Phoenix, Ariz., Aug 1, 2018 / 12:39 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix was named Wednesday as apostolic administrator sede plena of the Byzantine rite eparchy which is also based in Phoenix.
The Ruthenian Eparchy of Holy Protection of Mary of Phoenix is led by Bishop John Pažak, 71, who was appointed in 2016.
“Let me first state that this appointment has not come about because of any personal misconduct of any kind on the part of Bishop Pazak. Indeed, Bishop Pazak remains as the Bishop of this Eparchy,” Bishop Olmsted stated Aug. 1.
“However, over the past year there have been some disagreements about administrative matters within the Byzantine Ruthenian Church here in North America, of which the Eparchy of Phoenix is a part. Because of some unfortunate legal developments in these matters, their resolution has been unnecessarily complicated.”
The legal developments “have unintentionally endangered the peace, unity and communion” of the Ruthenian Catholic Church, the Latin rite bishop said.
Bishop Olmsted has been appointed apostolic administrator of the Phoenix eparchy to “facilitate the task of resolving these legal matters” and to “support the efforts on everyone’s part to build up the communion” within the Ruthenian Catholic Church.
The bishop added that his appointment as apostolic administrator has “no fixed term” and he is “happy to serve in any way that will support my brothers and sisters in this Eparchy.”
Bishop Olmsted’s statement mentioned “unfortunate legal developments” related to “disagreements about administrative matters” within the Ruthenian Catholic Church in the US.
On April 26, the Phoenix eparchy filed a suit claiming that an employee benefits company had wrongly started a self-insured health plan with funds from the eparchy, which believed it was paying premiums to secure insurance products for its employees, Danielle Smith reported at Law360.
“The Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Phoenix said in its complaint that Aetna-owned Meritain Health Inc. and Ohio-based Employee Benefits Services Inc., or EBS, flouted their fiduciary duty under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by using assets meant to pay insurance premiums for the eparchy’s roughly 21 employees to pay for expenses and fees, among other things, instead,” Smith wrote.
It said EBS had also, prior to 2012, been selling health insurance also to the other Ruthenian eparchies in the US: Passaic, Pittsburgh, and Parma.
The Phoenix eparchy in 2012 joined the Eastern Catholic Benefit Plan, which the eparchy called in its complaint “the unregistered, fictitious name provided by Defendants of an employee welfare benefit plan … that was established and maintained to provide welfare benefits to participants.”
The eparchy said that “EBS falsely promoted ECBP … as a fully-insured health plan that would provide equivalent benefits at lower costs than the insurance previously in place.”
It said it opened a joint checking account with EBS, which it understood and intended that all of the assets in the account were to be held in trust and used for the sole and exclusive purpose of paying insurance premiums for medical, dental and drug insurance benefits to the approximately 21 employees of the Eparchy of Phoenix who participated in ECBP and their eligible beneficiaries.”
This joint account “created a fiduciary relationship by and among ECBP, the participants of ECBP, the Eparchy of Phoenix and EBS,” the eparchy maintained.
According to the eparchy in Phoenix, “EBS pooled the contributions with assets from other employers and used the funds to pay itself and for claims from the other organizations’ employees — all without the eparchy’s consent,” Smith reported.
The eparchy says it contributed more than $1 million to the joint account between 2012 and 2015. The Phoenix eparchy ceased participating in ECBP Dec. 31, 2015.
The Phoenix eparchy alleges that its assets were “used for the benefit of and have unjustly enriched” several defendants “and other parties including, upon information and belief … other Eparchies.” It says that it was owed surplus assets when it withdrew from ECBP, and has not been paid.
The eparchy’s complaint said that in or around 2017 EBS merged ECBP with the benefit plans for the Maronite Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles and for the Melkite Eparchy of Newton, both of which it called groups “with different religious beliefs than the Byzantine Catholic Diocese.”
Both the Maronite and Melkite Churches are sui iuris Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with the Bishop of Rome.
The eparchy of Phoenix filed an amended complaint June 18, which added as defendants the administration committee of the ECBP, which it listed as Bert Reimann, William C. Skurla, and Robert Shalhoub.
Skurla is Archbishop of the Ruthenian Archeparchy of Pittsburgh, and as such, the metropolitan bishop over the Phoenix eparch.
The amended complaint says Archbishop Skurla was a fiduciary and a party in interest under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
According to Law360, Archbishop Skurla was dismissed as a party to the case July 30.
Before his appointment as Ruthenian Bishop of Phoenix, Bishop Pažak was Bishop of the Slovakian Eparchy of Saints Cyril and Methodius of Toronto. He became apostolic administrator of the Toronto eparchy when he was transferred to Phoenix.
On July 5, Fr. Marián Pacák was appointed bishop of the Toronto eparchy.
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
.
Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?