No good deed goes unpunished. Especially in the socialist state of New York, where the Attorney General has transformed herself into a one-woman Board of Real Estate Values and Applications. A few years ago, Letitia James aimed her peculiar interests in private property at Donald Trump. Now James refuses to release the proceeds of a Manhattan property sale to aging nuns who can no longer support the ministry they ran in New York City for more than a century.
And it’s no small amount, either. The Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence, based in Kentucky, ran the Jeanne D’Arc Residence for 123 years to benefit young women coming to the city on their own. The order grew too small to continue operations, as Madeleine Long reports for the Free Press, and needed to shift resources to support aging members of their own religious order and others – itself a charitable effort. The sisters sold the property to John Catsimidis for $22.5 million. As required by New York State law, James’ office approved the sale of the property owned by a charitable organization.
And then it seized the proceeds and has, for two years, refused to release them. Why? James disapproves of the plans the order has for their use:
The attorney general’s office told The Free Press that the religious order never provided “a breakdown of what they plan to do with the funds,” even though Christine Sama, the sisters’ lawyer, had told state officials in a January letter that the money would be used “to carry out the exact same activities as Jeanne d’Arc.”
In an interview, Sama told The Free Press that state officials objected to plans by the religious order to use the money to care for aging sisters at Holy Family Home, the order’s retirement home in Kentucky. They also plan to support their other ministries, which include running a local emergency shelter, supporting immigrant resettlement, and operating health clinics and schools in rural Madagascar.
“They are saying that use is not sufficiently similar” to the building that the sisters sold, Sama said.
Long points out that New York and James have a track record of poking her nose into the business of nuns. At the moment, several orders have sued the state over its Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) law that requires all hospice centers to at least facilitate assisted suicide. The plaintiffs in that case forced the state to agree to waive the punitive fines that would have closed their doors until their suit proceeds to trial. In that case as well, New York has assumed the role of defining both religious principles and the narrow interests of “charity” in the Empire State.
This case may have a different context, but it highlights the same arrogance. The Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence owned that property, used it for clearly charitable purposes, and can no longer support the specific mission after 123 years of devoted service to the people of New York. The order sold it legally, and has complied with state law in filing a plan for use of the sale funds in other charitable endeavors. That should be the end of the discussion. All the state needs to know – and even this is a stretch – is that the charitable organization will use the proceeds for charitable purposes. It is not the prerogative of the state to dictate the specifics of how charitable organizations use their money.
And that is because it is their money, not Letitia James’ money or the state’s money. The sisters complied with state law to the point that the proposal looked “suspiciously solid,” one expert told Long:
The religious order has a strong case, according to Robert E. Atkinson Jr., a Florida State University law professor who is a scholar of charitable law and cy pres doctrine. The proposal is “suspiciously solid,” he told The Free Press, so much so that it is hard to see why the situation would be seen even as a close call.
Atkinson told me that under cy pres, courts ask three basic questions: Did the donors have a general charitable intent? Has the original purpose failed? And is the proposed new use as close as possible to that purpose? “It really is a no-brainer,” he said, since the sisters’ planned use for the $19.3 million is closely aligned in a functional sense with Jeanne d’Arc’s historic charitable purpose: helping the needy.
It’s a no-brainer in another way entirely. James has seized the money because she wants to punish those who operate charities outside of the control of the state, much as Kathy Hochul is doing with the MAID law. James has stolen the money from aging Catholic nuns for no good legal reason otherwise, and certainly no good moral reason either. The nuns will now have to waste money, and more importantly, their diminishing time to help their aging order in a court fight to get their money back from the greedy, grasping Attorney General who has stolen two years of opportunity from an order that devoted itself to New York City for 123 years.
It’s despicable.
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