More than two years after filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the face of mounting lawsuits related to past child sexual abuse, the Archdiocese of New Orleans is beginning to raise cash by selling some of its vast real estate holdings, NOLA.com reported. Attorneys for the local Roman Catholic Church will ask a judge this week to allow two separate property transfers to move forward. One is the sale of a former 12-story office building at 1000 Howard Ave. to a Lafayette-based investor. The other is the sale of a parking lot on Loyola Avenue behind the Howard Avenue building. Together, the deals would generate nearly $10 million for the local church, and follow property sales totaling some $1.9 million earlier in the bankruptcy process. It's unclear how far the millions raised by the property sales will go to resolving the 450 abuse claims levied at priests and other clergy who served in the archdiocese. And it's also not known what other financial steps Archbishop Gregory Aymond and his advisers will take to pay off what is expected to be a multimillion-dollar settlement with abuse victims. When the New Orleans Catholic Church joined two dozen other U.S. archdioceses by filing for bankruptcy protection in May 2020, it listed $243 million in assets and $139 million in liabilities. At the time, Aymond said that the church, which serves 500,000 Catholics across 112 parishes, needed to seek chapter 11 protection due to the mounting costs of abuse settlements and the fallout from the pandemic. Financial records have previously valued archdiocesan-owned buildings and land at some $70 million. But that estimate is likely significantly lower than what the properties would fetch on the market, because it is based on the prices that the archdiocese paid for the properties.
