In Other News, The Sun May Rise In The West Tomorrow Morning.

From this morning's New York Times:

A former assistant treasurer of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland is to go on trial Monday, accused of taking part in widespread financial mismanagement and looting of church funds.

Lawyers for the defendants in this trial and a related case, however, say top church officials are to blame; in documents filed in federal court, the lawyers say the diocese’s former bishop and a priest used secret accounts to embezzle millions of dollars from the diocese. Such accusations are “scurrilous,” the diocese has said in a written statement.*

Federal prosecutors say the most shocking part of the case is the absence of pedophilia.

"We were doing our routine child abuse screening of Roman Catholic dioceses" said United States attorney Dirk Mendoza, "When a 7 year old boy told us how the parish priest just bought a new Mercedes. Naturally we assumed we were about to hear a tale of how the priest then drove the boy to a church retreat and made him feel shameful for tempting a man of the cloth into committing unholy sexual acts. But all we heard about was the new car."

The FBI noted that the Cleveland diocese has had only 8 reported cases of child sexual abuse this year, far below the average of 267 for a diocese of it's size.

"As amazing as it may sound, the officials at the Diocese of Cleveland seemed to be largely interested only in money." Said Mendoza. "Sex with children was a very low priority with them"

Mendoza added that the FBI was working on the theory that the embezzled funds were used largely to finance deviant consensual sex with adult female prostitutes, and to pay for the occasional abortion due to contraceptive failure.

"This is certainly the most boring case of my entire time on the Catholic crime beat." Said the prosecutor.

(* Everything before this is true. Everything after is made up.)