, with ex-communication from the Left if he didn’t make Peskin chair and confided that “Aaron, Michael Borstein (Peskin’s mini-me on the DCCC) and I” were working to “field a slate for the DCCC” in 2010 to control the Board of Supervisors.

The Daly/Peskin takeover plan hatched in 2008 will be played out in the DCCC endorsement vote tonight.

The politics of the situation are further charged by sitting members of the Board of Supervisors squatting at the Central Committee at night after  their day jobs at City Hall.  Peskin has been uncharacteristically uncoy when asked by other DCCC members about his ambitions to become Interim Mayor —  to get the job Peskin needs  six votes on the current Board to assume the remaining year of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s  term through December 2011 if Newsom is elected Lt. Governor in November.

(It is eating pie for a Supervisor to be elected to the DCCC  because of name recognition and the ability to raise money – as opposed to the financial resources of the average neighborhood activist running the a DCCC seat. (Compared to  the city’s stringent fiscal controls on Board of Supervisor races, a campaign for the DCCC is a virtual Open Seseme for fundraising.)

Mayor Newsom has placed a reform measure on the November ballot that would bar a sitting Supervisor from holding a dual seat on the Democratic county committee. If approved by voters, that would resolve the obvious complications with the  open-government Brown Act  of having  sitting county Supervisors (a non-partisan office) sitting at night on a partisan political body and discussing public policy issues outside the confines of their regularly scheduled and announced public meetings at City Hall.

It would also eliminate a channel for what is so famously called ‘special interest’ money to get into the purses of individual Supervisors via donations to their DCCC campaigns apart from the tightly restricted process of political donations to members of the Board of Supervisors.

Former DCCC member Jeff Sheehy took an historical perspective about 2000 to 2010. “The goal of the old DCCC which fostered district elections was that Committee would become a forum with members elected from the  neighborhoods and a place where new political talent in the Democratic Party would have a chance to grow.” Already-elected members of the Board of Supervisors further enabling themselves through also being elected to the DCCC did not exactly square with that grass roots, spread the political wealth ideal.

“When someone gets elected to the Board of Supervisors or the Board of Education, which are non-partisan positions, I wonder about them also running for a seat on a partisan political committee – and taking up seats on that body making it more difficult for neighborhood candidates to run,” he said.

The vote tonight is about if the DCCC is to be a farm team, or a Tammany Hall.

By Our City Hall Correspondent

Democratic Party Boss Aaron Peskin ate his own gun last night.

Peskin fired a political bullet at San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, challenging his right as the state Democratic Party’s nominee for Lt. Governor of California, to name a representative to vote on the city’s 26-member Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC), often short-handed in political circles to the more colloquial “D-Triple-C.”  San Francisco Democrats nominated for statewide office have traditionally named a representative to the county Democratic panel.

Peskin solicited an opinion  – the cost of that opinion ranging from zero to many thousands of dollars from the party’s thinning coffers – was a much-gossiped-about subject at the panel’s meeting Wednesday night in the State Building’s basement auditorium. At the opening of the meeting Peskin bragged of the logic of the opinion secured from longtime DCCC legal hack Lance Olson.

Aaron Peskin backed down at Wednesday night’s meeting and Newsom’s appointee, former deputy City Attorney John Shanley, was seated.

Peskin’s somewhat complicated legal argument was that since Newsom’s opponent, Lt. Governor Abel Maldonado, was a Republican, Newsom could not have a representative on the Democratic committee until after the November election. He said that however San Francisco City Attorney Kamala Harris, who is the state party’s nominee for Attorney General, could name a representative because the current Attorney General, now running for Governor, Jerry Brown, was a Democrat. Harris named London Breed as her ex-officio representative and deputy City Attorney Matthew Rothschild as her alternate.

The state Election Code states that candidates for a statewide office shall automatically become members of their party’s county Central Committee, but Peskin argued that the bylaws of the D-Triple-C were unclear on that matter. Peskin told the Bay Guardian earlier in the week that his ring would need to be kissed if the mayor hoped to make an appointment. “He’s going to need to make an argument why we should amend the rules.”

The mayor’s appointee, John Shanley, was asked by Supervisor Campos why the mayor should get an appointment since he has presented a ballot measure to preventing elected officials, i.e. Supervisors, from automatically becoming voting members of the DCCC. Shanley, who also happens to be an attorney, stated that his appointment was “not to represent they Mayor of San Francisco.  I am here to represent the duly certified Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor in accordance with State Law.”

Adding to the elements of contentiousness and occasionally frivolity in the often antagonistic relationship between former Board of Supervisors president Peskin and Mayor Newsom, the Mayor named San Francisco journalist Warren Hinckle, a frequent critic of Peskin, as Shanley’s alternate on the committee.

Peskin’s about face came about following a counter legal opinion submitted to the committee by member Scott Weiner, a deputy City Attorney, and a leading candidate for Supervisor in District 8.

Weiner argued that Peskin’s legal opinion was flawed:

“The DCCC can, and historically has, allowed the nominees for statewide office listed in the Code to take their seats upon nomination — from Arlo Smith to Dianne Feinstein to Kevin Shelley. Nothing in the bylaws precludes us from doing so here. Mr. Olson cites to nothing indicating that the DCCC intended to exclude ex-officios listed in the Elections Code. Instead, he relies on bylaw provisions that, at best for him, are vague, as opposed to the crystal clarity of the Elections Code,” Wiener wrote in a memorandum distributed to members.

“Our job is to unify the Democratic Party, not to tear it apart. Stretching the interpretation of our bylaws to exclude nominees we have historically included on the DCCC would be a terrible first step in achieving that unity. It would, deservedly, be an embarrassment to the Party. It also could strengthen Abel Maldonado’s hand by sending a message that the SF Democratic Party doesn’t support its own nominee. I can guarantee you that the Republicans will play up any decision by the SFDCCC to exclude our Lt. Governor nominee,” Weiner said.

The committee agreed with Weiner by a 17-13 vote to clarify the bylaws and seat Shanley. The vote at Peskin’s Draconian suggestion also revised the DCCC by-laws so that if either Newsom or Harris were to lose their statewide races, they would no longer have a representative on the committee, which is contrary to long-standing party tradition.

The unintended consequence of Peskin’s manipulation would be that, if Harris were to lose the race for state Attorney General, the San Francisco Democratic Party Central Committee would lose it’s only black member (London Breed, Harris’ delegate.) The DCCC as presently constituted is predominately white, with many gay, lesbian and transgender members but disproportionate to the city’s population number of Asian, Black and Latino members.

By Our Political Correspondent

Mayor Gavin Newsom has appointed former deputy City Attorney John Shanley as his ex-offico representative on the San Francisco Democratic Party Central Committee.

According to people familiar with the situation, former Board of Supervisors president Aaron Peskin has engaged legal counsel and will challenge the mayor’s appointment to the party panel at what is now expected to be a tumultuous meeting of the Committee Wednesday night at Milton Marks Auditorium in the State Building at 455 Golden Gate Avenue in Civic Center.

In calls to members of the Democratic Party panel this week, Peskin has argued that Newsom – who was overwhelmingly nominated by Democratic Party voters as the party’s candidate for Lt. Governor – cannot name a representative to vote for him on the party’s San Francisco county committee because a Republican presently holds the Lt. Governor office.

Conversely, Peskin maintains that District Attorney Kamala Harrris, the Party’s nominee for state Attorney General, can name a representative because the current holder of that post is a Democrat.

The state Elections Code states that a party nominee becomes an ex-officio member of the county central committee upon certification of nomination. California Secretary of State Deborah Bowen this month certified both Newsom and Harris  as their party’s nominees for the respective posts.

Longtime Democratic Central Committee member Arlo Hale Smith Jr., the son of former San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith, said that Peskin had contacted him this week and asked him to serve as Parliamentarian and give an opinion on Newsom’s nomination.

Smith said he told Peskin that the as a matter of State Law the Elections Code is controlling and specifically states that a statewide candidate automatically becomes an ex-officio member of the local party panel and can name a representative. He noted that Peskin as chair can overrule the Parliamentarian’s opinion, if upheld by a majority of members.

Smith departed from the legalize involved to note that the whole discussion was surreal in that Peskin, the party’s chair for the last two years, has to be re-elected at tonight’s meeting and the party by-laws upon which Peskin is relying to challenge Newsom’s appointment of Shanley, are arguably vague as to the point but that until the committee enacts new by-laws at tonight’s meeting “there are no-bylaws operative.” Smith said that regardless, the state Election Code that establishes the local party committees sets the standards for ex-officio appointments by candidates in every county, and clearly states that a nominee for statewide office is ex-officio member of the county committee.

“This appears to be a frontal challenge to Newsom by Peskin,”  Smith said. “Based on Peskin’s conversations with me, I imagine he will reject my opinion and try to his supporters on the committee to back him to keep Gavin from having a vote on the committee.”

Newsom’s appointee, former deputy City Attorney Shanley, said that Peskin was being politically “divisive” within a Democratic Party facing a challenging fall statewide election.

“Peskin makes a unilateral decision and calls that democracy with a capital D – that is typical of his reign at party chair,” said Shanley. “I’d like to know who paid for his putative legal opinion and if it came from Party funds and who authorized the expenditure – is this Democratic Party money funding silly and harmful fights among Democrats?

”What this all seems to be about is Peskin wanting to get six votes from the Board of Supervisors to be named interim if Mayor Newsom is elected Lt. Governor – he wants to be the Mini-Mayor,” Shanley said.

An interview with Warren Hinckle by Sean Stewart

On one of our last days in town my wife and I met up with the legendary publisher and award winning journalist Warren Hinckle at the Double Play Bar & Grill in the Mission district of San Francisco.

I was there to share my collection of Ramparts and Scanlan’s to see if there was anything he wanted to scan for his book, the perennially delayed Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson: The story of the birth of Gonzo.

As he thumbed through the magazines and showed us proofs of the book we talked about his friendship with Hunter; the roots of Gonzo journalism and the culture that spawned it; his tenure at the groundbreaking radical slick, Ramparts magazine, in the ‘60s; working with Hunter at his short-lived, but highly influential, muckraking monthly Scanlan’s; the Kennedy assassination; San Francisco’s favorite merchants of porn, The O’Farrell brothers; and much more.

Because there is nothing that would indicate that the Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson book will be released anytime soon, I figured I’d put this out in honor of Hunter’s birthday (July 18).

I hope you enjoy it.

Peace

-Sean

Click Here to read the interview

By John Shanley

Tough Night for Parents, Especially Natives, in DCCC Race…

Tuesday night’s election results suggest that when it comes to candidates for  the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee (DCCC) it was a bad night for parents as candidates, especially for native San Franciscans who have spent their whole lives in the city.

Incumbents with children — Meagan Levitan and Matt Tuchow — as well as former DCCC members Andy Clark and Dan Dunnigan all fell short in their efforts to stay on,  or return to, the panel.

Former Supervisorial Candidate Ron Dudum,  a Sunset family man, also failed to gain one of the west side’s twelve spots, despite the name recognition of having run for supervisor three times.

Levitan, Dunnigan, Clark and Dudum are all native San Franciscans raising children in San Francisco schools.  Tuchow moved to San Francisco several years ago and is raising children in the city.

Clark has spent over twenty years in the San Francisco District Attorneys Office, while Dunnigan, a UC Berkeley graduate, has spent almost a decade in San Francisco Fire Department.

Larry Yee,  David Wong,  Michael Chan,  and Jynary Mak are also DCCC candidates married with children, but failed to make the cut.

The question arises: Could it be that candidates with children, and native San Franciscans to boot, are at a disadvantage in the increasingly sectarian and gender politics of the DCCC?

By Warren Hinckle

First, the Supervisors chipped away at the Mayor’s powers and gave them to the Board. Then, Daly and Peskin changed the rules of the Democratic Party. Now, they plan to gain control of the Party endorsement process in the primary election to make certain that only their people will be elected to the Board of Supervisors. This will happen unless buyers beware.

Chris Daly was doing his X’s and O’s. The writer from the New York Times looked at him as if Chris had a snake coming out of his ear.

The trust fund baby leftist San Francisco Supervisor had recently moved to the burbs to shield his young family from the unintended consequences of his civic enthusiasms.

[Read more →]

Without a doubt, Private Eye, the Brit political-satirical periodical, has done well with this current cover on the Vatican’s issues with its aging pedophiles.

If you wish to download this profane image to pdf format to make your own post card or poster a a glossy to frame for your bathroom wall, see below (& pardon the expression.)

Meanwhile, the National Catholic Reporter which has been on top (again, scuz) of this story for decades, has an instructive takeout in this week’s edition on the late Fr. Marcial Degollado, “the greatest fundraiser of the modern Roman Catholic church,” the founder of the fabulously wealthy  Legion of Christ , “a secretive cult-like religious order now under Vatican investigation.”

The respected lay (pardon, again) Catholic publication describes the V’s favorite priest as an extraordinary payoff artist who took jillions from rich Mexican widows of the faith and greased the palm of Rome to ignore the facts that he was “a notorious pedophile” all the while a priest who “fathered several children by different women” and “a morphine addict who sexually abused at least 20 Legion seminarians from the 1940s to the 60s.”

The Italian newsweekly L’expresso estimates the Legion’s new worth at 25 billion euros, with, according to the Wall Street Journal, a $650 million annual budget, a good percentage of which was expended by the redoubtable Fr. Marciel, the combo pederast and out-of-wedlock father, who in 1994 was hailed by Pope John Paul II, a big buddy, as “an efficacious guide to youth.”

The Catholic paper does throw a bone to the present much-picked upon German Pope by reporting that as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then in authority to investigate questionable moral behavior in religious orders, swam against the stream of intense Vatican pressure to look the other way about Fr. Mariel, against whom formal canon law charges for sexual abuse of seminarians by eight ex-Legionaries in 1998, and eventually succeeded, in 2004, of launching an investigation. Ratzinger became pope in 2005 and banished Maciel from the ministry in 2006, so don’t say he never did ‘nothing.

The mega- bribes, which are described as offerings “for your works or charity,” were spread like cash confetti around the Vatican,  including to three-big shot cardinals “who allegedly received subsbtantial payments” but declined to comment to the National Catholic Reporter. (A canon lawyer told the newspaper that “an expensive gift, like a car, need not be reported” but gifts directly to the church for a “pious case” do. However, under canon law 1302,  a large financial gift to an official in Rome would not need be reported if funds were given for the official’s “personal charity, that is not a pious cause and need note be reported.” Thus the wily sex-priest dispensed his bribes with religious impunity.

“The Marciel case and the trail of money he reportedly gave cardinals raises profound ethical questions about how money circulates in the Vatican,” the Catholic newspaper said.

For more, see the website of The National Catholic Reporter, ncronline.org.

Download Hi-Resolution Cover