Sparks: Abuse survivors launch bid to transfer claims to entity that benefited from Christian Brothers’ wealth

What we call corporate succession is revealed here as a mere jurisdictional fiction, failing my test of consilience because the hypothesis of legal independence cannot explain why the wealth remains while the liability evaporates.

Designing an entity to hold assets while shielding them from the very obligations those assets incurred is a structural defect that no amount of private charity can rectify without a central authority to enforce liability.

Victory in the courtroom is a hollow phantom when the old regime simply changes the name on its counting-house door and retreated behind a wall of newly drafted constitutions that recognize no past.

These men believe they can hide behind the shifting boundaries of a ledger, but the infinite universe records the flow of gold and the cry of the sufferer as a single, indivisible truth.

The holy brothers have discovered a way to go to heaven with the loot while leaving the bill with a legal entity that hasn't got a soul to save or a body to kick.

You cannot preach the sanctity of the soul from a pulpit built with the silver of the betrayed while using the technicalities of the law to bar the schoolhouse door against the victim's cry.

The brothers have behaved with the impeccable grace of a cat that has eaten the canary and now insists, with wide-eyed sincerity, that the feathers found in the drawing-room belong to an entirely different bird.

It is a most rational improvement upon theology to suggest that while the sins of the father are visited upon the sons, the father’s bank account may be safely transferred to a nephew who bears no relation.

There is a fence around this property called a legal trust, and we must ask why it was built before we allow the lawyers to say it is only there to keep the money in and the truth out.

Looking past the ornate chancery and the quiet schoolyards, I observe a landscape where the inhabitants are forced to trek through a wilderness of paperwork just to reach the doors of their own inheritance.