Subrogation
The Catholic church faces a very specific insurance crisis.
Every day I learn new things about being a homeowner that make me want to scream. For example, did you know that you can make a high enough number of homeowners insurance claims in a six-year period that major carriers will start refusing to underwrite a policy for you? And did you know that “a high enough number”, for some major carriers, is “two”?
In 2021 and 2024, I had two minor issues with water damage in my building. Both of them were manageable enough that we could hire a contractor and fix the damage pretty quickly, and I put both of the incidents through as claims on my insurance because I THOUGHT THAT’S WHY PEOPLE GOT INSURANCE. Once my annual policy lapsed this year, my carrier told me they weren’t going to let me renew with them anymore because I had filed too many claims, YOU KNOW THE THINGS YOU GET INSURANCE FOR, and they considered me not worth underwriting anymore. I found someone else to insure my home, but it was a long day of calling carriers and telling them about my claim history and hearing from them that they didn’t much care for it. It got done, but it was stressful and somewhat expensive.
Let’s be honest, I have it easy. Major carriers are now considering wide swaths of the country uninsurable, as climate change accelerates and natural disasters become more severe. State Farm and Allstate won’t sign new policies in California, home to one in eight Americans. Progressive dropped 100,000 policy holders in Florida. Other states on the gulf coast, or vulnerable to wildfires, or in the likely path of other disasters, are going to follow. If you view insurance companies as soulless profit-seeking monsters - which you probably should - then of course this decision makes sense. Insuring certain properties in California or Florida in 2024 means that you’re probably going to have to pay out way more in claims that you’re going to take in from premiums, and a for-profit company is going to avoid that risk exposure whenever possible. My claims were very minor1, but yeah, my carrier paid out a certain amount of money on my claims and took in a certain amount of money on my premiums, and the math no longer made sense for their profit margins. And, in a darkly humorous turn of events, the latest institution that carriers now consider uninsurable is the Archdiocese of New York.
On October 1st, my best friend Cardinal Timothy Dolan - we’re best friends, we text each other all the time “hey have you heard the new Nick Cave album”, that sort of thing - published a letter to his archdiocese on how they were handling the abuse crisis. Great news: according to Dolan, they’re doing a great job handling everything, honestly probably the best anyone has ever handled any issue, and “While even our enemies — and their name is legion — seem to admire and credit our archdiocese in serving all New Yorkers with exemplary reform and progress in this area of protecting our young people, we can never become complacent.” I think it’s weird to write a letter about protecting families and children and mention how jealous and awestruck you’ve made all of your haters up top, but I’ll wave that off as a strange rhetorical flourish and just assume that the letter won’t get way worse towards the end. Anyways, my best friend Tim goes on to explain the state of outstanding abuse cases facing the arch:
“There remains about 1400 cases of alleged abuse, some dating back to World War II! To be clear, not all of these allegations are against priests. In fact, the two largest groups of complaints are against a former volunteer basketball coach and a former janitor. It has always been our wish to expeditiously settle all meritorious claims. However, Chubb2, for decades our primary insurance company, even though we have paid them over $2 billion in premium by today’s standards, is now attempting to evade their legal and moral contractual obligation to settle covered claims which would bring peace and healing to victim-survivors. As a result we have sued them.”
Dolan is not telling the entire story here. He’s suing Chubb for fraudulent business practices - basically, they’re not paying out, and he’s been paying premiums so they should pay out - because he already lost a different court case against Chubb pretty decisively back in April. An appellate court in New York unanimously ruled that Chubb couldn’t be forced to pay out abuse settlements if they could show that the arch knowingly covered up the abuse and is now trying to get someone else to pay for wrongdoing that they covered up, effectively committing - I can’t think of a better term for this, I’m sorry - Pedophile Insurance Fraud3.
How about that, Tim? You got dropped by your insurance carrier too, it’s not just me. Except I got dropped by my homeowners insurance and you got dropped by your pedophile insurance. And it’s the same insurance carrier that served the arches of San Francisco and Baltimore so you’re not even the first guy to have to deal with this? Hey, just curious, we’re best friends, you can tell me, why did the pedophile insurance think you were uninsurable?
“In legal documents, Chubb has abandoned its archdiocese and parish policy holders and those people such policies were purchased to protect, the survivors of child sexual abuse. Chubb scurrilously claims that they are not obligated to settle claims because the abuse of victims was “expected or intended” by the Church. You read that right. They make the false argument that people like my beloved predecessors Cardinal Terence Cooke or Cardinal John O’Connor took actions with the intent of harming children, or at least expecting that would be the case. Outrageous!”
Again, Dolan is not telling the whole story. I’m not sure Chubb is accusing Cardinal O’Connor of harming children, it sure seems like they’re accusing Timothy Dolan of not being forthcoming enough with information on these cases, so Chubb can determine if insurance actually covers them, because insurance usually doesn’t cover criminal conspiracies. Plus, you likely already see the circular logic here: Dolan states in his letter - and he probably shouldn’t have - that his arch purchased policies specifically to protect survivors of child sexual abuse, which is why I feel comfortable calling it “pedophile insurance”. Chubb rebutted that “if you’re going to go around saying ‘I need to buy pedophile insurance’, it suggests that you expect child abuse to happen, and we’re not gonna pay for that.” I know you weren’t expecting me to side with an insurance company, based on how I opened this piece but: that’s not a bad point to make! Chubb even put out a statement a few months ago that made some other very good points:
“[The arch cannot] suggest that anyone other than the Archdiocese of New York bears the moral responsibility for the sexual abuse perpetuated in its churches and schools…The archdiocese has the financial resources to pay compensation to victims right now, and it should do so. The [arch] know[s] that insurance policies cover damages from accidents. You can’t buy insurance for intended acts the [arch] has admitted: concealing, tolerating and abetting child molestation, which continued for decades because of the… cover-up and its unconscionable failure to stop the abuse when it had the knowledge and opportunity to do so. The arch] must now disclose what it knew and when it knew about child abuse perpetrated by priests and employees…That disclosure is critical to determining whether the [arch’s] knowledge and cover-up precludes coverage.”
That’s interesting, are you suggesting that the arch - which, of course, has quite a bit of its own money to pay victims, in real estate and other assets - has not been forthcoming about any potential criminal conduct, or how long archdiocesan officials worked to cover up and hide abuse? Would that, perhaps, point to a culture where abuse was “expected or intended” by the church? When Dolan came in to the arch of New York, was he the kind of guy that would have expected abuse to happen in the arch? Probably not; Dolan came to New York from the arch of Milwaukee, where there likely wasn’t widespread abuse, which is probably why Dolan did his damndest to shield $57 million of diocesan assets from being paid to abuse victims in 2007, or why he paid off accused priests with early retirement packages to keep their cases from ever coming to light. Other than those widespread systemic issues that Dolan actively contributed to and are still causing rot in the global church, my understanding is that he ran a pretty clean house. Now, he’s staring down 1,400 cases that must have just caught him completely flat-footed.
All of that said, I have great news for Dolan: he doesn’t have to pay to settle any of these cases! He’s more than welcome to take any or all of them to court, to lay out the evidence in open court, to testify under oath about what he did, what he knew, what is in the archdiocesan records, and what he ordered other people to do, and to make the details of any abuse and testimony of any abuse victims public knowledge, stored permanently in court records, and maybe after all of that a jury will side with him. For some reason, Dolan keeps choosing not to do any of this, and is instead fighting with an insurance company. And it is a fight, as evidenced by the weird apocalyptic imagery Dolan uses towards the end of his letter:
“...we have the promise of Jesus that He is with us always, and that the “gates of hell” will not destroy us, even though they sure keep trying! That’s an insurance policy, His Word, that will never fail to pay claims!...Cower and hide we will not! Fear we will not! We will stand and walk together through this, as we all did twenty-three years ago after 9/11, as we continue our resolve to compensate and reconcile with survivors, and as we ministered throughout the darkness of COVID. This challenge will strengthen our resolve to rely confidently upon the infinite power of the holy name of Jesus. With Him, nothing is impossible! Without Him, nothing is possible!”
Come on, man, it’s insurance paperwork. And if you refuse to act like a pastor, like someone who actually gives a shit about victims, like someone who is willing to say you did the wrong thing and actually atone? If you instead act like an asshole CEO who tries to avoid accountability and hangs out with fascist presidents and hosts white-tie $5k-a-plate dinners and lives in a 15,000 square foot mansion on Madison avenue and raises millions through annual archdiocesan appeals? Well, insurance paperwork comes with the job.
“New York. This is a place where everyday you wake up, you could experience everything from a plane crashing into our Trade Center to a person celebrating a new business that’s open…and that’s why it’s the greatest city on the globe.”
That is my favorite quote - and there are a lot to choose from! - from New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a man who structures every sentence like he’s Tracy Jordan on six Benadryl. You are probably aware that Adams is in a lot of trouble right now, and much like the Archbishop of New York, Adams has also taken to blaming his haters and claiming that he will prevail if everyone just believes in him enough. Now, as a good Chicagoan, I refuse to acknowledge that New York is “the greatest city on the globe”. But sure, anything can happen there, even 9/11, I guess? Maybe what can happen there now is a big public reckoning for the church, one in which insurance can’t protect them, one in which they really do have to sell off everything to do right by victims, one in which the big mansion, the fancy dinners, and the global travel all fall away. Maybe what starts with a court case in New York spreads to other insurers refusing to prop up other bishops. The church cannot insure their way out of the sins that they committed and still want to commit at every possible opportunity, as new abuse cases and scandals continue to surface and fester. We may, someday, see the church that the bishops deserve, one stripped of clerical prestige and power and riches, one where they are forced to atone to victims of abuse. That’s a church I could be a part of, a church that I have to believe is possible to experience in the city where, as the mayor says, “you could experience everything”. I mean, it certainly sounds better than a church where Tim Dolan gets hit by two airplanes.
Also, they weren’t due to climate change as much as they were due to my building having very old pipes.
Hell yeah, great name.
It’s like how Calumet Fisheries couldn’t buy an insurance policy and then burn their restaurant down to avoid increased scrutiny from the city’s health department, which, thankfully, is a fictional series of events I made up.